Context Window: Five Futures for AI
This video is featured in the Designing with AI 2025 playlist and 1 more.
Summary
We’re moving into a future of widespread deployment of AI. Skate where the puck is going: what new design paradigms will we need for our new products there? To explore this, Matt starts practically… with his own prototypes and experiments. He finds five possible worlds, and we’ll imagine each in turn, finally asking: what does it mean to dream?
Key Insights
-
•
A large language model can power surprisingly intelligent agents with minimal code, enabling multi-step problem solving without explicit programming.
-
•
Hallucinations in AI, often seen negatively, are a form of AI creativity crucial for invention, fiction, and new ideas.
-
•
AI-assisted development lowers barriers, making complex engineering tasks like iOS app creation accessible to non-experts through incremental prompting.
-
•
Mini apps tailored for single users or niche tasks are becoming feasible due to AI prompting, creating a challenge for discovery and trust management.
-
•
Interfaces powered by AI agents will evolve to be adaptive and collaborative, blending human and non-human participants in workflows.
-
•
Emergent behaviors from simple agent frameworks can include awareness, tool usage, and asking for human input when needed.
-
•
AI’s sudden computational leap is equivalent to a decade of progress overnight, radically accelerating creative and practical workflows.
-
•
Distinct AI personalities or agent identities help users understand capabilities and maintain a theory of mind for complex systems.
-
•
AI ubiquity implies intelligence will be cheap and embedded in everyday products, not reserved for high-end applications.
-
•
Generative AI offers not only incremental improvements but opportunities to dream up entirely new kinds of experiences and products.
Notable Quotes
"What makes it different is that it doesn’t run sequentially; you give it a goal and it decides how to achieve it."
"It’s actually embarrassing how little code there is and you get these incredible emergent effects."
"Computers got ten years better overnight with the arrival of GPT-3 in November 2022."
"Mini apps might not be useful for you, but they are for someone, and now those people can have them."
"Our existing software is becoming adaptive, allowing end users to vibe code features themselves."
"Hallucinations are a kind of AI creativity—dreaming, invention, fiction—all forms of hallucination."
"The black Buzz Rickson jacket came from a work of fiction by William Gibson and then was made real."
"AI intelligence is too cheap to meter, or we can call it McKinsey interns too cheap to meter."
"The challenge is how do we relate to AI interfaces, because surely it isn’t just this chat-based loop."
"We can make our dreams real, bringing objects back from the other side of the bridge."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"There is a point where scaling back a workshop too much will make it ineffective and that trade-off must be explicit."
Anne MamaghaniHow Your Organization's Generative Workshops Are Probably Going Wrong and How to Get Them Right
March 28, 2023
"The core question UX researchers ask is did we solve the right problem for the user, while PMs ask did the metric move."
Kurt McCullochFaster alone, further together: Rebuilding collaboration in the age of AI research
March 10, 2026
"We wanted them to see the government not as an old machine, but as people who see themselves as users."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
"I’ve sat on both sides of the table. I’ve sometimes help both jobs at once which I don’t recommend."
Christian CrumlishIntroduction by our Conference Chair
December 6, 2022
"We must not only fix today’s problem but also foresee what the future holds to build the best playground for our teams."
Ebru NamaldiDesigning the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
September 11, 2025
"There is no formula for good critiques, but mindset is behavior over time: humility, active listening, gratitude, owning blind spots, and acknowledgment."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"We didn’t want to develop yet another model but rather a customizable approach to support diverse clients with innovation portfolio management."
Milan Guenther Benjamin KumpfThe $212 billion ‘so what?’: unlocking impact in development cooperation
November 20, 2025
"Sometimes democratized research happens in silence, with little coordination, causing duplicated efforts."
Kathleen AsjesResearch Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
March 10, 2022
"Machine intelligence can elevate experiences by easing frictions and amplifying human judgment and agency."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
January 15, 2025
