Ideas and Discoveries
Personal and professional notes about our craft, technique, and the role of design in the world.
design
2025: The Year Ahead
AI shifts from tool to design material. Product design moves from consolidation to innovation. Generative AI loses its sparkle. Sentient Design comes to the fore. Josh Clark unpacks the signals reshaping design, strategy, and creativity in 2025.
sentient design
Say Hello to Sentient Design
Sentient Design is the already-here future of intelligent interfaces and AI-mediated experiences. Discover this framework and philosophy for working with AI as a design material.
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What we’re reading
Values in the Wild
Anthropic researchers studied the “values” of Claude and how they manifest in actual conversation with users.
Welcome To the Era of MEH
Michal Malewicz explores what happens when AI commoditizes core design skills like research, craft, and taste—a race to the bottom. (But there’s an exciting way to move forward.)
Redesigning Design, the Cliff in Front of Us All
Greg Storey exhorts designers to recognize that it’s a new era, like it or not. Don’t look back, he says—reinvent.
Design Artifacts
Robin Rendle challenges designers to step back from rote process and “factory-like production” that wastes time and blocks good work.
How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Chatbot Use
A study by MIT Media Lab finds that heavy use of chatbots correlates to loneliness, emotional dependence, and other negative social impacts.
TikTok Will Never Die
TikTok might not be chit-chatting generative AI, writes Damon Beres, but it’s the most widely and deeply impactful AI application we’ve seen so far.
Recent Writing
events & workshops
Workshop: Craft AI-Powered Experiences with Sentient Design
Reserve a private workshop to teach your product and design teams to imagine, design, and deliver AI-powered features and products.
icons
Your Sparkles Are Fizzling
Let’s retire the sparkle emoji, purple hues, and rainbow gradients for AI-powered features.
sentient design
Data Whisperers, Pinocchios, and Sentient Design
Podcasts from PDFs! Working code from pen-and-paper sketches! Discover the new AI-powered design patterns that liberate content from frozen formats—and create new experience paradigms.
ai
The Already-Here Future of Prototyping
With LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude, it’s easier than ever for anyone — including and perhaps especially non-developers — to develop ideas in code.
sentient design
Has the “AI Edge” Become a Dull Blade?
Today’s cutting-edge technology is becoming tomorrow’s ho-hum office tool. And that’s a good thing.
sentient design
The Shape of Sentient Design
Use this diagram to think through and explore AI-mediated experiences in your product design.
future
The Future is Built on Solid Foundations
Stability and innovation can sometimes seem to be in tension, but they are more complementary than competitive. Consider AI and design systems.
sentient design
A.I., Snake Oil, and Miracle-Cure Expectations
Be distrustful when AI is hyped as a cure-all—but don’t assume it’s useless just because it doesn’t live up to outlandish promises.
process
Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower
Successful design systems can and should move more slowly than the products they support—but a deliberate pace doesn’t have to create bottlenecks. Josh Clark shows how to reconcile the needs and speeds of product versus design system.
ai
AI and Design Systems
The new crop of AI tools are already supercharging design system efforts across many categories, and we’re helping our clients use AI to do exactly that. Big Medium’s Brad Frost, Kevin Coyle, and Ian Frost show how.
process
Only One Deliverable Matters
Too much design effort goes into artifacts that are not part of the working software. There’s a better way to work.
c25k
How Josh Clark Invented “Couch to 5K” and Helped Millions Start Running
Big Medium’s Josh Clark created the exercise schedule that got the world running. The BBC tells the story.