Create experiences that crackle with awareness and agency, adapting to your users in the moment. Sentient Design is the practice of crafting intelligent interfaces: dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more. This groundbreaking book gives designers and product leaders the practical framework and imaginative perspective to deliver extraordinary new products using AI as a design material.
Who Should Read This Book
Sentient Design is for designers, product leaders, and design-minded developers who want to create entirely new categories of experience with AI. This book helps you decide what to make and why it matters, giving you the patterns and process to conjure the next generation of AI-powered products.
Takeaways
- Design interfaces that adapt their content, style, structure, and behavior on the fly in response to user context and intent.
- Adopt AI as a design material: learn what it's good at, where it stumbles, and how to work with its grain.
- Evolve from crafting static interfaces to directing systems that make design decisions in real time.
- Explore the Sentient Triangle framework to discover over a dozen experience patterns that go far beyond text-based agents and chatbots.
Build systems that amplify human judgment and agency instead of replacing them. - Practice defensive design to manage risk, build trust, and recover gracefully when AI stumbles.
- Follow an innovative sprint process that combines "practical magic" with hands-on methods for designing intelligent interfaces.
Clark, Josh: -
Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what's next. He is a design leader specializing in emerging technology, user experience, and design innovation. His projects include future-friendly interfaces for AI, connected devices, and the web for many of the world's biggest companies.
Josh speaks around the world about what's next for digital interfaces. He has keynoted hundreds of events in over 25 countries and has offered countless more private workshops and executive sessions. Josh is also author of several other books, including Designing for Touch and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps.
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, interviewed the cabinet secretaries of nine US presidents, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show.
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 user experience: no pain, no pain.
Josh lives, runs, and works in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.
Kindred, Veronika: -
Veronika Kindred is a designer and researcher at Big Medium, where she defines and solves design problems alongside some of the world's biggest companies. She travels internationally to lead Sentient Design workshops and speak to teams at startups and Fortune 100 companies alike.
Veronika holds degrees from New York University (Politics and Data Science) and the Fashion Institute of Technology (Photography). Her photographs have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine and UN Women. Her research has ranged from AI's effect on user experience to mobile technology's impact on African political engagement to the nuances of congressional climate hearings.
