Designing AI: From Kitchen Layouts to Childlike Discoveries

Over the last few months, I’ve interviewed the people designing cutting edge AI products like Perplexity, Claude, Dot, Humane, Visual Electric, and more…

During that time I’ve created a running list of all the metaphors and mental models they’ve used to explain what it’s like.

So this episode breaks down 7 mental models for designing AI products.

Maggie Appleton (Design engineer at Normally): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/maggie-appleton

Henry Modisett (Head of Design at Perplexity): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/henry-modisett Joel Lewenstein (Head of Product Design at Anthropic): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/joel-lewenstein George Kedenburg III (Designer at Humane): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/george-kedenburg-iii Colin Dunn (Co-founder of Visual Electric): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/colin-dunn Jason Yuan (Co-founder of Dot): https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/jason-yuan

Chapters 0:00 AI as an organism we grew 1:49 AI as the middle of a field 6:24 AI as a chef in a kitchen 7:37 AI as a new child 8:42 AI as a new material 10:20 AI as the meat of our design deliverable 12:11 AI as electricity