Josh Clark & Veronika Kindred
Founder of Big Medium and designer and researcher at Big Medium
Closing keynote - English
Sentient Design: AI and radically adaptive interfaces
Sentient Design is the already-here future of intelligent interfaces—AI-mediated experiences that feel almost self-aware in their response to user needs. Static presentation gives way to radically adaptive user experiences conceived in real time.
Instead of treating AI as a tool, Sentient Design invites you to use AI as a design material: What does it mean to weave intelligence into an interface? What entirely new kinds of experiences—and dramatic new value—can we create?
This lively session gives you the inspiration, framework, and examples to create intelligent interfaces in your own practice—right now, today—building remarkable experiences with AI while contending with its risks.
Masterclass - English
Sentient Design: AI and Radically Adaptive Interfaces
This hands-on session introduces practical skills for designing intelligent interfaces that connect intent to action. Learn to create radically adaptive experiences that respond in real time to user context. Together we’ll craft simple system prompts—no coding required—that show how LLMs excel at interpreting user need.
You’ll use your designer superpowers of empathy and explanation to prompt LLMs to make reliable UX decisions in real time according to the rules and guardrails you establish. The work is familiar—you still define behaviors and interactions—but the site of that work changes. Instead of writing red-line annotations for developers in design files, you can now talk directly to the system itself to test and explore possibilities.
Learn how to integrate this opportunity into your design process to prototype and validate experiences that deliver remarkable new value. You’ll leave prepared (and excited!) to weave intelligence into your interfaces as part of your everyday practice.
About Josh Clark
Josh Clark is a design leader and founder of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. He specializes in digital transformation around emerging technology and design at scale. His projects include future-friendly interfaces for AI, connected devices, and the web—and enterprise design systems for many of the world’s biggest companies.
Josh coined the term Sentient Design for the already-here future of intelligent interfaces—as well as the framework and philosophy for applying it. Josh is author with Veronika Kindred of Sentient Design, the forthcoming book from Rosenfeld Media. Josh is also author of several other books, including “Designing for Touch” (A Book Apart) and “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” (O’Reilly).
Before the internet swallowed him up in the 1990s, Josh was a producer of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. He was crowned 11th strongest man in Maine after a highly scientific series of trials—at a county fair with, ahem, just ten other competitors. In 1996, Josh created the “Couch-to–5K” (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up running. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)
About Veronika Kindred
Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world’s biggest companies. Veronika is co-author with Josh Clark of Sentient Design, the forthcoming book from Rosenfeld Media. Veronika graduated with high honors from New York University with a major in Politics and a minor in Data Science—a useful combination for navigating both organizational and technical design challenges. Her research projects have included building clean data sets from congressional hearings on climate change, studying the effects of mobile technology on African political engagement, and exploring how AI has impacted user experience.
When she’s not wrangling AI systems and thorny research questions, Veronika wrangles (very) young dance students as a weekend ballet teacher in Brooklyn. In both dance and design, she enjoys bringing discipline, grace, and an air of lightness to her work.