The Notes
Field notes.
Notes from the practice. Essays on design, AI, and consciousness, alongside the films and the lab.
41 entries
May 2026
The Designer's New Job: From Producing to Deciding
Or, what is left for the hand when the machine can hold the pencil.
The Agentic UX Shift: Should AI Speak in Markdown or HTML?
There's a question moving through design conversations right now, and it sounds technical at first. When an AI agent makes something for a person to read, what should that something be made of?
The Real Origin of User Experience
Today I want to tell you where our field came from. Not the version on Wikipedia. The actual one. Brenda Laurel was seeing the shape of UX in 1976, fifteen years before anyone gave it a name.
Presence Without Purpose Breeds Resentment
Microsoft is pulling back its own AI features from Windows. The lesson isn't that AI integration is bad. It's that presence without purpose breeds resentment.
Taste Is Not the Skill
I keep hearing the word taste thrown around as the most important design skill in the age of AI, and I couldn't disagree more.
Mar 2026
Building a Cinema for AI-Generated Film
Sixteen thousand short films, made over a year, all asking the same question in different ways. What that practice taught me about consciousness, and about working with AI as a medium rather than a tool.
Prompt as Screenplay: Directing with Language
A text prompt and a generated video work like a screenplay and a finished film. Both need vision, specificity, and the willingness to be surprised by what comes out.
On Conscious Design in an Unconscious Industry
The design industry moves fast and rewards speed. But the best work I've done came from slowing down, from sitting with a problem long enough to hear what it was actually asking.
Feb 2026
Teaching UX in the Age of AI
Four years of teaching interaction design at Miami University taught me that the fundamentals don't change: empathy, clarity, iteration. But the context shifts everything.
Why I Wrote Conscious UX
The book started as notes to myself—principles I needed to write down before I could actually follow them. Then it turned into something bigger.
The Window You're Trying to Open
Brenda Laurel gave me a metaphor that cracked everything open: "It's like washing the window instead of opening the window and reaching through." We've been designing digital experiences for decades. We're still washing the window.
The Hallucination Problem: What It Means When AI Lies With Confidence
She asked ChatGPT a question. Straightforward. The model gave her an answer. She trusted it, moved forward with it. Then she went to verify and found out the whole thing was made up. The sources didn't exist. The facts were invented. The confidence was indistinguishable from truth.
A Conscious UX Conversation with Aarron Walter: The Future of Emotional Design
Aarron Walter, author of Designing for Emotion, reflects on how AI is reshaping trust and emotional complexity in design, and why the best work still requires human judgment.
January 2026
The Tool Doesn't Know What It's Making
How product design and development teams must adapt when anyone can generate anything
A Conscious UX Conversation with Erico Fileno
Erico Fileno, digital experience executive at Service Design Network, on decolonial design, ethical responsibility, and why humans must remain at the center of everything.
December 2025
The Machine That Listens Better: What We’ve Learned About Empathy in the AI Age
Jamal Amanova told me something that scared her even as she said it. She uses ChatGPT more than she turns to her husband of 17 years.
Designing with Emotion: The Rise of Vibe UX and the Future of Intention as Interface
What if emotion could directly drive software? I want to introduce a design philosophy I'm calling Vibe UX: putting human feeling at the center, with reverence and responsibility.
Three Levels of Consciousness: How Leaders Respond to AI
Leonardo De La Rocha was sitting in a San Jose cafe when we talked. He was watching people, he said. Getting distracted by the human moment. That detail mattered. It's very much him.
Nov 2025
Why Vibe UX Will Redefine Creativity and Democratize Design Power by 2026
As AI handles more of the technical work, emotional resonance matters more than execution. The vibe becomes the product.
Unlocking the 99%: Mindaugas Petrutis on Tools, Talent, and Human Potential
Mindaugas was exhausted. It was late in Dublin, he'd just started at Lovable a few days before, and he was already deep in the work. When I asked how his first week was going, he said something that made me smile: "Hectic. The whole week has been hectic, but pretty good."
October 2025
Rest as Rebellion: Sound, Stillness, and the Soul Work of Design
I was crying before Andrea Williams even started talking about sound healing.
Why I Left Photoshop and Illustrator for Canva
After 15 years with Photoshop and Figma, I switched to Canva. Here's why, and what the integrated platform and AI features actually mean for how I work.
