Power of Ten: design at every level of zoom, from thoughtful detail to organisational and societal change, hosted by Andy Polaine.

In this episode, Andy speaks with interaction design veteran Chris Noessel, former design principal at IBM where he ran the worldwide Design for AI Guild, and author of Make It So, Designing Agentive Technology and the new Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes Us Smarter. Chris and Andy discuss how AI assistants risk de-skilling us and what designers can do about it. Chris explains why his books came out in the “wrong” order, why handing off the cognitive work of understanding is different from earlier waves of automation like phototypesetting and desktop publishing, and how he trained Claude Design to pair design with him rather than dump screens. They discuss the See, Think, Do loop and his five universal assists, the “human goes first” pattern (which turned a 48% performance collapse in a navigation study into a 19% gain), organisational over-reliance, AI as Frankfurt-style bullshitter, and why hydrofluorocarbons deserve far more design attention.

Show Links

Chris
Sci-fi Interfaces: https://scifiinterfaces.com
Designing Assistant Technology book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/designing-assistant-technology/
Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisnoessel/?isSelfProfile=false

Andy
Website: https://www.polaine.com
Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws
Podcast: https://pln.me/p10
Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching
Courses: https://courses.polaine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/andypolaine.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine