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AI and Design

AI and Design

By: Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
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Two Carnegie Mellon faculty explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. Each week, we'll break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into AI topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.

All views expressed are our own and not reflective of Carnegie Mellon or the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

2026 Dan Saffer and Nik Martelaro
Art Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko
    Jun 3 2026

    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/stitch-updates/

    The Design System Advantage is Memory
    https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory

    Fraude Design
    https://fraude.design/

    Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
    https://www.quilter.ai/

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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR
    May 26 2026

    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. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/

    Show Notes:

    • The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma Blog
    • State of AI in Design
    • Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/
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    59 mins
  • AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer
    May 19 2026

    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 now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in.

    We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box.

    Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap.

    LINKS
    UI for AI
    https://uiforai.design

    The Thinking Was Never Just Mine
    https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837

    Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up.

    https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2

    Introducing Claude for Small Business

    https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business

    Operator
    https://fin.ai/operator

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    58 mins
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