Creative and design obsessed, learning AI together.

Dan Hiester is a product builder, formerly of Microsoft Research. He’ll set up a design system that gives LLMs a visual vocabulary and prevents UI slop, then make the same design feel like different companies built it.

Josh Glick is a design leader now building tools for special education across K-12. He’ll cover the process, and the constraints that come with designing for schools.

Yilin Zhu, a grad student at UW HCDE, took the Frontier Creatives motion expression from Vol. 02 a step further: a motion system built on the mathematical line art, applied to other shapes and interactive work.

Then we open it up. Madison Joslyn moderates a panel with David Zager and all three presenters, going deep on craft in the new landscape. Audience questions welcome.

Want to present at a future Volume? Get in touch.

Three talks, one messy middle.

Vol. 02 filled Pioneer Square Labs. Three people showed the actual work instead of talking about AI in the abstract.

Patrick Neeman dug into journey mapping and intent across the ecosystem of companies and products we use on a daily basis. His prototype does the heavy lifting and will empower product teams to agree on intent before anyone renders real UI.

Sarra Naemi took Stemtopia from design through engineering into a playable game and made agentic workflows look survivable. She then busted out the Xbox controllers and challenged the audience to a fighting game.

Ben Mullins pulled apart the 808 drum machine: 2.6 sextillion possible states, one thumb, and the argument (made in memes) that judgment is still the part that doesn’t compute.

The through line: the messy middle doesn’t get less messy because a model is helping. It just moves faster, and the wrong turns get easier to skip past.

Then everyone stayed and talked, which is the actual point.

The Vol. 02 event page is still on Luma.