179 - Sentient Design and the Future of AI-Powered UX with Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred

What happens when AI becomes more than a tool and starts shaping the interface itself? Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred of Big Medium, co-authors of Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI, join Karen Lynch to explore a new approach to designing AI-powered experiences. They discuss treating AI as a design material, moving beyond chat-based interfaces, and creating products that adapt to users’ context and intent in real time. The conversation also examines one of AI design’s biggest challenges: trust. Josh and Veronika share approaches for building transparency, explainability, and healthy skepticism into intelligent systems. For UX researchers and insights professionals, they explain why user research becomes even more important as AI changes product development—and how researchers can take a more active role in shaping the products themselves.

Key Discussion Points

• Moving beyond chat with AI: How sentient design uses AI as a creative design material to build intelligent, adaptive interfaces rather than simply adding chatbots or AI tools to existing products.
• Designing experiences that adapt in real time: How interfaces can respond to user context and intent, including dynamically generated dashboards and AI agents that work alongside users within familiar environments.
• Building trust into AI-powered products: Why AI’s confidence can be misleading and how transparency, explainability, visible sources, and “productive humility” can help users evaluate AI-generated outputs.
• Balancing AI opportunity with risk: How designers can determine where AI is appropriate, identify unacceptable risks, and build safeguards into systems where failure has meaningful consequences.
• The evolving role of UX research and insights: Why researchers need to participate throughout design and development—and how research findings can become direct instructions that shape how AI-powered products behave.

Resources/Links

• ⁠Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI - Use code SENTIENT-GREENBOOK for 20% off your purchase of the book at Rosenfeld Media through September 30, 2026.
• ⁠Big Medium

You can reach out to Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred for being our guests. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.