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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
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Sentient Design treats AI as a design material that shapes user experience, not just as a tool or feature.
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The Pinocchio pattern transforms low-fidelity ideas like sketches into high-fidelity, functional prototypes with AI as a collaborator.
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AI interfaces can be radically adaptive, creating experiences shaped dynamically by user context and intent.
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Most current AI applications focus on efficiency and tools rather than deeply rethinking user experience.
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Machine learning and AI should be embedded everywhere in subtle ways, or 'casual intelligence,' to elevate everyday interfaces.
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AI-enabled interfaces can act as NPCs (non-player characters), collaborators that behave like users within the system rather than separate chatbots.
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Large language models don't understand meaning but manipulate probabilities; designers must treat their output as signals rather than truths.
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Defensive design is crucial to anticipate AI’s unreliability, hallucinations, and the infinite possibilities users may create.
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New AI interfaces can manifest custom UIs on demand, as shown by Google Gemini’s bespoke UI feature creating context-specific interfaces.
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The Sentient Triangle framework maps AI experiences across grounded tools, open-ended chats, autonomous agents, and continuous copilots.
Notable Quotes
"AI is design material, a new kind of material that we weave into our products."
"The Pinocchio pattern is about turning a concept into a working reality with machine intelligence as a collaborator."
"Current AI adoption is obsessed with efficiency and transactional tool features, which feels more engineering than experiential."
"The interface becomes a radically adaptive surface, an intelligent canvas that responds to your needs in context."
"AI systems are not answer machines; they are dream machines designed to imagine what could happen next."
"We must not let the LLM fly the plane; use it as the face of your system but rely on smarter systems for facts."
"Defensive design helps us set expectations and channel behavior to work with the system's strengths and limitations."
"Machine intelligence can elevate experiences in subtle or dramatic ways, amplifying human judgment rather than replacing it."
"Sentient design interfaces are collaborative, multimodal, continuous, and deferential partners in user journeys."
"If we don’t decide the best way to use AI, the technology will decide for us."
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