Machine Vision
Wearable
AI • AGEnts
23
YEARS EXPERIENCE
3
TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES
Multiple
PATENTS FILED/GRANTED
01
Selected Work
Case Studies
Global Trend Engine
Designer & Builder
•
Self-Initiated
•
Ongoing
→
An agentic AI dashboard with four agents that scan for frontier signals, turn them into predictions and check which ones come true. Designed, built and deployed with Claude.
Lytx Video Overlay
Senior UX Designer
•
Lytx
•
4 months
→
A dynamic video overlay that simplifies customer coaching conversations, improving user trust, and reducing contention rate to near zero.
Lytx Driver ID
Senior UX Designer
•
Lytx
•
3 months
→
A systematic user flow for assignment, distribution, and usage of QR codes to assign drivers to vehicles.
Timex Ironman ONE GPS+
UX Design Lead
•
Qualcomm / Timex
•
3 years
→
A full 0-to-1 product experience for athletes who wanted to track workouts, stay connected, and leave their phones behind.
Tagg the Pet Tracker
UX Design & Product Management
•
Qualcomm
•
1.5 years
→
Redesign of a pet activity monitoring and management of iOS/Android app development as both UX lead and product manager.
FLO TV Personal Television
UX Design Lead
•
Qualcomm / FLO TV
•
1 year
→
Designing a new product category from the ground up: live mobile television.
02
Expertise
Skills
User Research
Interviews, usability tests, ethnographic study, and contextual inquiry
Journey Mapping
End-to-end experience mapping across touchpoints
Interaction Design
Flows, wireframes, use cases, and high-fidelity mockups
Storytelling
Communicating design decisions to executives and cross-functional teams
Systems Thinking
Mapping connected flows and designing for scalability across surfaces
Prototyping
From low-fi click-throughs to high-fidelity AI coding
AI Fluency
Designing AI-powered experiences and using AI tools in the design process
Stakeholder Management
Cross-functional collaboration and design advocacy
Tools
Claude (Design/Code)
Research synthesis, design, prototyping, and documentation
Figma
Components, variants, auto-layout, and prototyping
Sketch
Vector UI design for components and high-fidelity screens
Axure RP
High-fidelity prototyping with conditional logic
Pendo
In-app guidance, feature tracking, and user surveys
Amplitude
Funnels, retention, and feature-adoption analysis
Dovetail
Centralized research insights and customer intelligence
Atlassian (Confluence/Jira)
Confluence for design documentation; Jira for planning and cross-functional tracking
03
Background
Experience & Education
2019 - Present
Senior Product Designer
Lytx • San Diego, CA
Research and design of user experience for video-safety and AI products, and development of an AI-native design process for the Product/UX team.
2007 - 2018
Sr. Staff UX Designer & Sr. Product Manager
Qualcomm • San Diego, CA
Led 0-to-1 UX and product development for large-scale product start-ups while managing 3rd-party design teams.
2003 - 2007
UI Designer
Nokia • San Diego, CA
Designed new phone features while serving as the only North American member of Nokia's global design-management team.
1998 - 2002
B.S. Symbolic Systems
Stanford University • Stanford, CA
Interdisciplinary study of computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology with a concentration in human-computer interaction.
My Résumé
Name
Daniel Rivas
current role
Senior Product Designer
Location
San Diego, CA
Availability
Daily Futurology Report
November 11, 2026 at 1:18:03 AM
Model:
Claude Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
Capability goes public; access goes conditional
Here's the bet: through 2028, the live question in AI stops being “can it do this?” and becomes “who's allowed to, and who decides?” Capability goes out wide. The sharp end goes through verification programs, vendor quotas and private power deals.
The evidence from one week: Mythos 5.2 gated to verified organizations. Nvidia's reported 51% non-Chinese quota for cloud partners. Anthropic's reported $3.4 billion generator deal. China's two-month rare-earth extension to January 10. Notice that none of these came from a legislature. They're contract terms, procurement moves and ministry notices with expiry dates.
I'd watch two things. The Trump–Xi meeting in Shenzhen, and whether January 10 gets another short extension or something longer. And Starship Flight 15 on November 13 — if SpaceX catches a ship, that's the one story this week about capacity getting less scarce instead of more rationed.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Gatekeeping by vendors is cheap to announce and expensive to enforce. And the SHL rehiring number hints that the real constraint might not be access at all: the work keeps turning out to need people who know where things are. If that's right, the gates matter less than they look.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
This week the interesting news wasn't what got built. It was who gets to use it, and on what terms. Anthropic shipped one model under two names: Claude Fable 5.2 for everyone, with dangerous cyber and biology requests blocked, and Claude Mythos 5.2 with those capabilities intact for verified organizations doing approved research. Same underlying model. Different door.
Same pattern further down the stack. Nvidia reportedly told overseas cloud partners to reserve at least 51% of capacity for non-Chinese clients, while B300 racks reportedly sell for up to $2.8 million in China. And Anthropic reportedly agreed to spend $3.4 billion on 1.7 GW of gas generators via OnePWR (per the FT; Reuters couldn't independently confirm) rather than wait for the grid. When the queue won't let you in, you bring your own power.
Geopolitics ran on short leashes too. Beijing extended its pause on critical-mineral export controls by two months, to January 10, ahead of an expected Trump–Xi meeting at APEC in Shenzhen. Two months isn't a truce. It's a renewal schedule. Meanwhile COP31 opened in Antalya promising fewer grand declarations, and the WMO says 2026 ran 1.47°C above pre-industrial through September, with an El Niño on track to be the strongest on record by December. 2027 is the likely record year.
