Workshop: Sentient Design
Crafting AI-Powered Experiences
November 28th 9am–5pm, UTS Sydney
Price $895 early bird until Oct 18th.
Discover the critical role of design (and designers!) in the era of the algorithm. Join UX leaders Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred for an immersive full-day workshop on Sentient Design, the already-here future of intelligent interfaces. This workshop will guide you through the opportunities and techniques for designing AI-powered experiences that feel almost self-aware in their response to user needs.
You’ll explore experiences way beyond the chatbot, learning to infuse everyday interfaces with machine intelligence in ways that are meaningful to the user and appropriate to the technology. Along the way, entirely new interaction paradigms will emerge—and new challenges and responsibilities, too. This demands fresh perspective, technique and process. Sentient Design provides the framework for delivering this new kind of experience.
This hands-on workshop explores the technologies and practical techniques that you can use today—like right now—to imagine surprising new services or to make existing products better. You’ll leave the day inspired to create—and ready for action.
What we’ll do together
- Prototype a new product: identify, imagine, and design AI-powered features that solve real problems (not just “because AI”).
- Learn to use machine-generated content and interaction as design material in your everyday work.
- Get your hands dirty working with models directly to learn their strengths and quirks.
- Explore radically adaptive interfaces that are conceived in real-time based on user context and intent.
- Discover emerging UX patterns that go beyond "slap a chatbot on it."
- Learn the art of defensive design—because let's face it, AI can be... unpredictable (and weird, wrong, and biased, too).
- Adopt techniques for setting user expectations when your interface has a mind of its own. Guide user behavior to match the system’s ability.
- Use responsible practices that build trust and transparency.
How you’ll learn
We’ll mix it up with lectures (the fun kind), discussions, and hands-on exercises. You'll put theory into practice through collaborative design sessions, prototyping exercises, and critical analysis of real-world AI applications. By the end of the day, you'll have a solid foundation in Sentient Design principles and a toolkit of techniques to apply in your work.
Who it’s for
This workshop is perfect for designers, product owners/managers, and design-minded developers who want to stay ahead of the curve in AI-powered experiences. If you're curious about how to make AI work for people (instead of the other way around), this is for you.
What to bring
Laptop or tablet, an open mind, and a healthy mix of imagination and skepticism. No prior AI or machine learning experience is required—just bring your human intelligence, and we'll supply the artificial kind.
Josh Clark
Principal, Big Medium
Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. Josh is a design leader specializing in emerging technology, user experience, 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 phrase Sentient Design to describe the already-here future of intelligent interfaces—AI-mediated experiences that seem almost self-aware in their response to user needs. Sentient Design describes the form of this new experience, as well as a 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.)
Veronika Kindred
Designer and Researcher, Big Medium
Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at digital agency 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. Veronika also has a degree in photography from Fashion Institute of Technology. Her photographs have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine and in UNWomen.org, the United Nations organization for women’s rights.
When she’s not wrangling Figma files 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.