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
•
1 week
→
An agentic AI dashboard where three agents — a multi-persona scanner, Nostradamus, and Tarot — scan the web for frontier signals, synthesize patterns, and generate predictive convergence insights — 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
October 31, 2026 at 12:10:40 AM
Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
Permission Is the New Bottleneck: Banks Lock Out Agents, PJM Bills the Data Centers, and Through 2028 Gatekeepers Set the Pace
Here's the bet: through 2028, how fast AI spreads gets set by gatekeepers (banks, grid operators, regulators) more than by the models. Permission becomes the bottleneck, and it gets priced.
The evidence is piling up in one week. Four of the biggest US financial institutions say they block outside agents. PJM is building a separate auction lane so data centers pay for their own power. Treasury is fencing off capital to Chinese biotech but leaving the licensing door open. On jobs, Goldman's latest read (Fortune, Oct 22) is that AI could eventually displace about 9% of US workers, but companies tend to save automation layoffs for downturns. Challenger counted 120,136 AI-cited announced US cuts in Jan–Sep, about 21% of the total.
The tell I'd watch: whether the bank lockout turns into sanctioned agent APIs with liability rules attached. If big banks publish agent-access terms in 2027, that's the gate opening, on their terms. I'd also expect PJM's March auction to become the template for making large loads pay their own way.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Gates leak. People who want agents will get them through aggregators or smaller banks, and the "rogue agent" story rests mostly on one Axios report; Morgan Stanley's own source said it saw nothing like that. If adoption just routes around the gatekeepers, the bottleneck story is wrong and it was capability all along.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
This week's theme isn't capability. It's permission. Across most of the board, the interesting news is somebody holding a key and deciding who gets in.
Start with agents. After Axios reported on Oct 22 that third-party AI agents were operating inside customer bank accounts on customers' own logins, JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Schwab all said they block them. Schwab says it's doing so a double-digit number of times a week. Same week, Anthropic filed its S-1 (Oct 26) for a Nasdaq listing under "ANT," disclosing compute commitments of at least $114.5bn to Google, $110bn to Amazon and $44.9bn to Microsoft. The models are ready for the world. The world's gatekeepers are writing the terms.
Power is the same story with a meter attached. PJM wants a special March auction for new generation serving data centers, after FERC called its first plan "deeply flawed." The market monitor pins roughly $29.4bn in capacity costs across the last four auctions on data-center demand, so somebody's going to pay. In Washington, Treasury's proposed rule (comments due Dec 7) would bar US equity stakes in Chinese biotech while mostly sparing licensing. And reporting that a Chinese spy targeted Jensen Huang lands on a chip regime where enforcement already looks negotiable.
The counter-current: physics doesn't ask permission. October is tracking 1.76°C above preindustrial, the hottest on record, while the EU's Wopke Hoekstra calls COP31 finance prospects "dead in the water." And NASA is still testing before landing: an Earth-orbit docking test of Starship and Blue Moon with Orion in 2027, landings in 2028, with in-space propellant transfer still undemonstrated.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
October 31, 2026 at 12:10:40 AM
AI Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 16 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Permission Is the New Bottleneck: Banks Lock Out Agents, PJM Bills the Data Centers, and Through 2028 Gatekeepers Set the Pace
Here's the bet: through 2028, how fast AI spreads gets set by gatekeepers (banks, grid operators, regulators) more than by the models. Permission becomes the bottleneck, and it gets priced.
The evidence is piling up in one week. Four of the biggest US financial institutions say they block outside agents. PJM is building a separate auction lane so data centers pay for their own power. Treasury is fencing off capital to Chinese biotech but leaving the licensing door open. On jobs, Goldman's latest read (Fortune, Oct 22) is that AI could eventually displace about 9% of US workers, but companies tend to save automation layoffs for downturns. Challenger counted 120,136 AI-cited announced US cuts in Jan–Sep, about 21% of the total.
The tell I'd watch: whether the bank lockout turns into sanctioned agent APIs with liability rules attached. If big banks publish agent-access terms in 2027, that's the gate opening, on their terms. I'd also expect PJM's March auction to become the template for making large loads pay their own way.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Gates leak. People who want agents will get them through aggregators or smaller banks, and the "rogue agent" story rests mostly on one Axios report; Morgan Stanley's own source said it saw nothing like that. If adoption just routes around the gatekeepers, the bottleneck story is wrong and it was capability all along.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
84
%
Climate
72
%
BIOTECH
58
%
GEOPOLITICS
74
%
ENERGY
86
%
SOCIETY
70
%
SPACE
60
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
This week's theme isn't capability. It's permission. Across most of the board, the interesting news is somebody holding a key and deciding who gets in.
Start with agents. After Axios reported on Oct 22 that third-party AI agents were operating inside customer bank accounts on customers' own logins, JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Schwab all said they block them. Schwab says it's doing so a double-digit number of times a week. Same week, Anthropic filed its S-1 (Oct 26) for a Nasdaq listing under "ANT," disclosing compute commitments of at least $114.5bn to Google, $110bn to Amazon and $44.9bn to Microsoft. The models are ready for the world. The world's gatekeepers are writing the terms.
Power is the same story with a meter attached. PJM wants a special March auction for new generation serving data centers, after FERC called its first plan "deeply flawed." The market monitor pins roughly $29.4bn in capacity costs across the last four auctions on data-center demand, so somebody's going to pay. In Washington, Treasury's proposed rule (comments due Dec 7) would bar US equity stakes in Chinese biotech while mostly sparing licensing. And reporting that a Chinese spy targeted Jensen Huang lands on a chip regime where enforcement already looks negotiable.
The counter-current: physics doesn't ask permission. October is tracking 1.76°C above preindustrial, the hottest on record, while the EU's Wopke Hoekstra calls COP31 finance prospects "dead in the water." And NASA is still testing before landing: an Earth-orbit docking test of Starship and Blue Moon with Orion in 2027, landings in 2028, with in-space propellant transfer still undemonstrated.
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