AI and Design

Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter.

This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters.

LINKS
Measuring Time Savings From Figma Make
https://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/

Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddi
https://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17b

Target Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growth
https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shah

EasyCircuit
https://easycircuit.app/

Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/

Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.

We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills?

LINKS
The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/

The Six Levels of Adaptive Software
https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-software

AI and the Mangrove Problem
https://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problem

The Growth Equation book
https://www.andybudd.com/book/

design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026
https://designplusaisummit.com/

Andy Budd's blog
https://www.andybudd.com/

Smilla’s Sense of Snow book
https://amzn.to/4znTIPt

Pattern Recognition book
https://amzn.to/4znk9F5

This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.

Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-look

LLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/

A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/

Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-work

Agent Behavior (agentbehavior.dev)

Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/

Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai

LinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platform

How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks

Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck.

The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%).

LINKS

Figma's 2026 AI Report — blog post

Full report / download

Report microsite

Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn

Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line"

Shane Johnston on LinkedIn

Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.

Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.

LINKS
"Training design senses"
https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses

”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”
https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN
https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/

Thinking in Systems book
https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o

How Buildings Learn book
https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V

"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"
https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f

Charming Robot
https://charmingrobot.com

Story in a Bottle podcast
https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/

The Barstool MBA (Audible)
https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q

Fool's Gold, NYC
https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/

MHCI Capstone sponsorship
https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone