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AI and Design: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
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- 4 days ago49 min
Apple's Siri AI and Audio Intelligence, Project Solaris, Miro Sale, AI Tool Building
In this episode, Dan and Nik unpack Apple's big announcements from its latest event, starting with Siri AI: now a dedicated app with personal context indexing, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, launching in beta with iOS 27 . They dig into the promise and limitations of Apple-only app integration, the EU regulatory lockout, and what daily usage caps signal about Apple's services ambitions. The conversation gets more charged around Audio Intelligence, Apple's new always-on listening features for the Apple Watch, including live audio rewind and Siri Recap summaries of real-world conversations. Dan and Nik wrestle with the surveillance implications, the absence of any on-device indicator, and whether this crosses a line — particularly in two-party consent states like Pennsylvania and California.The back half covers Runway's Project Solaris, a generative UI concept that uses its video model to render fully interactive, pixel-based interfaces with no underlying code. Dan sees echoes of Microsoft's Bob-era skeuomorphism and questions whether it misunderstands fifty years of HCI; Nik finds more to like in its challenge to the sameness of modern app design. They then turn to the surprise sale of Miro to Bending Spoons for $1.36 billion — a 90% haircut from its 2021 peak valuation — and what it means when a profitable, hundred-million-user company gets absorbed into a portfolio known for maintaining but not advancing its acquisitions. The episode closes with a discussion of Benedict Evans' essay "AI, Tools and Transformation," which argues that the Silicon Valley vision of everyone rolling their own SaaS tools misunderstands how most people think about their work. LINKSIntroducing Solarishttps://runway.com/news/research/introducing-solarisBending Spoons to buy collaboration tools maker Miro for $1.36B, 90% less than its 2022 valuation https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/bending-spoons-to-buy-collaboration-tools-maker-miro-for-1-36b-90-less-than-its-2022-valuation/AI, Tools and Transformation (Benedict Evans)https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/9/3/ai-tools-and-transformation
- 2 weeks ago34 min
Episode 33: Mobbin MCP, Perplexity Computer, Design Ledgers
This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new speaking engagements you can join coming up.Chapters00:00 Introduction to AI and Design01:11 Upcoming Speaking Engagements04:44 Mobbin's MCP Release11:34 Perplexity and NVIDIA's Local AI Agent23:54 The Concept of Design LedgersShow Noteshttps://mobbin.com/mcphttps://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/perplexity-partners-with-nvidia-to-launch-portable-computer-a-fully-local-ai-agent-with-zero-token-costshttps://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/the-ledger-of-designDan's Speaking EngagementsShiftUX workshop: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/workshops/designing-ai-for-humansShiftUX talk: https://shiftux.rosenfeldmedia.com/program/day-2-turing-machines/Dan's ShiftUX Discount Code: SAFFER-SHIFT26Chicago Camps' Leadership by Design: https://chicagocamps.org/event/leadership-by-design-2026/
- 3 weeks ago39 min
Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit
Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter.This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters.LINKSMeasuring Time Savings From Figma Makehttps://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddihttps://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17bTarget Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growthhttps://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shahEasyCircuithttps://easycircuit.app/Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/
- Aug 18, 202649 min
Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design Industry
Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills?LINKSThe Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/The Six Levels of Adaptive Softwarehttps://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-softwareAI and the Mangrove Problemhttps://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problemThe Growth Equation bookhttps://www.andybudd.com/book/design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026https://designplusaisummit.com/Andy Budd's bloghttps://www.andybudd.com/Smilla’s Sense of Snow bookhttps://amzn.to/4znTIPtPattern Recognition bookhttps://amzn.to/4znk9F5
- Aug 11, 202639 min
Summer 2026 Hot Takes
This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-lookLLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-workAgent Behavior (agentbehavior.dev)Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-aiLinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platformHow writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks
- Aug 4, 202646 min
Deep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston
Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck.The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%).LINKSFigma's 2026 AI Report — blog post Full report / downloadReport micrositeAndrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line" Shane Johnston on LinkedIn
- Jul 28, 202655 min
Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone
Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.LINKS"Training design senses"https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webLLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGNhttps://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/Thinking in Systems bookhttps://amzn.to/4wuNA6oHow Buildings Learn bookhttps://amzn.to/4g2Y99V"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155fCharming Robothttps://charmingrobot.comStory in a Bottle podcasthttps://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/The Barstool MBA (Audible)https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3qFool's Gold, NYChttps://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/MHCI Capstone sponsorshiphttps://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone
- Jul 21, 202648 min
Bye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus special guests: fuguUX
Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design anti-patterns (goodbye, purple gradients) and combining known templates with customized outputs — followed by Figma Make's OpenAI integration and what it might signal about the shifting model landscape. They also geek out over Codex Micro, OpenAI's slick new macro keyboard designed by Work Louder, which uses RGB-lit keys to let developers monitor and control multiple coding agents without touching a mouse.The episode's guest segment features Jason Hong and Sauvik Das, CMU HCII faculty and co-founders of fuguUX, an AI-powered usability auditing tool. Jason and Sauvik explain how frontier language models can now scale subjective design judgment — evaluating concepts like information scent that were previously impossible to codify — and walk through their two offerings: synthetic user testing (with a diverse cast of twenty AI agents built from Census microdata) and automated heuristic audits. The conversation touches on why B2B software remains so dreadful, the testing pyramid, and the long-term vision of continuously self-improving websites.LINKSDesign Arena https://www.designarena.ai/GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboardhttps://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/Codex Microhttps://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcementhttps://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/fuguUXhttps://www.fuguux.com/
About AI and Design
Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
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