How to develop Design-AI thinking
Steven Spielberg’s movie reminded us of how far AI will bring us. UX/AI designers will remind us of our humanity in the designs of the future
Hey there! This is a 🔒 subscriber-only edition of ADPList’s newsletter 🔒 designed to make you a better designer and leader. Members get access to exceptional leaders' proven strategies, tactics, and wisdom. For more: Get free 1:1 advisory | Become an ADPList Ambassador | Become a sponsor | Submit a guest post
Friends,
This week’s edition is all about design — not just the kind that looks good, but the kind that works.
We’re diving into the ultimate design stack for 2025: 100 tools across ideation, prototyping, collaboration, and beyond — curated for marketers, brand builders, and creative teams who need to move fast and make it beautiful. The noise is loud, the options endless — but which tools are actually powering great work right now?
Spoiler: it’s not just about flashy UI. It’s about speed, flexibility, and tools that disappear into your workflow. From AI-enhanced design assistants to frictionless prototyping and smart brand libraries, the best design stacks of 2025 are lean, collaborative, and surprisingly fun to use.
Here’s what we’re unpacking this week:
The best tools for idea generation, visual design, and campaign prototyping
How to build a streamlined, no-clutter design workflow across teams
Why AI isn’t replacing designers — it’s becoming their favorite teammate
What top marketers are actually using behind the scenes — from pitch decks to final launches
This isn’t just a list. It’s your new creative arsenal. Let’s build smarter, faster, and bolder.
Let’s get into it 👇
With over 12 years in human-centered design, UX, and experimentation, Darren is currently working in Singapore's public sector as a UX manager and have shaped transformative journeys for Singapore’s largest portfolio companies. Passionate about design and innovation, he enjoys reading and engaging in meaningful conversations with like-minded people who share the same enthusiasm.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn & Medium.
I remembered a time when I was working with the airline cargo operations department. Despite our various attempts to find a human-centric topic within cargo operations, we quickly realized that there were very few such instances. That was understandable since the customers are very far from this back-office action. Besides, there were bigger problems, such as improving operational efficiency and practicing cost management. At the same time, the steering committee was wishing to expose the value of design thinking — how emotional connections through culture building, collaboration, and empathy are important to foster a better, more productive working relationship with the cargo operations personnel.
After various brainstorming sessions, we landed on the observation that every cargo package looked mundane and void of any expression. Pragmatically, it was necessary to protect the contents across their journey, but for the purpose of design thinking, we saw an opportunity to inject some personality into the banal cargo packaging. Within minutes, we were able to identify items ranging from common objects (e.g., pharmaceuticals, food) to weird cargo (e.g., incubator eggs, F1 car racing parts). From those objects, we imagine the exchange between the sender and the receiver, as well as the emotions attached to each piece of cargo. What came out of the design thinking workshop of over 80 participants were ideas generated from the emotions of the cargo and their end-users.
The cargo boxes were given personalities based on human feelings.
Personification
This took place before the boom in Generative AI and was based on a familiar design exercise known as personification. Known as a literacy device, personification is the act of giving a human quality or characteristic to something that is not human. This differs from another familiar concept known as personalization, which is the action of designing or producing something to meet someone’s individual requirements. The latter is well known to UX designers, linking user metadata to the digital interface. On the contrary, personification focuses on giving human qualities so as to create an emotional appeal when done appropriately.
One of the most obvious examples is how components have taken on a more organic shape over the years. Call them fillets, rounded corners, or squircles, curves are more pleasing to the eyes because of their similarities to human anatomy. In modern UI, some primary buttons could easily be mistaken for a thumb if it weren’t for a contrasting color with microcopy. Even gradients could be argued as a case of personification, as skin pigmentation distributes different tones of color evenly. Others, like Amazon, incorporated its iconic arrow with a box illustration as its app logo, intentionally giving a smile to the banal cargo box.
There is, however, another better example of a device that “breathes.” Take a moment to observe a smart speaker in action. As a person activates a trigger using their voice, a feedback response is given. Through a series of interactions, we can witness a smarter speaker come to life with rhythmic patterns from its light indicators and audio chimes. All of this is a form of mimicry of human gestures and behavior so as to bring an element of humanness to the product. Contrast this with a utilitarian on/off switch without any sensory feedback. Yes, it gets the job done, but it is void of any human connection. Just like cargo boxes for back-office operations.
Anthropomorphism
Yet there is more than meets the eye. The other defining feature is processing spoken language to carry out subsequent actions. For once, it could be perceived to be more human, more ‘intelligent’. Thus, it opens the door to a whole new discipline of user experience known as conversational UX, where human conversations are considered.
The term anthropomorphism, is often confused with personification. Here is the key difference between the two words:
Personification is the use of figurative language to give inanimate objects or natural phenomena humanlike characteristics in a metaphorical and representative way. Anthropomorphism, on the other hand, involves non-human things displaying literal human traits and being capable of human behavior.
— Masterclass
The key distinction lies in the application of human traits to non-human objects. While personification interprets human attributes, anthropomorphism applies them directly. Smart speakers are a transition between personification and anthropomorphism because users are starting to imagine inanimate objects coming to life and becoming human beings. It explains why my three-year-old daughter cried when my Google Home Mini was not listening to her voice command. She treated the inanimate object like a human, even though it didn’t look like one.
A new design world
Today, she is much older and knows the smart speaker is a digital assistant. That being said, the AI horizon has continued to develop at a tremendous pace with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), raising anthropomorphism to a significant level with its ability to generate continuous natural dialogs through prompts. And although the most recognizable interface is ChatGPT, a LLM’s API will allow further exploration into other forms of interfaces, such as voice assistants, robotics, and even humanoids.
 |
|