Should we be kind to machines (for our own sake, really)?
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
“The way we talk to technology has always said something about us. We barked commands at early voice recognition software. We typed queries into search engines like telegrams. Now we chat, negotiate, apologize, and occasionally vent to systems that, by any reasonable measure, couldn’t care less. What’s changed isn’t just the technology. It’s the tone.”
Should we be kind to machines (for our own sake, really)? →
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Editor picks
A designer’s path →
From faster pencil to AI Experience Architect.Designing the Human+AI system →
The new product mandate.The best AI tools make users better →
Most AI tools only make them faster.
The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.
3Dsvg: turn any SVG into interactive 3D objects →
Make me think
Your design system might be AI-ready. Your organisation probably isn’t. →
“I’ve been watching the design systems community gear up for AI with considerable energy. Token structures are getting cleaner, documentation is becoming more explicit, component naming is moving from visual description to semantic intent. Teams are putting in serious structural work, and it matters.”Don’t outsource the learning →
“There’s a default loop most of us have settled into. You paste in a spec or error message. The model hands you a fix. The symptom vanishes. You ship. Somewhere in that loop, the messy struggle between problem and solution stops happening at all.”The text is not the product →
“It is a widespread fallacy that by using AI, students can learn faster. Another dean of my university (let’s be graceful and not mention the discipline) recently said in a meeting that students could use AI to let it summarize “500 pages of text” for them. But why should an employer want to hire graduates who have just read the AI summary of these 500 pages, rather than actually having worked through them?”
Little gems this week
The quiet genius of Claude’s branding: less hype, more humanity →
Opening your place to the street →
Two gears, one compass: designing at velocity while sustaining quality →
Tools and resources
AI UX debt: a new bottleneck →
The illusion of completion and the birth of the ghost.Your DESIGN.md should tell a story →
How to write a DESIGN.md file Claude can actually use.The undo problem in AI products →
AI products skipped undo and shipped branching as the retrofit.
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