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A Little Big Medium: Sentient Design is here!

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SENTIENT DESIGN IS HERE

In this edition: our new book, how to create intelligent interfaces, looking up from our tools, designing for sprawling agent populations, upcoming workshops and events, and our favorite reads about genie lamps, brain fry, immoral AI, and more.

Big news! 😅 Our book Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI is now available for pre-order from Rosenfeld Media, Amazon, and all the usual suspects. (15% off during the pre-order period!)

Sentient Design is all about creating AI-powered experiences with the awareness and agency to adapt to your users in the moment. These are intelligent interfaces—things like dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, or agents that just get it done. The book is the first to map the whole territory: the experience patterns, practical methodology, and imaginative perspective for creating experiences that just weren’t possible before.

We think you’ll enjoy it, and we hope you’ll find it useful. Our early readers sure did (I swear we didn't make up these quotes):

“What an epic book.”
—John Maeda, author of How To Speak Machine and Laws of Simplicity
“I f*cking love this book.”
—Katja Forbes, author of Machine Customers

I wrote this book with my colleague and daughter (!!) Veronika Kindred, with a generous foreword by John Maeda. We created Sentient Design because we needed it at Big Medium. We’re sharing it because we think you might need it, too.

Sentient Design helps all of us think bigger than the current vogue of AI for tooling and productivity. What’s possible when you weave intelligence into product, not just production?

Let’s look up from our tools. I wrote a thing about the stages of technology adoption, where most of us (and most teams) are stuck, and the crazy-good things that happen when we favor invention over automation. Oh, and lots of examples of the design work that points the way. In this edition, we also look at how things get weird when agents collide at scale.

Want to learn even more? Come along (bring your team!) to our Sentient Design workshop course online on May 13–14—or live in Berlin at Hatch Conference on September 16.

Exciting times. Let’s wade into them together.
—Josh Clark and the Big Medium team

🍿 The latest

Pre-Order Sentient Design

Create experiences that crackle with awareness and agency, adapting to your users in the moment. (15% off during pre-order. Hit us up for a bulk rate to buy for your whole team.)

Look Up from Your Tools: AI for Product over Production

Today’s focus on AI production efficiencies is only the first stage of a far more exciting arc. See where your team sits and how to get unstuck.

What Happens When Agents Meet?

Designing agent experiences means thinking beyond individual users—to swarms of agents colliding in shared systems. What could go wrong?

Lean Stories: AI as Design Material

Podcast: Josh and Veronika join Jonathan Bertfield to explore how the Lean methodology supports Sentient Design and other innovation work, digging into the messy realities of innovation in complex organizations.

🤓 What We're Reading

  • AI Is the Closest Thing to a Genie Lamp
    The “magic” might be remarkable, Alberto Romero writes, but it shifts the effort to the wish. And most people (and organizations) aren’t very good at that part.
  • What Does AI Do to Software?
    Benedict Evans considers what intelligent interfaces will look like and concludes there’s “an enormous white space” to invent what’s next. If only there was a new book about that.
  • When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
    A BCG study of US-based workers found that intensive oversight of AI agents can cause cognitive exhaustion that the researchers call “AI brain fry.”
  • An Anti-AI Moral Stance?
    What do you do if you find the whole AI enterprise so immoral that its very use is ethically unacceptable to you?
  • Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces
    Ethan Mollick reviews the research that chat interfaces introduce heavy effort that undermines complex, specialized work. He says the future is radically adaptive interfaces. We agree.
  • How Many Products Does Microsoft Have Named “Copilot”?
    “There are now Copilots inside Copilots, Copilots for other Copilots, and a physical Copilot key on your keyboard for summoning them,” writes Tey Bannerman.

And now for something completely different…

  • This Is Running
    If you’re a runner (or just running-curious), you’ll love this beautiful new book by Raziq Rauf. It's a wonderful and expansive exploration of running culture—UX researchers take note!

🪩 Upcoming Events

Design Futures Assembly

San Francisco: April 29, 2026
Josh Clark will lead the conversation about the future of intelligent interfaces at this invite-only event featuring design and product leaders from Anthropic, OpenAI, Figma, Lovable, and more.

SENTIENT DESIGN WORKSHOP

Online course: May 13–14, 2026

Sentient Design: Craft Intelligent Interfaces with AI​ is a two-day online workshop with Josh and Veronika. This hands-on, zero-hype session provides measured, practical techniques that your team can use today—like right now— to imagine surprising new experiences or to improve existing products.

HATCH CONFERENCE

Berlin: September 16, 2026

Designing AI Experiences that Adapt to User Intent is a full-day workshop with Josh and Veronika at a very special event: Hatch is a conference for senior designers (you apply for an invite), so everyone is a peer with years of experience in the industry. The audience is as notable as the folks on stage.

This is Big Design

Big Medium helps complex organizations design for what's next.

We do forward-looking product design and strategy; we create Sentient Design experiences; and we transform digital organizations.

Learn how we can help your team.

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