Chris Noessel
UX Veteran, Author, and Public Speaker
Opening keynote
Opening keynote - English
Over-reliance and deskilling: Two long-term AI problems
(and what designers can do about them)
AI is full of promise for users, but it introduces risk as well. The two we’ll talk about in this session are over-reliance and deskilling. Over-reliance is when users trust an AI’s output too much. Deskilling is when users lose skills they previously had, but handed off to the AI—with implications not just for users but for labor relations as well.
The good news is that you as a designer can do something about each of these. Come hear Christopher Noessel introduce the problems, share examples (including two from pop culture: beloved Australian show Bluey, and Rémy the rat from Ratatouille), and walk us through the patterns we can implement to help take some of the sting out of AI.
Workshop - English
When AI isn’t doing things for you, it should be helping you to do what you want to do. User-centered designers know this, but the language around AI capabilities can be frustratingly opaque. How can designers make sense of AI’s capabilities when designing for assistants? Come hear Chris Noessel, senior designer at IBM and author of Designing Agentive Technologies: AI That Works for People, discuss the 5 Universal Assists and how common AI capabilities fit into it all.
(And P.S. understanding the Universal Assists helps you implement the design patterns he’ll discuss on the main stage in his keynote.)
Getting familiar with the 5 Universal Assists
About
Christopher is a luminary interaction designer whose career has been focused on design for AI since 2016. He teaches, speaks about, and evangelizes design internationally. He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017). His most recent book Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes People Smarter (out 17 MAR 2026) helps designers understand the opportunities and mitigate the risks of AI assistants. In his day job he is an Experience Design Architect focusing on AI in Autodesk products.
