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
November 1, 2026 at 1:49:29 AM
Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
The Bill Comes Due: Through 2028, Cash Flow and Local Consent, Not Demand, Pace the AI Buildout
Here’s the bet: through 2028, the AI buildout gets paced by who can afford it and who’ll allow it, not by demand. Cash flow and local consent become the two meters that matter.
The evidence landed in one week. Alphabet and Amazon both posted booming cloud growth and negative free cash flow, and the market punished the cash, not the growth. OpenAI’s raise shrank by a third. On the ground, Hermantown said yes only after Google dropped an $80m property-tax-break request and agreed to a $210m decommissioning plan, and three lawsuits remain. MPR notes polls show both Democrats and Republicans oppose data centers in their own communities.
The tell I’d watch is how the build gets financed. Nvidia is reportedly in advanced talks to guarantee debt for Nscale’s 460MW Anthropic phase in West Virginia, and vendor credit is what you see when internal cash stops covering the plan. If 2027 brings more guarantees and fewer self-funded campuses, I’d expect the split between cash-rich builders and borrowers to harden. I’d also expect town councils and utility-board races to do more siting work than federal policy does.
Worth holding this loosely, though. One ugly earnings week isn’t a regime change; Alphabet’s cloud doubled, and CFRA’s Angelo Zino called the drop a probable buying opportunity. Anthropic’s IPO is coming. If it prices well, the cash story was a mood, not a constraint.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Last week the theme was permission. This week somebody sent the invoice. The AI buildout is running into the people who pay for it: shareholders, towns, and, in the background, an ocean that’s been saving up heat.
Start with the money. Alphabet fell nearly 13% on Oct 29, its worst day since its 2004 IPO, erasing $475bn in market value. Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $31bn, but free cash flow swung to a loss of about $9bn as AI spending climbed. Amazon’s AWS grew 39%, its fastest in nearly five years, while Amazon’s 12-month free cash flow sank to a record outflow of more than $42bn. And the FT reports OpenAI cut its round from $30bn to roughly $20bn, with the implied valuation down from $1.4T to $1.25T. Demand’s fine. The cash is the problem.
Then the ground game. Hermantown, Minnesota approved a 500MW Google data center just before midnight Friday, after protests postponed the vote twice, with three lawsuits still pending. All 79 Victorian councils, through their municipal association, asked for a moratorium on new data centres. A federal judge let the NAACP’s Clean Air Act suit over xAI’s 35 Memphis gas turbines go forward. Across the Pacific, Beijing’s draft rules would put 23 AI technologies, advanced models and agents included, under export control; Taiwan is moving to make shipping restricted AI hardware to China a criminal offense; and Apple is putting Alibaba’s Qwen inside Apple Intelligence for China. Two stacks, two fences.
The counter-current is physics, again. WMO says El Niño is strengthening fast, with Niño 3.4 forecast around +3.7°C for Oct–Dec, well past the 2015–16 record of +2.6°C, and a near-100% chance it lasts through February 2027. Meanwhile SpaceX will try to catch both Starship stages on Flight 15 in November. The things that work keep working. It’s the business models that wobble.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
November 1, 2026 at 1:49:29 AM
AI Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 22 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
The Bill Comes Due: Through 2028, Cash Flow and Local Consent, Not Demand, Pace the AI Buildout
Here’s the bet: through 2028, the AI buildout gets paced by who can afford it and who’ll allow it, not by demand. Cash flow and local consent become the two meters that matter.
The evidence landed in one week. Alphabet and Amazon both posted booming cloud growth and negative free cash flow, and the market punished the cash, not the growth. OpenAI’s raise shrank by a third. On the ground, Hermantown said yes only after Google dropped an $80m property-tax-break request and agreed to a $210m decommissioning plan, and three lawsuits remain. MPR notes polls show both Democrats and Republicans oppose data centers in their own communities.
The tell I’d watch is how the build gets financed. Nvidia is reportedly in advanced talks to guarantee debt for Nscale’s 460MW Anthropic phase in West Virginia, and vendor credit is what you see when internal cash stops covering the plan. If 2027 brings more guarantees and fewer self-funded campuses, I’d expect the split between cash-rich builders and borrowers to harden. I’d also expect town councils and utility-board races to do more siting work than federal policy does.
Worth holding this loosely, though. One ugly earnings week isn’t a regime change; Alphabet’s cloud doubled, and CFRA’s Angelo Zino called the drop a probable buying opportunity. Anthropic’s IPO is coming. If it prices well, the cash story was a mood, not a constraint.
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
78
%
BIOTECH
55
%
GEOPOLITICS
72
%
ENERGY
80
%
SOCIETY
66
%
SPACE
62
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Last week the theme was permission. This week somebody sent the invoice. The AI buildout is running into the people who pay for it: shareholders, towns, and, in the background, an ocean that’s been saving up heat.
Start with the money. Alphabet fell nearly 13% on Oct 29, its worst day since its 2004 IPO, erasing $475bn in market value. Cloud revenue more than doubled to about $31bn, but free cash flow swung to a loss of about $9bn as AI spending climbed. Amazon’s AWS grew 39%, its fastest in nearly five years, while Amazon’s 12-month free cash flow sank to a record outflow of more than $42bn. And the FT reports OpenAI cut its round from $30bn to roughly $20bn, with the implied valuation down from $1.4T to $1.25T. Demand’s fine. The cash is the problem.
Then the ground game. Hermantown, Minnesota approved a 500MW Google data center just before midnight Friday, after protests postponed the vote twice, with three lawsuits still pending. All 79 Victorian councils, through their municipal association, asked for a moratorium on new data centres. A federal judge let the NAACP’s Clean Air Act suit over xAI’s 35 Memphis gas turbines go forward. Across the Pacific, Beijing’s draft rules would put 23 AI technologies, advanced models and agents included, under export control; Taiwan is moving to make shipping restricted AI hardware to China a criminal offense; and Apple is putting Alibaba’s Qwen inside Apple Intelligence for China. Two stacks, two fences.
The counter-current is physics, again. WMO says El Niño is strengthening fast, with Niño 3.4 forecast around +3.7°C for Oct–Dec, well past the 2015–16 record of +2.6°C, and a near-100% chance it lasts through February 2027. Meanwhile SpaceX will try to catch both Starship stages on Flight 15 in November. The things that work keep working. It’s the business models that wobble.
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