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 3, 2026 at 12:09:12 AM
Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
Promise Now, Permit Later: Through 2028, AI Builders Trade Voluntary Restraint for Room to Grow
Here's the bet: through 2028, AI builders buy room to grow with voluntary restraint. Curtailment pledges, election war rooms, published safeguards. Give the referee a little control now so you don't get a moratorium later.
The evidence piled up in a weekend. OpenAI pledged up to 1 GW of emergency curtailment in Georgia and says it'll take the program national. FERC has already told grid operators to justify or reform how they connect large loads, with flexibility built in, and a Senate permitting bill would let states require data centers to cut use at certain times as a condition of service. Meanwhile 71% of Americans told Gallup in March they'd oppose a data center in their area. That's the pressure the pledges are answering.
The tell I'd watch is whether pledges turn into terms. If a state commission or utility tariff writes curtailment into large-load interconnection in 2027, the pledge became a license fee. If OpenAI's peers match the Georgia commitment, it becomes the price of entry. I'd expect at least one of those before 2028.
Worth holding this loosely, though. A pledge with no enforcement is a press release, and a 70 GW gap doesn't close because someone promised to switch off at peak. The market may set the pace before any regulator does: tech sold off on Nov 2, and Oracle is reportedly raising $20bn to keep building.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
It's Election Day, and the most interesting thing in AI this week isn't a model. It's a promise. The builders are volunteering to be governed a little, before somebody makes them be governed a lot.
Start with the grid. On Nov 2, OpenAI announced a Grid Protectors Program: it pledges to cut power at US campuses it develops during extreme weather and grid emergencies, starting with up to a gigawatt at a planned campus in Effingham County, Georgia. The backdrop explains the generosity. Morgan Stanley now puts the US data-center power gap at 70 GW through 2028 before mitigation, against 97 GW of projected demand. A curtailment pledge is a lot cheaper than a moratorium.
Same move at the ballot box. OpenAI and Anthropic stood up election-monitoring teams for today's midterms, and Anthropic, OpenAI and Google all published safeguard policies. They needed to. Forum AI found nearly 40% of chatbot election answers had at least one factual error, and NPR found bots misstating polling hours and, in some cases, suggesting who to vote for.
The referees aren't idle either. FDA finalized potency guidance for cell and gene therapies on Nov 2, replacing its 2011 version, and accepted uniQure's Huntington's BLA under priority review with a May 1, 2027 decision date, after a public fight over whether the trial data was enough. China's rare-earth suspension still lapses Nov 10 on paper.
The counter-current: markets and weather don't take pledges. Tech extended its sell-off on Nov 2, and Oracle is reportedly lining up $10bn in bonds and $10bn in stock to keep spending. Ghana's met agency says a very strong El Niño will peak by January 2027, and COP31 opens in Antalya on Nov 9 with finance still the fight. Nobody's volunteering to fix that one.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
November 3, 2026 at 12:09:12 AM
AI Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 25 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Promise Now, Permit Later: Through 2028, AI Builders Trade Voluntary Restraint for Room to Grow
Here's the bet: through 2028, AI builders buy room to grow with voluntary restraint. Curtailment pledges, election war rooms, published safeguards. Give the referee a little control now so you don't get a moratorium later.
The evidence piled up in a weekend. OpenAI pledged up to 1 GW of emergency curtailment in Georgia and says it'll take the program national. FERC has already told grid operators to justify or reform how they connect large loads, with flexibility built in, and a Senate permitting bill would let states require data centers to cut use at certain times as a condition of service. Meanwhile 71% of Americans told Gallup in March they'd oppose a data center in their area. That's the pressure the pledges are answering.
The tell I'd watch is whether pledges turn into terms. If a state commission or utility tariff writes curtailment into large-load interconnection in 2027, the pledge became a license fee. If OpenAI's peers match the Georgia commitment, it becomes the price of entry. I'd expect at least one of those before 2028.
Worth holding this loosely, though. A pledge with no enforcement is a press release, and a 70 GW gap doesn't close because someone promised to switch off at peak. The market may set the pace before any regulator does: tech sold off on Nov 2, and Oracle is reportedly raising $20bn to keep building.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
80
%
Climate
80
%
BIOTECH
64
%
GEOPOLITICS
76
%
ENERGY
84
%
SOCIETY
78
%
SPACE
58
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
It's Election Day, and the most interesting thing in AI this week isn't a model. It's a promise. The builders are volunteering to be governed a little, before somebody makes them be governed a lot.
Start with the grid. On Nov 2, OpenAI announced a Grid Protectors Program: it pledges to cut power at US campuses it develops during extreme weather and grid emergencies, starting with up to a gigawatt at a planned campus in Effingham County, Georgia. The backdrop explains the generosity. Morgan Stanley now puts the US data-center power gap at 70 GW through 2028 before mitigation, against 97 GW of projected demand. A curtailment pledge is a lot cheaper than a moratorium.
Same move at the ballot box. OpenAI and Anthropic stood up election-monitoring teams for today's midterms, and Anthropic, OpenAI and Google all published safeguard policies. They needed to. Forum AI found nearly 40% of chatbot election answers had at least one factual error, and NPR found bots misstating polling hours and, in some cases, suggesting who to vote for.
The referees aren't idle either. FDA finalized potency guidance for cell and gene therapies on Nov 2, replacing its 2011 version, and accepted uniQure's Huntington's BLA under priority review with a May 1, 2027 decision date, after a public fight over whether the trial data was enough. China's rare-earth suspension still lapses Nov 10 on paper.
The counter-current: markets and weather don't take pledges. Tech extended its sell-off on Nov 2, and Oracle is reportedly lining up $10bn in bonds and $10bn in stock to keep spending. Ghana's met agency says a very strong El Niño will peak by January 2027, and COP31 opens in Antalya on Nov 9 with finance still the fight. Nobody's volunteering to fix that one.
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