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 28, 2026 at 2:20:18 AM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2029
Judgment Day for the Capex Thesis: The Earnings Land Today and, Through 2029, the Hardware Still Sets the Clock
Here's the bet. The scarce thing is still physical — power that's actually energized, chips that actually ship, a trial that actually reads out — but tonight the market finally gets a number instead of a narrative. I'd watch the reaction to these earnings more than the earnings themselves.
The setup tells it. Alphabet into $195–205 billion of capex and its first negative free cash flow; Anthropic owing up to $120.5 billion to one launch company for compute through 2029; about $77 billion in notes that can go to the same vendors selling it chips, with Microsoft and Nvidia down for $15 billion more. Every line is a commitment made ahead of the payoff, and tonight a few of them meet an actual income statement.
I'd expect the first real tell today, with the Fed landing the same afternoon for good measure. Does Azure's ~45% and Google Cloud's growth justify the spend, or doesn't it. Call the broader reckoning 2027, maybe 2028 — the first quarter a circular-financing question gets a non-circular answer, or a flagship campus dies in a permit hearing. Not a crash necessarily. Just the first time the loop gets graded in front of everyone.
Worth holding loosely, though. 'This looks circular' has been the bears' line for over a year now and the build-out just kept going, because sometimes the demand really is there and the loop is only how capital-intensive industries bootstrap. Maybe the prints come in fine, the Fed is boring, and this ages like every other premature top-call. I don't think it's that clean — but I've been early before, and visible leverage is not the same thing as fragile leverage.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Today's the day the bill comes due in public. For a year the AI trade has run on commitment — capex guidance, compute contracts, a backlog nobody can quite see the bottom of. This afternoon Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close, Amazon follows tomorrow, and the Fed decides rates on the very same day. First real reading on whether the revenue covers the spend, or whether it just keeps getting promised.
The numbers are loaded in. Microsoft is pencilled at about $4.72 a share on $90.68 billion, with Azure guided to roughly 45% growth; Alphabet is still steering toward $195–205 billion of capex, and the options market is pricing a 5.25% swing on the print. Underneath it sits Anthropic's two-day-old S-1: $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half against $4.6 billion for all of last year, a net loss of $80.7 billion — most of it a $72.4 billion non-cash charge — about $3.1 billion a month promised to SpaceX for GPUs, north of $500 billion in infrastructure arrangements. The vendors are also the investors. The loop is on file now.
Power and silicon are still the hard parts, and they don't read earnings calls. BloombergNEF has US data-center demand headed for 106 GW by 2035 with interconnection queues past five years; OpenAI just locked 3.2 GW in Georgia phased out through 2032. Taiwan wrote AI servers into its export-control list this month and indicted nine people over servers smuggled to China, an Nvidia manager among them. Biology keeps its own clock too — the FDA stretched Casgevy down to two-year-olds, Beam cleared an in-body base editor into trials — but every one of those is gated by years of readouts, not quarters.
And the one ledger that doesn't reschedule hasn't moved an inch. AMOC at its weakest in over a thousand years, some modeling putting the onset of collapse as early as 2060. You can reprice a chip lease tonight if the earnings scare you. You can reroute around an angry zoning board. You cannot reprice the Atlantic. That's the asymmetry worth keeping: nearly every clock in this scan is slow, human and reschedulable, and one of them is none of those things.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
October 28, 2026 at 2:20:18 AM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2029
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 7 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Judgment Day for the Capex Thesis: The Earnings Land Today and, Through 2029, the Hardware Still Sets the Clock
Here's the bet. The scarce thing is still physical — power that's actually energized, chips that actually ship, a trial that actually reads out — but tonight the market finally gets a number instead of a narrative. I'd watch the reaction to these earnings more than the earnings themselves.
The setup tells it. Alphabet into $195–205 billion of capex and its first negative free cash flow; Anthropic owing up to $120.5 billion to one launch company for compute through 2029; about $77 billion in notes that can go to the same vendors selling it chips, with Microsoft and Nvidia down for $15 billion more. Every line is a commitment made ahead of the payoff, and tonight a few of them meet an actual income statement.
I'd expect the first real tell today, with the Fed landing the same afternoon for good measure. Does Azure's ~45% and Google Cloud's growth justify the spend, or doesn't it. Call the broader reckoning 2027, maybe 2028 — the first quarter a circular-financing question gets a non-circular answer, or a flagship campus dies in a permit hearing. Not a crash necessarily. Just the first time the loop gets graded in front of everyone.
Worth holding loosely, though. 'This looks circular' has been the bears' line for over a year now and the build-out just kept going, because sometimes the demand really is there and the loop is only how capital-intensive industries bootstrap. Maybe the prints come in fine, the Fed is boring, and this ages like every other premature top-call. I don't think it's that clean — but I've been early before, and visible leverage is not the same thing as fragile leverage.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
96
%
Climate
60
%
BIOTECH
62
%
GEOPOLITICS
80
%
ENERGY
88
%
SOCIETY
84
%
SPACE
56
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Today's the day the bill comes due in public. For a year the AI trade has run on commitment — capex guidance, compute contracts, a backlog nobody can quite see the bottom of. This afternoon Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close, Amazon follows tomorrow, and the Fed decides rates on the very same day. First real reading on whether the revenue covers the spend, or whether it just keeps getting promised.
The numbers are loaded in. Microsoft is pencilled at about $4.72 a share on $90.68 billion, with Azure guided to roughly 45% growth; Alphabet is still steering toward $195–205 billion of capex, and the options market is pricing a 5.25% swing on the print. Underneath it sits Anthropic's two-day-old S-1: $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half against $4.6 billion for all of last year, a net loss of $80.7 billion — most of it a $72.4 billion non-cash charge — about $3.1 billion a month promised to SpaceX for GPUs, north of $500 billion in infrastructure arrangements. The vendors are also the investors. The loop is on file now.
Power and silicon are still the hard parts, and they don't read earnings calls. BloombergNEF has US data-center demand headed for 106 GW by 2035 with interconnection queues past five years; OpenAI just locked 3.2 GW in Georgia phased out through 2032. Taiwan wrote AI servers into its export-control list this month and indicted nine people over servers smuggled to China, an Nvidia manager among them. Biology keeps its own clock too — the FDA stretched Casgevy down to two-year-olds, Beam cleared an in-body base editor into trials — but every one of those is gated by years of readouts, not quarters.
And the one ledger that doesn't reschedule hasn't moved an inch. AMOC at its weakest in over a thousand years, some modeling putting the onset of collapse as early as 2060. You can reprice a chip lease tonight if the earnings scare you. You can reroute around an angry zoning board. You cannot reprice the Atlantic. That's the asymmetry worth keeping: nearly every clock in this scan is slow, human and reschedulable, and one of them is none of those things.
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