This video is featured in the AI and UX playlist and 1 more.
Summary
Sentient Scenes is a little toy with big lessons—an intelligent interface that changes style, mood, and behavior on demand. The project explores what it means to treat AI as a design material, weaving open-ended intelligence into interfaces beyond chat. We’ll share lessons in both technique and perspective for how the designer’s role evolves—from crafting visuals to sketching prompts—and what it takes to craft systems where machine intelligence mediates the user experience.
Key Insights
-
•
AI can be treated as a design material with unique strengths and weaknesses rather than just a productivity tool.
-
•
Radically adaptive experiences adapt style, mood, behavior, and layout dynamically in response to user context and intent.
-
•
Open-ended AI interfaces must operate within constraints to maintain cohesion and avoid 'robot fever dreams'.
-
•
Large language models excel more at parsing user intent than merely providing factual answers.
-
•
The prompt itself becomes a hybrid artifact acting as design spec, requirement doc, and programming language.
-
•
Designers’ roles evolve into defining the interaction sandbox and parameters for AI-user collaboration rather than specifying every UI detail.
-
•
Personality and presence in AI interfaces can be achieved without pretending to be human, using animation and interaction cues.
-
•
Bespoke UI assembles and rearranges interface elements in real time to fit user needs, reducing complexity in workflows.
-
•
AI can enhance accessibility by tailoring font, color, and interaction styles to users’ abilities on demand.
-
•
Sentient Scenes took less than a day to build due to using plain language prompts, highlighting opportunities for rapid, imaginative prototyping.
Notable Quotes
"AI is not just a tool for productivity or efficiency; it's a design material with unusual strengths and weaknesses."
"Sentient Scenes doesn’t just talk about the scene, it becomes the scene, adapting continuously to user input."
"We wanted to create personality in interfaces without pretending they are human."
"Radically adaptive experiences are conceived and compiled in real time, responding to context and intent."
"The big design activity here is sketching prompts, guiding how the AI should behave rather than drawing UI."
"The prompt becomes part design spec, part requirement doc, and part programming language."
"Large language models are far better at figuring out what you mean than simply giving an answer."
"With bespoke UI, you don’t present every single path to the user; you let the right tool appear immediately for the job."
"AI can transform accessibility by changing experiences to meet user needs in the moment."
"This isn’t about Skynet; it’s about simple signals of awareness that adapt to immediate context."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"A little color purple to start the day. Good morning."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 3, 2023
"Public services in the US are harder to design because everything has to have a cost and be paid for."
Ron BronsonDesign, Consequences & Everyday Life
November 18, 2022
"Version vaults save multiple versions of work, letting users review, compare, and revert, which encourages exploration."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)
February 12, 2025
"What am I avoiding? Asking that every day turns out to be a surprisingly powerful prioritization tool."
John Cutler Harry MaxPrioritization for designers and product managers (1st of 3 seminars)
June 13, 2024
"Make me a dashboard, no matter what, is the one thing I've heard more than anything else for 20 years."
Theresa NeilJust Build Me a Dashboard!
April 9, 2019
"We freak out when leadership acts irrationally, but we accept that users do the same because we understand them better."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX
July 13, 2023
"There’s opportunity to shift people internally within organizations rather than just hiring externally to fill experience design roles."
DesignOps and The Great Talent War of 2021
August 19, 2021
"Hopefully the internet stays strong and holds steady despite the stormy weather here in Louisiana."
Uday Gajendar Louis RosenfeldDay 2 Welcome
June 5, 2024
"The more I work with evals, the more I think UX and product people need to be involved because of the need for diverse perspectives."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
