Rosenverse
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)

Wednesday, January 15, 2025 • Rosenfeld Community

This video is featured in the AI and UX playlist and 1 more.

Share the love for this talk
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
Speakers: Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred
Link:

Summary

How do you use AI to do more than just “make stuff” and instead make new kinds of experiences? Machine intelligence is your new design material, and radically adaptive experiences are the result. Join Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred, authors of our forthcoming book Sentient Design, for a lively introduction to this emerging generation of intelligent interfaces. Sentient Design describes the form, framework, and philosophy for creating AI-mediated experiences that feel almost self-aware in their response to user needs. In these new experiences, the content, structure, interaction, medium, or posture—sometimes all at once—adapt on the fly to provide the right experience for the individual and the moment. These changes can be small and subtle, or big and dramatic. As you crank the “radical” dial, these experiences include: dashboards that assemble themselves into the best collection of UI elements and content; interactions and interfaces that are conceived on the spot by the user, the system, or both; and entire applications invented whole cloth for the moment. This is not ye olde website anymore. It’s weird and hairy and different from what’s come before. Josh and Veronika will share lots of examples of radically adaptive experiences in the wild, as well as strategies and techniques for bringing this approach to your own practice. You’ll also learn six fundamental shifts in perspectives that radically adaptive experiences impose: from personalized to individualized; from visual to multimodal; from reactive to proactive; from predefined to emergent; from persistent to ephemeral.

Key Insights

  • •

    Sentient Design frames AI as a design material that can be woven into interfaces to create intelligent, adaptive experiences rather than just a tool or feature.

  • •

    The Pinocchio design pattern enables turning low-fidelity ideas like sketches into working prototypes, demonstrating AI as a collaborator.

  • •

    Radically adaptive experiences adapt content, structure, and interaction in real time based on user context and intent, going beyond static interfaces or simple chatbots.

  • •

    Four broad experience postures exist in sentient design: tools (grounded), chat (peer-level dialogue), agents (autonomous goal-oriented), and copilots (continuous collaborators).

  • •

    Intelligent interfaces can generate bespoke UIs on demand, as shown in Google Gemini’s birthday party planning example where AI builds the needed interface dynamically.

  • •

    Integrating AI assistance directly into familiar working environments (like Figma or Google Docs) provides smoother collaboration than separate chat-based interfaces.

  • •

    Machine intelligence excels at transforming and translating content across forms, mediums, and languages, liberating static content like PDFs into interactive formats.

  • •

    AI outputs are probabilistic 'signals' rather than factual answers, requiring designers to treat AI-generated content as suggestions rather than absolute truths.

  • •

    Designers now face a loss of full control over interaction paths due to AI’s adaptability, making defensive design critical to manage unpredictability and user expectations.

  • •

    Ethical and environmental concerns around AI, including energy consumption and extractive data practices, must be acknowledged and factored into design decisions.

Notable Quotes

"AI is a design material, not just a tool or function you add to an experience."

"The Pinocchio pattern is about turning an idea, a concept, into a working reality with machine intelligence as a collaborator."

"Radically adaptive experiences bend to your current wants and needs, creating unique, unpredictable journeys."

"The interface becomes a radically adaptive surface—an intelligent canvas that reacts to your behavior and context."

"Typing prompts is not the UX of the future. Integration into the interactive context where you work is better."

"LLMs talk the talk but don’t understand the meaning. They’re master impersonators without true knowledge."

"AI delivers signals, not hard truths. They’re dream machines designed to imagine what could happen next."

"We can’t design for every possible outcome anymore. We have to anticipate fuzzy ranges of results and channel behavior accordingly."

"Machine intelligence can elevate experiences by easing frictions and amplifying human judgment and agency."

"The future should not be self-driving. It’s up to us, not the technology, to figure out the right way to use AI."

Ask the Rosenbot
Irina Tikhonova
Small Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Kritika Yadav
Optimizing AI Conversations: A Case Study on Personalized Shopping Assistance Frameworks
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Husani Oakley
Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Fisayo Osilaja
[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sam Ladner
How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Kim Fellman Cohen
Measuring the Designer Experience
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Lisa Welchman
Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Marina Martin
Lives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Adrian Howard
Sturgeon’s Biases
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Emily Eagle
Can't Rewind: Radio and Retail
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Robert Reimann
Taming Design Complexity with UX Models
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2024 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community
Steve Portigal
War Stories LIVE! Steve Portigal
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold

More Videos

Erin Hauber

"Design thinking can feel like a magical black box or utterly overwhelming; it has to be made immediately usable and valuable."

Erin Hauber

Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake

October 24, 2019

Megan Kierstead

"You need to believe what you’re doing is the right approach. You need to believe in your own skills and your team’s skills."

Megan Kierstead

You Are a Badass at UX: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

March 10, 2021

Maggie Dieringer

"When the world outside is crazy, the team needs to know that at least design ops has things under control internally."

Maggie Dieringer

Creating Consistency Through Constant Change

January 8, 2024

Meaghan Waters

"If everyone’s looking at different versions of the plan, you get frustration and confusion."

Meaghan Waters Fotina Koutropoulous

Lack of Product Thinking will Doom Your Legacy Modernization

June 9, 2021

Jemma Ahmed

"Brand is not just what you say, it’s what you do — your product and design live and breathe the brand."

Jemma Ahmed

Bringing together market and user research

October 17, 2019

Maria Taylor

"Building trust should absolutely be a core value for design ops teams aiming to steward knowledge effectively."

Maria Taylor

Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of the Design Org

October 3, 2023

Sam Proulx

"The little sounds that VoiceOver makes are like bird song; you only notice them when they're gone."

Sam Proulx

Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users

June 6, 2023

Catherine Blizzard

"Project leadership can be at any level; the right discipline leads, not necessarily the most senior person."

Catherine Blizzard

Using Integrated Insight to Drive Growth

March 10, 2022

Randolph Duke II

"I’m going to need to bring my A game."

Randolph Duke II

War Stories LIVE! Randy Duke II

March 30, 2020