This video is featured in the AI and UX playlist and 2 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
"Discovery workshops are seen as time-consuming and costly, causing resistance from internal stakeholders."
Michele WongHelping Them Help Us
January 8, 2024
"Everything is the way it is by design."
Kevin BethuneReimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation
June 8, 2022
"We use a structured rubric that evaluates expected impact and how research will be used to inform decisions."
Chris Geison Cristen Torrey Eric MahlstedtWhat is Research Strategy?: A Panel of Research Leaders Discuss this Emergent Question
March 4, 2021
"We constantly collect feedback to improve our community and design practice because iteration is key to impact."
Lona MooreScaling Design Beyond Designers
June 11, 2021
"Please read our code of conduct; it’s on every page of our website and includes ways to get help if needed."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 2, 2023
"It’s worth explaining your new communication approach to stakeholders to save their time and foster discussion."
Bruce GillespieLearning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
March 13, 2025
"One of the challenges for designers is to orient around forces rather than only people."
Sheryl CababaLiving in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
June 6, 2023
"Even the best-designed public-facing tools need operational and policy support to succeed."
Shanti Mathew Natalie Sims Natalia RadywylCivic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake
December 9, 2021
"It was not some benevolent church group or a member of a Town Council that carved out these curb Cuts. They were due to deliberate actions and painstaking labor of members in the community."
Sha HwangThe First Fifty Years of Civic Design
November 16, 2022