AI and Design

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.

AI and Design is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 30 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts AI and Design, a arts show with 30 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #31

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

  Aug 18, 202650 minS1

  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 industry is about to boom or bust. Andy argues we hit "peak designer" around 2021–22, and that we're now in an era of Schrödinger's design and nobody has opened the box. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org. We talk about taste of course, but Andy points out that everyone thinks they have taste. He also revisits his poker-versus-chess framing — designers study the board and hate mistakes while their peers just want to play every hand. We end on a genuinely unsettled note about the industry itself. How are your house painting skills? LINKS The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/07/bull-and-bear-case-digital-design-age-ai/ The Six Levels of Adaptive Software https://www.andybudd.com/archives/2026/06/the-six-levels-of-adaptive-software AI and the Mangrove Problem https://andybudd.com/archives/2025/09/ai-and-the-mangrove-problem The Growth Equation book https://www.andybudd.com/book/ design + AI Summit — Brighton Dome, 24–25 September 2026 https://designplusaisummit.com/ Andy Budd's blog https://www.andybudd.com/ Smilla’s Sense of Snow book https://amzn.to/4znTIPt Pattern Recognition book https://amzn.to/4znk9F5

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  Episode #30

  Summer 2026 Hot Takes

  Aug 11, 202639 minS1

  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/everyones-work-is-starting-to-look LLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/ A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/ Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-work Agent Behavior ( agentbehavior.dev ) Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/ Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai LinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platform How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks

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  Episode #29

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

  Aug 4, 202647 minS1

  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 dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck. The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%). LINKS Figma's 2026 AI Report — blog post Full report / download Report microsite Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line" Shane Johnston on LinkedIn

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  Episode #28

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

  Jul 28, 202656 minS1

  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 starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them. Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's. LINKS "Training design senses" https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses ”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products” https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/ Thinking in Systems book https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o How Buildings Learn book https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V "Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking" https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f Charming Robot https://charmingrobot.com Story in a Bottle podcast https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/ The Barstool MBA (Audible) https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q Fool's Gold, NYC https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/ MHCI Capstone sponsorship https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone

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  Episode #27

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

  Jul 21, 202649 minS1

  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 anti-patterns (goodbye, purple gradients) and combining known templates with customized outputs — followed by Figma Make's OpenAI integration and what it might signal about the shifting model landscape. They also geek out over Codex Micro, OpenAI's slick new macro keyboard designed by Work Louder, which uses RGB-lit keys to let developers monitor and control multiple coding agents without touching a mouse. The episode's guest segment features Jason Hong and Sauvik Das, CMU HCII faculty and co-founders of fuguUX, an AI-powered usability auditing tool. Jason and Sauvik explain how frontier language models can now scale subjective design judgment — evaluating concepts like information scent that were previously impossible to codify — and walk through their two offerings: synthetic user testing (with a diverse cast of twenty AI agents built from Census microdata) and automated heuristic audits. The conversation touches on why B2B software remains so dreadful, the testing pyramid, and the long-term vision of continuously self-improving websites. LINKS Design Arena https://www.designarena.ai/ GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboard https://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/ Codex Micro https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/ Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcement https://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/ fuguUX https://www.fuguux.com/

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