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Summary
How do you get your head around all the different machine-intelligent experiences available to you as a designer? What are the new design patterns, and which old ones fall away? How do you name and organize those experiences? And how do you develop an intuition for how and when to use each interaction paradigm? Watch Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred, authors of our forthcoming book Sentient Design, explore the emerging diversity of AI-mediated experiences. Just as the natural world demonstrates intelligence in many forms, the same is true for machine intelligence. New “species” of interfaces roam our screens, the manner of each tailored to purpose and environment—copilots, agents, chatbots, assistants, tools, adaptive interfaces, and many more. Sentient Design offers a framework for exploring and organizing these new experience patterns, or “postures”—the way each kind of experience positions itself in relation to the user. More than just distinct functionality, each posture has its own interaction style, manner of communication, and expectations that it sets. Josh and Veronika share over a dozen of these postures, from familiar options like dedicated tools to more exotic patterns including sculptors, bespoke UI, non-player characters, and data whisperers. Get a map for exploring these postures to expand both your perspective and your toolkit as a designer.
Key Insights
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Sentient design treats AI as a new design material, enabling interfaces with real-time contextual awareness and adaptivity.
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Josh and Veronica frame intelligent interfaces across three dimensions: grounded (reliable), interoperable (cross-system), and radically adaptive (dynamic).
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There are four AI postures relative to users: tools (controlled input/output), sculptors (iterative conversational content creation), assistants (knowledgeable collaborative peers), and agents (autonomous task executors).
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The sentient triangle framework helps designers categorize AI experiences and explore trade-offs between reliability, adaptability, and interoperability.
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Inline AI tools like Notion’s contextual menus enhance user workflows by integrating assistance seamlessly into the user’s context.
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Chat-based AI (sculptors and characters) often prioritize creativity and exploration over strict factual accuracy, functioning as partners in imagination rather than objective tools.
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Bespoke UIs, like Google Gemini's adaptive interfaces, generate custom UI components on-the-fly to better suit user intent beyond static chat interfaces.
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Radically adaptive agents, like Siri’s envisioned conductors or Adept AI, struggle with brittle and complex workflows, revealing deficiencies in current UX and APIs.
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Embracing AI’s inherent weirdness and occasional unpredictability can unlock creative and experiential value instead of merely striving for hyper-accuracy.
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Sentient design demands designers become more sentient themselves—mindful of risks, social impacts, and the complexities of infinite adaptability.
Notable Quotes
"What happens when you weave intelligence into digital interfaces is really what sentient design is about."
"Instead of thinking of AI as a maker of stuff, think of it as an enabler of experiences."
"Sentient designs are collaborative, active, and proactive partners in a journey."
"Tools do what they say they’re gonna do; they’re very controlled and predictable."
"Inline tools stay in the user's context the whole time and are invisible when you don’t need them."
"Sculptors digitally chisel machine generated content like clay, iterating until you get exactly what you want."
"Radically adaptive interfaces react in the moment and follow the user’s lead like improvisation."
"Agents work on their own; you delegate tasks and they plan, execute, and decide when they’re done."
"The map is not the territory; these categories are fluid and overlapping right now."
"Instead of fighting AI’s essential weirdness, what can we do if we embrace it as an asset?"
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