Designing for AI, the permalink problem, vibe designing

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“We have extraordinary capability and almost no shared conventions for handing it to people — no settled patterns, no agreed vocabulary (ambient, really? They’re just fancy Cron Jobs), half the tooling still being written as we use it, literally by the technology itself. The tools are remarkable; the ground under them is soft, shifting like a tech quicksand.

That isn’t a complaint. It’s an invitation.”

Designing for AI means designing like it’s 1999 →
By Patrick Neeman

94% say research matters. Only 27% act on it. →
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Editor picks

• Designing locality, by redrawing the lines →
  On Bruno Munari, an old Buddhist phrase, and an empty field.
  By Hiroshi Sato
• 7 things that Vibe Design can’t replicate →
  Vibe design with intention, eyes open.
  By Arin Bhowmick
• We haven’t lost the battle for empathy. Have we? →
  A meditation on presence.
  By Marcelo Ordenes

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Mechanical pencil: a celebration of the engineering around us →

Make me think

• When everyone has AI, and the company still learns nothing →
  “Are people using AI, or is the organization learning from it? What changed because we spent those tokens? And who moves discoveries from individuals to teams to organizational capabilities?”
• Cynicism is a luxury; hope is a necessity →
  “A working system has that strange quality: it disappears. We notice the plumbing only when it leaks, the power only when it fails, the road only when it is closed. Attention is drawn to friction — to the broken and the missing — and slides off whatever is quietly doing its job.”
• The orchestration tax is you →
  “Starting more agents is easy now. However, more agents running doesn’t mean more of you available — your cognitive bandwidth doesn’t parallelize. (…) Orchestration tax is basically the price you pay for forgetting this and the only real fix is to start architecting your own attention like you architect any concurrent system.”

Little gems this week

The book cover as a relational object →
By Urszula Kluz

You are no longer the user. You are the principal. →
By Adrian Levy

Is hot coral a feature or a liability? A closer look at your bank card →
By Dora Czerna

Tools and resources

• Designing how designers master AI →
  Personal, divergent, and never finished.
  By Amber Bouabdallah
• The permalink problem in AI chat →
  AI chat made the conversation ephemeral.
  By Adi Leviim
• AI and cognitive delegation →
  The hidden cost of AI that works too well.
  By Elisa Viglianese

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Designing for AI, the permalink problem, vibe designing was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.