ep. 82. Live from Toronto: AI x Design Panel Recap & Reflections

5 min read

Nov 20, 2025

A panel discussion in a large atrium with four speakers on stage and a seated audience watching; food trays are set up on a table in the foreground. — Design Meets x Business Design Initiative Panel @ Rotman, November 19, 2025

Greetings from my hometown of Toronto! 👋 🇨🇦

Last night, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on AI and Human Centered Design, hosted by Design Meets x Business Design Initiative at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Event poster for a panel titled ‘AI & Human Centered Design,’ featuring photos and names of Patrick Bach, Stefanie Hutka, Kem-Laurin Lubin, and Alex Ryan, with event details for Nov 19 at the Rotman School of Management.

I shared the stage with three design leaders—Patrick Bach, Kem-Laurin Lubin, and Dr. Alex Ryan, alongside our thoughtful moderators and pillars of the Toronto design community, Michael Dila and Dr. Emma Jo Aiken-Klar. Today’s episode captures my recap and reflections from our conversation.

TL;DR

1. What are we noticing?

Organizations are integrating AI quickly—often faster than processes and culture can adapt. The tech is showing up in all aspects of work, from research workflows and design tooling, to hiring and organizational expectations. Core themes:

Top-down pressure + bottom-up experimentation: Organizations are encouraging or mandating AI adoption, while practitioners experiment to understand where it genuinely adds value.
New frictions and uncertainty: We’re seeing uneven tool maturity, unclear norms of use, and the risk of over-reliance on AI outputs that “sound right” but lack depth.
Blurred swimlanes: Tools like Figma Make allow non-designers to quickly produce prototypes, collapsing traditional role boundaries

2. What assumptions about human-centered design are being challenged?

AI is challenging many of the foundational ideas of human-centered design. Key tensions:

Problem-first vs. solution-first sequencing: AI is an example of radical innovation, evolving at an unprecedented pace relative to previous tech. It is a solution unlocking new problem spaces—the reverse of the “people-first, solution second” that undergirds traditional human-centered design.
The human is no longer the only “actor”: AI agents become participants in the system, raising unprecedented questions about designing with non-human actors. This includes the use of synthetic users in design research, and considering agents as an actor in our service blueprints.
Linear iteration no longer fits how work moves: AI allows you to quickly and simultaneously generate—and iterate on—multiple design concepts. This challenges the old “research > design > build” pipeline into an always-on loop where teams refine direction in real time.

3. How are our practices and workflows evolving?

Design work is becoming a hybrid process where people and AI collaborate. A few examples from our conversation:

Braided intelligence: Teams can now combine individual intelligence, collective intelligence, and artificial intelligence. This unlocks new possibilities like real-time sense-making during workshops. Contrast this with long lead times for synthesis and sharing out a summary weeks after the workshop has passed.
Acceleration of prototyping: Tools like Figma Make and Lovable enable immediate interface generation and faster iteration, accessible to designers and non-designers alike.
Restructuring of team roles: When everyone can vibe code a prototype, designers no longer “own the pixel” by default. Their value shifts more squarely toward problem framing, navigating ambiguity, and ensuring rich human context is represented in the design process.

4. What new opportunities and risks do we see?

Opportunities

Massive efficiency gains: Design practitioners reclaim time from transcription, reporting, and first-pass synthesis, enabling deeper conceptual and strategic work. This can be especially valuable for civic tech practitioners working with limited resource, enabling them to “do more with less”.
Broader exploration: The recurring theme of faster prototyping showed up here as well. The ability to quickly create prototypes can enable more parallel experimentation and faster learning.
Unlocking new resources: AI can be used to quickly translate texts in different languages, helping increase the breadth of global perspectives that a practitioner can access.

Risks

Loss of humanity (and surprise): Synthetic users risk turning us all into data points, stripped of rich context and lived experience. They also can never replace the emotional resonance or unexpected insights of a real human story. We’ll always need those stories to shift c-suite minds and hearts.
Erosion of foundational skills: Early-career practitioners risk not learning synthesis, critical thinking, or ambiguity tolerance if they rely exclusively on generated outputs.
Reinforcing bias and inequity: Examples such as biased hiring models show how quickly AI can amplify structural inequities if not interrogated.

5. How can human-centered design shape the future of AI?

Designers have a clear role as bridge builders, systems thinkers, and meaning-makers. Key roles the field can play:

Rethinking the GUI: We’re interacting with bleeding-edge tech through old-school interfaces like the prompt bar—GUIs that haven’t evolved much from the 1968 Mother of All Demos. Designers are uniquely positioned to invent new interaction models.
Defining the design metaphors that guide mental models: Language like “server farms” shapes how people imagine systems; designers can reexamine these frames to influence cultural expectations of AI.
Bending the solution-first momentum: One of design practitioners’ unique strengths is building bridges between disciplines, people, and ideas. We can lead teams through hands-on experimentation with the tech to learn capabilities and affordances, and then connect that back with what we know about people’s unmet needs. This helps balance the solution-first momentum AI is exerting on product development, bringing the human back in the loop.

Breaking the GUI Glass

A recurring theme across the evening was that of designers “breaking the GUI glass” (thanks for the phrase, Kem!) Unpacking that:

Design traditionally meant learning the technology underlying visual design—think HTML and JavaScript. Along the way, many designers got stuck at the GUI level. UX Bootcamps and the proliferation of hi-fi design tools like Figma didn’t help.

When AI tools can create convincing interfaces in the matter of minutes, GUI-level proficiency isn’t going to cut it. Designer practitioner need to go deeper:

Looking beneath the interface: Understand how models work—for instance, the data on which they’re trained—and how that shapes the user experience.
Rethink interaction paradigms: Transcend the prompt bar to better support how humans collaborate with AI.
Reclaiming agency at the systems layer: Return to our roots as systems thinkers. Design the mental models that guide how people understand and use AI systems, grounded in user goals and context.

On the Importance of Conversation

When you hear “panel discussion”, it’s easy to picture a row of talking heads and rehearsed responses.

This event was not that.

It was truly a conversation—yes, panelists answered questions, but the audience was also invited to share their responses. As we all figure out how to build this AI plane as we’re flying it, we need this community dialogue and collective sensemaking. Bravo, Design Meets and BDI. To everyone organizing tech events, especially in the Bay Area: More like this, please.

🚀 Sendfull in the Wild

Tune in for free tomorrow. Friday November 21, for my talk, Still in the Loop: Leading with Human-Centered Design in the Age of AI.

What? I’ll be sharing a framework and tools from my forthcoming book, Designing Automated Futures, to help practitioners navigate and thrive in the evolving AI landscape.
Where? Online and in-person at University of Toronto.
How? Get tickets here.

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📖 Good Reads

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AI x Design Foresight Scan: Helpful landscape overview, led by panel moderator and co-organizer, Dr. Emma Jo Aiken-Klar.

That’s a wrap 🌯 . More on UX, HCI, and strategy from Sendfull in two weeks!

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