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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 frames AI as a design material that can be woven into interfaces to create intelligent, adaptive experiences rather than just a tool or feature.
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The Pinocchio design pattern enables turning low-fidelity ideas like sketches into working prototypes, demonstrating AI as a collaborator.
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Radically adaptive experiences adapt content, structure, and interaction in real time based on user context and intent, going beyond static interfaces or simple chatbots.
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Four broad experience postures exist in sentient design: tools (grounded), chat (peer-level dialogue), agents (autonomous goal-oriented), and copilots (continuous collaborators).
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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.
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Integrating AI assistance directly into familiar working environments (like Figma or Google Docs) provides smoother collaboration than separate chat-based interfaces.
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Machine intelligence excels at transforming and translating content across forms, mediums, and languages, liberating static content like PDFs into interactive formats.
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AI outputs are probabilistic 'signals' rather than factual answers, requiring designers to treat AI-generated content as suggestions rather than absolute truths.
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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.
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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."
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