S8E3 Sentient Design for Intelligent Interfaces

About this episode

What if we stopped thinking about AI simply as a tool for doing our existing work faster—and started treating it as a new material for designing experiences?

In this episode, I talk with Josh Clark and Veronica Kindred, co-authors of Sentient Design, about what happens when intelligence moves beyond the chatbot and becomes part of the interface itself.

Josh and Veronika define sentient design as the practice of creating intelligent interfaces that are aware of context and intent and can adapt to users in the moment. We explore what that looks like in practice, from dynamically assembled dashboards to AI agents that behave more like collaborators within an interface.

And for technical communicators, there’s an interesting implication: our ability to define context, instructions, rules, guardrails, and behavior could make us important contributors to these emerging experiences.

Want to explore the ideas further? Inside Tech Comm listeners can get 20% off Sentient Design from Rosenfeld Media with code SENTIENT-TECHCOMM through October 31, 2026.

Some highlights from our conversation:

• Moving from AI as a tool for production to a material for product
• What sentient design actually means—and what it doesn’t 
• Combining probabilistic AI with deterministic systems 
• How adaptive interfaces can respond to context without giving AI unlimited control 
• Why technical communicators may have a new audience: the AI systems themselves
• What Salesforce and Cisco are already experimenting with in adaptive interfaces 
• Why AI could change collaboration across content, design, development, and product 
• Making room for experimentation and “mad science” 
• Using defensive design to build trust and guardrails into AI experiences 
• Designing AI to express uncertainty instead of pretending to know everything 
• Why critical thinking and AI literacy may become more—not less—important