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PODCAST

AI and Design

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.

arts design

All Episodes

00:52:41

The Fastest Gun in the West, Multiplayer AI, Serious...

AI and Design ·

2026/10/07

The Fastest Gun in the West: https://www.doc.cc/articles/fastest-gunWe're building multiplayer AI. Here's what we've learned so far: https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/were-building-multiplayer-ai-heresWhat would a serious AI product look like? https://blog.glyph.im/2026/09/serious-ai-product.htmlJeremy BelcherRobot Heart - www.robotheart.studioLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremybelcher

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00:58:19

AI Sychophancy with Steve Rathje

AI and Design ·

2026/09/30

This week Dan and Nik sit down with Steve Rathje, a new HCII colleague who runs CMU's Psychology of Technology Lab, to talk about what sycophantic AI does to the people using it. Steve's team randomly assigned people to chat with bots that were flattering, disagreeable, or neutral. People liked the flatterers, shrugged at the neutral ones, and hated the bots that pushed back. For designers, the news is mixed. Validation drives enjoyment, but cherry-picked facts do the persuading, so pairing a little

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00:31:11

Google CC, Controlling Image Generators, and Planning...

AI and Design ·

2026/09/22

This week we talk about Google's new CC agent for managing family tasks, some techniques to control image generators when you want to constrain certain elements, and a deep article on planning with AI agents.Show Noteshttps://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/googles-new-cc-is-an-ai-agent-that-helps-families-run-their-households/https://trpevski.com/blog/image-model-decide-everythinghttps://maggieappleton.com/planning-agentsMai Lee Chang, Alicia (Hyun Jin) Lee, Nara Han, Anna Huang, Hugo Simão, Samantha

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00:49:54

Apple's Siri AI and Audio Intelligence, Project...

AI and Design ·

2026/09/16

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

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00:34:48

Mobbin MCP, Perplexity and Nvidia Local AI Agent,...

AI and Design ·

2026/09/02

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

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00:39:22

Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers,...

AI and Design ·

2026/08/25

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

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00:49:49

Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design...

AI and Design ·

2026/08/18

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 —

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00:39:10

Summer 2026 Hot Takes

AI and Design ·

2026/08/11

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:

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00:46:39

Deep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew...

AI and Design ·

2026/08/04

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

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00:55:59

Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter...

AI and Design ·

2026/07/28

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,

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00:48:54

Bye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus...

AI and Design ·

2026/07/21

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

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00:49:49

2026 Thus Far: 7 Big Themes

AI and Design ·

2026/07/14

Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable — Dan's ambient bird-listening app for AirPods, Nik's long-running multi-agent builds — they revisit the year's biggest themes: the collapse of fidelity and whether wireframes still matter, taste as the designer's (maybe) moat, cognitive surrender and the strange compulsion to keep feeding the machine, canvas versus code as Figma and

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00:37:27

Claude Design 2.0, Quality Bars, Layers of AI...

AI and Design ·

2026/07/07

Nik and Dan catch up on the news out of Figma Config 2026 — where generative plugins stole the show for Nik (build them with tokens, run them for free) — before digging into Anthropic's big Claude Design 2.0 overhaul, with canvas editing, design-system imports, a two-way round-trip with Claude Code, and a fix for its token-burning problem. From there: MC Dean asks who actually owns the quality bar when anyone can ship, Emily Campbell reimagines the layers of UX for probabilistic AI systems (goblins

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00:54:03

Hot Takes and Big Themes from Config 2026

AI and Design ·

2026/07/01

Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas, Kim Lenox, Alice Quan, and Emily Campbell — about the keynote, major announcements like Code Layers and Weave, and the vibe on the floor. The conversations circle a few big tensions: Figma's push into Adobe's territory (motion, brand, marketing) versus doubling down on AI-to-code workflows where competitors like Claude Design are

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00:30:22

Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four...

AI and Design ·

2026/06/16

A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" play might just work. Dan and Nik dig into what Apple actually shipped, why App Intents matter for designers, and the gut-punch reality that your year-old iPhone won't run it.Also this episode: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is building a design-led AI lab, and nobody can quite figure out what it's

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01:03:01

Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus,...

AI and Design ·

2026/06/10

Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch

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01:05:36

Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude...

AI and Design ·

2026/06/03

Updates to Figma and Google Stitchhttps://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-codehttps://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/The Design System Advantage is Memoryhttps://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memoryFraude Designhttps://fraude.design/Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenkohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/https://www.quilter.ai/

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00:58:57

Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report,...

AI and Design ·

2026/05/26

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/Show Notes:The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma BlogState of AI in DesignSynthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain &

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00:58:26

AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP...

AI and Design ·

2026/05/19

When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in.We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count

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00:57:24

Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and...

AI and Design ·

2026/05/12

Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back.Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality.Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior

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37 results

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