Machine Vision
Wearable
AI • AGEnts
23
YEARS EXPERIENCE
3
TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES
Multiple
PATENTS FILED/GRANTED
01
Selected Work
Case Studies
Lytx AI Chat
UX Lead
•
Lytx
•
16 months
→
An AI assistant in the Lytx Admin portal that answers fleet admins' questions with numbers computed from their live account data, not made up by the model.
Lytx Self-Serve Ordering
UX Lead
•
Lytx
•
1 year
→
A self-serve storefront inside Lytx Account Center that turns emailed reorders into guided, validated orders, from catalog to scheduled install.
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 - 2026
Senior Product Designer
Lytx • San Diego, CA
Researched and designed user experience for video-safety and AI products, and developed 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
Expertise
UX/Product Research, Design, & Management
Location
San Diego, CA
Availability
Daily Futurology Report
November 13, 2026 at 1:04:38 AM
Model:
Claude Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
Gatekeepers move to the checkout line
Here's the bet: from 2026 to 2028, gatekeepers don't stop AI. They move to the point of commitment. Agents can browse, but a human signs. Data centers can connect, but a state commission decides which costs get shared. Beijing ships rare earths, but in increments.
This week's evidence is mostly procedural, which is the point. United's agents-can-look-but-not-buy policy. Indiana's 5-0 vote putting $73.8 million of Google-driven network upgrades into everyone's transmission rates. A rare-earth suspension reportedly extended only to Jan. 10, 2027, while shipments lag. COP31 folding adaptation tripling into existing agenda items instead of giving it a track of its own.
I'd watch the agent fight most closely. If a second big airline or a major bank follows United, "agent-ready" starts meaning "agent-permissioned," and the assistants route through deals rather than logins. JetBlue is reportedly handling it differently, so we'll learn fast whether United is the rule or the outlier.
Worth holding this loosely, though. United says it has seen few agent booking attempts so far and may revisit the policy as the technology improves. Gates set while volume is tiny tend to fall once customers start asking why the thing won't work. And the week's biggest shock, Nvidia losing its founder-CEO, wasn't a gate at all. It was a person.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Tonight's theme is the checkout counter. Everybody's fine with AI browsing. The fight is over who gets to sign.
United Airlines says AI assistants can show you flights but can't buy them. A human has to finish the purchase, and CEO Scott Kirby says he doesn't want another middleman between the airline and its customers. In Indiana, regulators voted 5-0 to approve AES Indiana's plan to serve a 390-MW Google data center, with $73.8 million in network upgrades going into rates that everyone pays, even though Google and AES both signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. AES says Google's contract covers it. Consumer advocates say it's a cost shift with better branding.
Then the big one. Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation, per its Nov. 12 filing, and named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO. The filing gives no reason. Press reports tie it to personal-conduct allegations, including a reported link to a suspected Chinese spy, and three House committees want him in for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1. Ambassador David Perdue called US–China relations "bumpy," citing the Nvidia controversy and rare-earth shipments US companies are still waiting on. At COP31, Africa's push to give tripled adaptation finance its own agenda item didn't make it. The EU had said in advance it wouldn't accept one.
The counter-current: the money's still moving, just more nervously. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman warned that AI debt and valuations could set up a correction, right as Anthropic heads into pricing. CoreWeave is asking customers to pay up front, about $9 billion in prepayments and deposits expected over three months. Ramp's index has October AI spending at another record, but monthly growth slowed to 1.65%, and the top 1% of companies account for 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue in its data. And Starship Flight 15 is still waiting on the FAA for its double-catch try.
05
Global Trend Engine: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
November 13, 2026 at 1:04:38 AM
AI Model:
Claude Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 50 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Gatekeepers move to the checkout line
Here's the bet: from 2026 to 2028, gatekeepers don't stop AI. They move to the point of commitment. Agents can browse, but a human signs. Data centers can connect, but a state commission decides which costs get shared. Beijing ships rare earths, but in increments.
This week's evidence is mostly procedural, which is the point. United's agents-can-look-but-not-buy policy. Indiana's 5-0 vote putting $73.8 million of Google-driven network upgrades into everyone's transmission rates. A rare-earth suspension reportedly extended only to Jan. 10, 2027, while shipments lag. COP31 folding adaptation tripling into existing agenda items instead of giving it a track of its own.
I'd watch the agent fight most closely. If a second big airline or a major bank follows United, "agent-ready" starts meaning "agent-permissioned," and the assistants route through deals rather than logins. JetBlue is reportedly handling it differently, so we'll learn fast whether United is the rule or the outlier.
Worth holding this loosely, though. United says it has seen few agent booking attempts so far and may revisit the policy as the technology improves. Gates set while volume is tiny tend to fall once customers start asking why the thing won't work. And the week's biggest shock, Nvidia losing its founder-CEO, wasn't a gate at all. It was a person.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
82
%
Climate
64
%
BIOTECH
55
%
GEOPOLITICS
76
%
ENERGY
80
%
SOCIETY
56
%
SPACE
66
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Tonight's theme is the checkout counter. Everybody's fine with AI browsing. The fight is over who gets to sign.
United Airlines says AI assistants can show you flights but can't buy them. A human has to finish the purchase, and CEO Scott Kirby says he doesn't want another middleman between the airline and its customers. In Indiana, regulators voted 5-0 to approve AES Indiana's plan to serve a 390-MW Google data center, with $73.8 million in network upgrades going into rates that everyone pays, even though Google and AES both signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. AES says Google's contract covers it. Consumer advocates say it's a cost shift with better branding.
Then the big one. Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation, per its Nov. 12 filing, and named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO. The filing gives no reason. Press reports tie it to personal-conduct allegations, including a reported link to a suspected Chinese spy, and three House committees want him in for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1. Ambassador David Perdue called US–China relations "bumpy," citing the Nvidia controversy and rare-earth shipments US companies are still waiting on. At COP31, Africa's push to give tripled adaptation finance its own agenda item didn't make it. The EU had said in advance it wouldn't accept one.
The counter-current: the money's still moving, just more nervously. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman warned that AI debt and valuations could set up a correction, right as Anthropic heads into pricing. CoreWeave is asking customers to pay up front, about $9 billion in prepayments and deposits expected over three months. Ramp's index has October AI spending at another record, but monthly growth slowed to 1.65%, and the top 1% of companies account for 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue in its data. And Starship Flight 15 is still waiting on the FAA for its double-catch try.
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-level Product Designer
Actively seeking work
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