Creative and design obsessed, learning AI together.

Want to present at Vol. 05? Get in touch.

Three talks, a panel built from your questions, and a room that stayed late.

Vol. 04 filled Pioneer Square Labs again, with 150 RSVPs and a 50-person waitlist behind them. Ben Mullins and PSL’s own David Zager opened the night, and this time the questions came in on phones before anyone raised a hand.

Ana Marini opened with Lumi, a personal language-learning project she built with AI as a design partner, and was straight about the messy middle: what happens to your thinking, your judgment, and your process when the tool is in the room with you.

Sylvia Ding followed with a component built end to end with AI, engineering and QA in the loop the whole way, and made the case that the designer-to-design-engineer shift is less a title change than a change in where you stop.

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent closed the talks with what fifteen years of design systems looks like when you hand it an agentic workflow: Claude Design, Claude Code, Storybook and Playwright as one loop that revamps a UI head to toe, design system included, with the OpenID Foundation’s conformance suite as the worked example.

Then Madison Joslyn moderated a panel with David and all three presenters, driving it from a live board of audience questions the room voted up as it went.

The through line was in the question board more than the talks. “Your AI lied to you???” and “define good taste” sat at the top all night, which tells you where this crowd actually is: past whether to use the tools, and deep into what you still owe the work when you do.

Built something you want to show? We’re always looking for presenters. Get in touch.

The Vol. 04 event page is still on Luma.

Three talks, one panel, and a swear jar.

Vol. 03 filled Pioneer Square Labs to capacity, with 150 RSVPs and a waitlist behind them; roughly half the room was back from Vol. 02, and the mix widened well past designers into product and engineering.

Dan Hiester framed design systems as mise en place. The kitchen does its prep before service so that quality is a decision made in advance, not a thing you improvise at the pass; a design system is the same bet. He walked through his own setup and then showed a design token prototype that takes an existing site and rebuilds it to whatever design language you point it at.

Yilin Zhu took the Frontier Creatives motion expression several steps past where we left it: a system that uses math to generate shapes, letters, and words out of line art, then outputs them as video and as code. Four animals, seventy-two lines each, arriving as the word LOVE and looking like they meant to; making it right took twenty-five versions. She also won the swear jar award, which as a UW master’s student is going straight into her token spend.

Josh Glick walked through the app he is building for special education across K-12, where the words are the product. Three school directors and a lawyer shaped his language, and then the language rewrote the product. He was equally straight about the rest of it: the legal exposure, the constraints of time tracking inside schools, and how far you can actually trust AI to hold quality when the whole company is one person.

Then Madison Joslyn moderated a panel with PSL’s own David Zager and all three presenters. It got heated in the good way: guardrails, whether non-designers can deliver quality work, and where the tools are taking us. The sharpest turn was the historical one: the industry has done this before, going from two-inch tape to Pro Tools and from 35mm development to Photoshop, and neither one ended the craft; it only made it more accessible.

The through line: every talk was really about constraints. The model gets you moving; what you decided beforehand, and the quality and effort you put in, is what makes the output worth keeping.

Built something you want to show? We’re always looking for presenters. Get in touch.

The Vol. 03 event page is still on Luma.

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.