Field notes.

Or, what is left for the hand when the machine can hold the pencil.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How product design and development teams must adapt when anyone can generate anything

Erico Fileno, digital experience executive at Service Design Network, on decolonial design, ethical responsibility, and why humans must remain at the center of everything.

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.

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.

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.

As AI handles more of the technical work, emotional resonance matters more than execution. The vibe becomes the product.

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."

I was crying before Andrea Williams even started talking about sound healing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Systems thinking, strategic foresight, AI collaboration, storytelling for influence, ethical imagination: five capabilities that define the next generation of design leaders.

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.

That book was The Design of Everyday Things, published in 1988, the year I was born. When I realized that during our interview, I felt something shift. Don Norman has been working on human-centered design longer than I've been alive. And he still hasn't stopped asking the hard questions.

Now is the breath. Next is the pattern. Never is the consequence we are accountable to. A framework for designing with both immediate care and long-term clarity.

As AI moves to center stage, UX is changing. The shift is from screen-based interactions toward shaping intent, agent behaviors, and trust.

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, 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.

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.

A practical guide to using Claude for UX work: research synthesis, persona development, journey mapping, and accessibility audits.

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.

The best experiences come from empathy, systems thinking, and good technology. Human-centered design matters more, not less, when AI is everywhere.

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.

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.