AI and Design

Mobbin MCP, Perplexity and Nvidia Local AI Agent, Design Ledgers

This week on AI and design, we highlight the release of Mobbin's MCP, Perplexity and NVIDIA's local AI agent, and the concept of design ledgers. Dan also has some new spe

Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit

Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard int

Deep Dive: Andy Budd on the Future of the Design Industry

Andy Budd — reformed designer, coach to design leaders, and advisor at VC fund Seedcamp — joins Nik and Dan for a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design indus

Summer 2026 Hot Takes

This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer. Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/ev

Deep Dive: 2026 Figma AI Report with Figma's Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston

Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamic

Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone

Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode sta

Bye Bye Purple Gradients: OpenAI's Design Push. Plus special guests: fuguUX

Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design

2026 Thus Far: 7 Big Themes

Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable —

Claude Design 2.0, Quality Bars, Layers of AI Experience, Perplexity Brain

Nik and Dan catch up on the news out of Figma Config 2026 — where generative plugins stole the show for Nik (build them with tokens, run them for free) — before digging i

Hot Takes and Big Themes from Config 2026

Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas,

Siri AI, A New Interaction-Focused AI Lab, Four Design AI Jobs, Perplexity Computer Research

A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware

Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith

Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and posi

Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko

Updates to Figma and Google Stitch https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stit

Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Th

AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer

When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right

Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal

Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They'

Agent Users, New Design Team Structures, Team Dynamics, AI Chat Problems, Constraints Not Prompts

Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversatio

Deep Dive: AI Skills (with Google's MC Dean)

Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how

Claude Design, Innovative AI and Design Research from CHI 2026

Surprise surprise, Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's launch of Claude Design. The Nik does a set of rapid-fire interviews from the 2026 CHI conference, featuring the lat

Insights from Anthropic's Head of Design, Why AI UX Sucks, AI Aesthetics, Human-Centered Design 2.0

Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has s