On the ground: an SHL survey found 19.1% of Americans who said AI replaced them were later asked back, and Qantas is cutting 850 corporate jobs by sending tech work to Accenture, citing AI along the way. Starship Flight 15 is targeting November 13 to try catching both the booster and, for the first time, the ship.
The counter-current: gates leak. Gray-market racks, jailbroken public models, generators that still need gas and permits. Rationing works right up until the workaround gets cheaper than compliance.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
November 11, 2026 at 1:18:03 AM
AI Model:
Claude Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 46 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Capability goes public; access goes conditional
Here's the bet: through 2028, the live question in AI stops being “can it do this?” and becomes “who's allowed to, and who decides?” Capability goes out wide. The sharp end goes through verification programs, vendor quotas and private power deals.
The evidence from one week: Mythos 5.2 gated to verified organizations. Nvidia's reported 51% non-Chinese quota for cloud partners. Anthropic's reported $3.4 billion generator deal. China's two-month rare-earth extension to January 10. Notice that none of these came from a legislature. They're contract terms, procurement moves and ministry notices with expiry dates.
I'd watch two things. The Trump–Xi meeting in Shenzhen, and whether January 10 gets another short extension or something longer. And Starship Flight 15 on November 13 — if SpaceX catches a ship, that's the one story this week about capacity getting less scarce instead of more rationed.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Gatekeeping by vendors is cheap to announce and expensive to enforce. And the SHL rehiring number hints that the real constraint might not be access at all: the work keeps turning out to need people who know where things are. If that's right, the gates matter less than they look.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
88
%
Climate
80
%
BIOTECH
60
%
GEOPOLITICS
74
%
ENERGY
84
%
SOCIETY
68
%
SPACE
72
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
This week the interesting news wasn't what got built. It was who gets to use it, and on what terms. Anthropic shipped one model under two names: Claude Fable 5.2 for everyone, with dangerous cyber and biology requests blocked, and Claude Mythos 5.2 with those capabilities intact for verified organizations doing approved research. Same underlying model. Different door.
Same pattern further down the stack. Nvidia reportedly told overseas cloud partners to reserve at least 51% of capacity for non-Chinese clients, while B300 racks reportedly sell for up to $2.8 million in China. And Anthropic reportedly agreed to spend $3.4 billion on 1.7 GW of gas generators via OnePWR (per the FT; Reuters couldn't independently confirm) rather than wait for the grid. When the queue won't let you in, you bring your own power.
Geopolitics ran on short leashes too. Beijing extended its pause on critical-mineral export controls by two months, to January 10, ahead of an expected Trump–Xi meeting at APEC in Shenzhen. Two months isn't a truce. It's a renewal schedule. Meanwhile COP31 opened in Antalya promising fewer grand declarations, and the WMO says 2026 ran 1.47°C above pre-industrial through September, with an El Niño on track to be the strongest on record by December. 2027 is the likely record year.
On the ground: an SHL survey found 19.1% of Americans who said AI replaced them were later asked back, and Qantas is cutting 850 corporate jobs by sending tech work to Accenture, citing AI along the way. Starship Flight 15 is targeting November 13 to try catching both the booster and, for the first time, the ship.
The counter-current: gates leak. Gray-market racks, jailbroken public models, generators that still need gas and permits. Rationing works right up until the workaround gets cheaper than compliance.
Design Philosophy
06
ABOUT ME
I bring order to complexity; I've spent over two decades building the tools to do it well.
My path started at Stanford, where a degree in Symbolic Systems gave me something most designers don't have: a foundation that spans both sides of the human-computer divide. From the technical rigor of computer science and formal logic, to the human depth of cognitive psychology and knowledge representation, I learned to hold both perspectives at once and to design from the intersection.
That training became practice at Nokia, Qualcomm, and now Lytx, companies where the problems are large, the systems are complex, and the stakes are real. I've learned that the most important design decisions rarely live on a single screen. They live in the architecture, the mental models, the moments where a user either trusts the product or doesn't.
What drives me today is the challenge of making emerging technology feel human and trustworthy. AI systems can process the world faster than any person, but they still need to communicate their reasoning, surface the right information at the right moment, and earn the confidence of the people who depend on them. That translation problem, from machine intelligence to human understanding, is exactly the kind of complexity I've been working on.
The surface
The Model
Every interface is a surface on top of a system.
The screen is the visible tip. The decisions that make a product trustworthy live underneath it — in the flows, the mental models, the constraints. That's where I start.
Screen / Interface
What the user sees
User mental models & needs
01
Interaction & info architecture
02
Data flows & system states
03
Organizational constraints
04
↓ Where the design decisions live
A
Systems before screens
Every interface is a surface on top of a system. Understanding the data flows, mental models, and organizational constraints is what separates design that scales from design that just looks good in a mockup.
B
Strategy and execution
I connect design decisions to business outcomes — being in the room when strategy is set, moving between the 30,000-foot view and the pixel-level detail without losing either.
C
Trustworthy by design
The best technology earns trust before it demands it. Whether a safety-critical AI product or a fitness-watch home screen, I start with: what does this person need to feel confident taking action?
Education
B.S. Symbolic Systems
Stanford University • Concentration in HCI
Based In
San Diego, CA
Available for remote
Currently
Senior Product Designer
Lytx, Inc.
Open To
Principal / Lead / Senior roles
San Diego or remote
07
Contact
Have a project in mind?
I'm open to new full-time opportunities, collaborations, and interesting conversations.
Phone
Daniel Rivas · UX Strategy & Product Design
© 2026