Josh Clark introduces Sentient Design, the already-here future of intelligent interfaces and AI-mediated experiences. Learn to design radically adaptive experiences that feel almost self-aware in their response to user needs.| Big Medium
Personal and professional notes about our craft, technique, and the role of design in the world.| Big Medium
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
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.| Big Medium
The longer a conversation goes, the more likely that a large language model (LLM) will go astray. A research paper from Philippe Laban, Hiroaki Hayashi, Yingbo Zhou, and Jennifer Neville finds that most models lose aptitude—and unreliability skyrockets—in multi-turn exchanges: We find that LLMs often make assumptions in early turns and prematurely attempt to generate final solutions, on which they overly rely. In simpler terms, we discover that when LLMs take a wrong turn in a conversatio...| Big Medium - Full Feed
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
The Wall Street Journal: “Websites in general will evolve to serve primarily as data sources for bots that feed LLMs.”| Big Medium
What are the “values” of AI? How do they manifest in conversation? How consistent are they? Can they be manipulated? A study by the Societal Impacts group at Anthropic (maker of Claude) tried to find out. Claude and other models are trained to observe certain rules—human values and etiquette: At Anthropic, we’ve attempted to shape the values of our AI model, Claude, to help keep it aligned with human preferences, make it less likely to engage in dangerous behaviors, and generally make...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Michal Malewicz explores what happens as AI gets better at core designer skills—not just visuals and words, but taste, experience, and research. He points out that automation tends to devalue the stuff it creates—in both interest and attention. Execution, effort, and craft are what draw interest and create value, he says. Once the thing is machine-made, there’s a brief novelty of automation—and then emotional response falls flat: “The ‘niceness’ of the image is no longer celebra...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Greg Storey exhorts designers to jump gamely into the breach. Design process is leaner, budgets are tighter, and AI is everywhere. There’s no going back, he says—time for reinvention and for curiosity. I don’t have to like it. Neither do you. But the writing is on the wall—and it’s constantly regenerating. We’re not at a crossroads. We’re at the edge of a cliff. And I’m not the only one seeing it. Mike Davidson recently put it plainly: “the future favors the curious.” He...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Robin Rendle challenges designers to step back from rote process and instead consider what will help the end result. Journey maps, personas, wireframes, and the like—they’re only useful if they actually improve the experience that gets to customers. These are only thinking tools—a means to an end—yet they often get treated with the weight of the product itself: So design artifacts are only useful if progress is made but often these assets lead nowhere and waste endless months investig...| Big Medium - Full Feed
A study by MIT Media Lab finds that heavy use of chatbots travels with loneliness, emotional dependence, and other negative social impacts. Overall, higher daily usage–across all modalities and conversation types–correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization. Exploratory analyses revealed that those with stronger emotional attachment tendencies and higher trust in the AI chatbot tended to experience greater loneliness and emotional dependence,...| 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
Big Medium guided strategy and design for PEOPLE’s mobile app. The app reimagines the brand’s signature storytelling to meet emerging behaviors and expectations.| Big Medium
Big Medium is a digital agency that helps complex organizations build design systems, craft exceptional online experiences, and transform digital operations.| 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
Reserve a private workshop to teach your product and design teams to imagine, design, and deliver AI-powered features and products.| Big Medium
Veronika Kindred is associate producer at Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world’s biggest companies.| Big Medium
Insight and inspiration about emerging interfaces and technologies—and what they mean for you.| Big Medium
Love email? Neither do we! But we really, really, really love sharing new perspectives and resources to help everyone do their work better. “A Little Big Medium” is Big Medium’s occasional newsletter, and it’s where we share practical insights for product design and UX practice. That includes everything about Sentient Design: the form, philosophy, and framework for designing AI-mediated experiences and intelligent interfaces. Sound good? Let’s go! Sign up here:| Big Medium - Full Feed
Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred lead a three-part video series to introduce the principles and practice of Sentient Design and AI-mediated experiences.| Big Medium
Damon Beres in the Atlantic Intelligence newsletter: “Although it was not the first app to offer an endless feed, and it was certainly not the first to use algorithms to better understand and target its users, TikTok put these ingredients together like nothing else before it.” The app was so effective—so sticky—that every meaningful competitor tried to copy its formula. Now TikTok-like feeds have been integrated into Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, X, even LinkedIn. Today, AI ...| Big Medium - Full Feed
Josh Clark is founder and principal of Big Medium. He‘s a UX design leader who helps organizations build products for what’s next, specializing in digital transformation around emerging technology, process, and user experience. He’s also inventor of Couch to 5K (C25K), and on a technicality, the 11th strongest man in Maine.| Big Medium
Big Medium can help you **build** your design system, **design** exceptional online experiences, and **transform** your digital organization.| Big Medium
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.| Big Medium
Josh Clark shares nine principles to guide high-performing teams to deliver faster/better/cheaper in an era of shrinking budgets.| Big Medium
Big Medium’s Brad Frost issues a call to action to create a Global Design System of common UI components. What would this look like, and what would it mean for you?| Big Medium
Big Medium is a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. We build design systems, craft exceptional online experiences, and transform digital organizations. We do big design.| Big Medium
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.| Big Medium
Brad Frost explores the landscape of a mature, end-to-end design system for big, complex organizations. Discover all the moving pieces and how they hang together.| Big Medium
Design systems should solve problems that designers confront over and over again, so that they can turn to more interesting challenges.| Big Medium
AI Dungeon is a pretty astonishing example of generative fiction—in the form of old-school text adventure game.| Big Medium