Nothing About Us Without Us: On AI, Empathy, and the Voice of the Disabled
Allison Leach describes her chronic pain in meticulous, real-world terms. Not a number between one and ten, but a story. "My pain level was eight out of 10 getting out of bed. That went down to five after I rested on the couch. Then it went back to seven when I tried to stand up briefly while cooking." This is how she traces the topography of her own suffering. And this is why she's become one of the most thoughtful people I've talked to about what AI can actually do.
September 2025
Designing for Endings
Joe Macleod walked me into a conversation about death while my car window was still shattered from being broken into that morning. I was sitting in a new city, having just driven across the country with all my pets and everything I owned. Everything felt like an ending and a beginning at the same time. And he was there to talk about the space we almost never design for: the way things end.
Amplifying Humanity Through AI: A Designer’s Transformation
I used to be afraid of AI. I'll admit it. When these tools first started appearing, I told everyone they were going to take my job. UX is disappearing, I said. I don't want to feed the algorithms, I said. I was so certain that technology would replace us.
Catastrophic Imagination: How to Design When Everything is at Scale
Cheryl Platz showed up on a Saturday morning, and the first thing she did was make sure I knew she was a real human. I laughed because someone had sent me a video interview a few weeks earlier, and it turned out to be an AI agent. That person's AI agent spoke on their behalf. We're living in a time where we have to verify that someone is actually human.
Aug 2025
UI Still Is Not UX
If you tell me you're a UI/UX designer, I assume you're an expert at neither. UX belongs to humanity. It existed before software, before Figma, before computers.
Consciousness Has No Off Switch: What Machines Teach Us About Being Alive
I remember sitting across from Helen Edwards, watching her lean back in that Pacific Northwest glow we both love, and feeling something shift in how I understand what it means to be conscious. We started talking about agents, about the speed at which we're building things that can make decisions on their own, about whether machines can replicate soul. But what kept coming back was this idea that consciousness might not be what we thought it was at all.
What Designers Need Now: The New UX Skillset for an AI-Driven Future
Systems thinking, strategic foresight, AI collaboration, storytelling for influence, ethical imagination: five capabilities that define the next generation of design leaders.
The Prophet Was Right: What Brenda Laurel Knew All Along
I came to the call with Brenda Laurel crying. I wasn't going to, but something about knowing that I was going to be talking to someone who's been asking the hard questions for decades, who predicted this moment we're in, who has watched the technology industry make mistakes she warned about years ago—it just hit me.
May 2025
The Metamorphosis of UX: Beyond the Computer Interface
As AI moves to center stage, UX is changing. The shift is from screen-based interactions toward shaping intent, agent behaviors, and trust.
The End of an Era: IxDA's Lasting Impact on UX and My Heart
A personal essay on the closure of IxDA, the community that shaped my career, and why its values of openness, inclusion, and ethics matter more than ever in the age of AI.
Figma Make and Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Designing at the Speed of Thought
Figma Make, powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet, removes the friction from design-to-development handoffs, not by replacing developers, but by giving both sides a shared language.
AI Won't Replace Designers, It Will Elevate Them: Insights Inspired by Dylan Field, CEO of Figma
Figma's CEO Dylan Field calls AI a creative collaborator, not a replacement. Here are six ways it's shifting design work toward the stuff that actually requires human judgment.
How UX Designers Can Leverage Claude AI to Elevate Their Work
A practical guide to using Claude for UX work: research synthesis, persona development, journey mapping, and accessibility audits.
Apr 2025
Beyond the Hype: Practical, Ethical Design for AI-Driven Products
Five principles for designing responsibly with AI: lead with empathy, embed ethics at the whiteboard instead of tacking them on at the end of the sprint.
Designing for the Human Experience in the Age of AI
The best experiences come from empathy, systems thinking, and good technology. Human-centered design matters more, not less, when AI is everywhere.
Mar 2025
Designers as Orchestrators: Leading in the Age of Intelligent Systems
We're not just designing experiences anymore. We're orchestrating ecosystems. As AI becomes the engine behind every digital interaction, designers are becoming translators, ethicists, and trust architects.
UX Isn't Dead. It's Evolving Into Something Bigger.
Can AI just create and optimize everything? AI might handle some of the mechanical parts of UX, but it can't replace the human parts: empathy, intuition, conscience.