Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Web Directions Next may be a brand-new event from us, but its DNA goes back to our earliest days.

Imagine a super concentrated day of our most engaging keynotes and talks. Opportunities to connect meaningfully with others who get excited about this stuff as much as you do.

That’s Next which will help you chart what’s next in product, design and strategy and it features amazing talks like this.

Sentient Design: AI and the Next Chapter of UX

Sentient Design is the already-here future of intelligent interfaces: AI-mediated experiences that feel almost self-aware in their response to user needs. This is so much more than chatbots (and also much less, in exciting ways). Sentient Design moves past static presentation to transform user experiences into radically adaptive stories, conceived and compiled in real time. This experience design will animate the next generation of our craft.

There’s a lot, a lot, a lot going on here—tons of new opportunities, tons of new pitfalls. How do we realize the benefits while contending with the risks? Designer Josh Clark shares a framework of principles and techniques that you can apply in your own work today (yes, today!). It’s about AI, but also not.

By focusing on people instead of technology, Sentient Design offers a chance to build systems that bend to human needs, instead of the reverse. Josh explains how we can do it.

About Josh Clark

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.)