Sentient Design Workshops | Big Medium
Learn to create intelligent interfaces in this two-day online workshop, now available in December 2025 and February 2026.| Big Medium
Learn to create intelligent interfaces in this two-day online workshop, now available in December 2025 and February 2026.| Big Medium
Josh Clark Product leaders call me for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s to help invent and build a next-generation product, other times to train their team in the latest design methods. But lately, there’s one call I get more than any other: “We’re facing a big shift, and we’re not sure what to do next.” The specifics vary but the themes are the same: Why don’t our products and processes work like they used to? What does AI mean for our business and our customers? How do we ...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Until recently, it was really, really hard for systems to determine user intent from natural language or other cues. Hand-coded rules or simple keyword matching made early interpretation systems brittle. Even when systems understood the words you said, they might not know what to do with them if it wasn’t part of the script. Saying “switch on the lights” instead of “turn on the lights” could mean you stayed in the dark. Don’t know the precise incantation? Too bad. Large language m...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Nobody’s thinking more crisply about the convergence of AI and design systems than TJ Pitre, a longtime friend and partner of Big Medium. He and his crew at front-end agency Southleft have been knocking it out of the park this year by using AI to grease the end-to-end delivery of design systems from Figma to production. In our work together, TJ has led AI integrations that improved the Figma hygiene of design systems, eased design-dev handoff (or eliminated it altogether), and let non-dev, ...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Applications that manifest on demand. Interfaces that redesign themselves to fit the moment. Web forms that practically complete themselves. It’s tricky territory, but this strange frontier of intelligent interfaces is already here, promising remarkable new experiences for the designers who can negotiate the terrain. Let’s explore the landscape: You look cautiously down a deserted street, peering both ways before setting off along a row of shattered storefronts. The street opens to a smal...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Scott Jenson suggests AI is likely to be more useful for “boring” tasks than for fancy outboard brains that can do our thinking for us. With hallucination and faulty reasoning derailing high-order tasks, Scott argues its time to right-size the task—and maybe the models, too. “Small language models” (SLMs) are plenty to take on helpful but modest tasks around syntax and language. These smaller open-source models, while very good, usually don’t score as well as the big foundational ...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Sharif Shameem pulled together a wishlist of fun ideas for AI-powered applications. Some are useful automations of dreary tasks, while others have a strong Sentient Design vibe of weaving intelligence into the interface itself. It’s a good list if you’re looking for inspiration for new ways to think about how to apply AI as a design material. Some examples: A writing app that uses the non-player character (NPC) design pattern to embed suggests in comments, like a human user: “A minimali...| Big Medium - Full Feed
While Apple certainly bungled its rollout of Apple Intelligence, it continues to make steady progress in providing AI-powered features that offer everyday convenience. TechCrunch gathered a collection of apps that are using Apple’s on-device models to build intelligence into their interface in ways that are free, easy, and private to the user. Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models ...| Big Medium - Full Feed
With design especially, the professional is always personal, and Anna Dahlstrom is unrivaled at coaxing out that connection. Big Medium’s Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred joined Anna on her UX Fika podcast for a lively and intimate conversation. (It turns out that Anna, the author of Storytelling in Design is good at drawing out stories!) Don’t settle for an interview that “only” talks about the future of design when you can also get life advice about the Beastie Boys, embarrassing chi...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred join the Design Better podcast to talk about intelligent interfaces beyond chat, intergenerational design, and what designers can learn from Wile E. Coyote.| Big Medium
Toby Ord’s analysis suggests that an AI agent’s chance of success drops off exponentially the longer a task takes. Some agents perform better than others, but the overall pattern holds—and may be predictable for any individual agent: This empirical regularity allows us to estimate the success rate for an agent at different task lengths. And the fact that this model is a good fit for the data is suggestive of the underlying causes of failure on longer tasks — that they involve increasi...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred explore Sentient Design—and the AI opportunities for designers to create new, radically adaptive experiences.| Big Medium
Peek behind the curtain to see how we created the radically adaptive interface for Sentient Scenes. It’s a playful exploration of the serious possibilities of Sentient Design and AI-mediated experiences.| Big Medium
