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AI and Design

AI and Design

Written by: Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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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.

2026 Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
Art Politics & Government
Episodes
  • AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer
    May 19 2026

    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. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box.

    Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap.

    LINKS
    UI for AI
    https://uiforai.design

    The Thinking Was Never Just Mine
    https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837

    Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up.

    https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2

    Introducing Claude for Small Business

    https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business

    Operator
    https://fin.ai/operator

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    58 mins
  • Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal
    May 12 2026

    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 Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager.

    LINKS

    Thinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

    Cognitive Surrender
    https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/

    Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished
    https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53

    claude code is not making your product better
    https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product


    Obviously Awesome (book)
    https://amzn.to/433nIkR

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    57 mins
  • Agent Users, New Design Team Structures, Team Dynamics, AI Chat Problems, Constraints Not Prompts
    May 5 2026

    Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts.

    Chapters

    • 00:00 Your Next User is an Agent
    • 12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World
    • 17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions
    • 24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI
    • 31:14 The End of Prompting: AI Experience Design with Constraints

    LINKS
    Your product has a new user. It’s not human.
    https://www.elenaverna.com/p/your-product-has-a-new-user-its-not

    Rethinking the shape of design teams in an AI world
    https://uxdesign.cc/rethinking-the-shape-of-design-teams-in-an-ai-world-82f986bf9a27

    The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams

    https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/bug-free-workforce-ai-disrupting-teams/

    The forgotten conversation problem in AI chat

    https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-conversation-problem-in-ai-chat-4d3d0c3ea525

    The End of Prompting: Why the Future of AI Experience Design Is Constraint-First

    https://uxmag.com/articles/the-end-of-prompting-why-the-future-of-ai-experience-design-is-constraint-first

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    42 mins
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