UX STRATEGY • PRODUCT DESIGN
Research. Strategy. Systems Design. AI.
I design products that help people understand and trust systems they can't fully see — from machine vision overlays to GPS-connected hardware. That's been my work for over two decades. AI just made it more interesting. (See how I'm integrating AI into my design process.)
Machine Vision
Wearable
AI • AGEnts
22
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
August 25, 2026 at 12:10:12 AM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2030
The backlash gets a line item: Anthropic's record IPO filing now names public anger over AI jobs and data centers as a formal risk factor (CNBC, Aug 21) - even as its CEO walks back his own jobs-apocalypse warning, Bloomberg finds two-thirds of the 1,066 GW of AI power requested will never be built, and PJM's new rule forces data centers over 50 MW to bring their own power by March 2027. Through 2030 the AI story turns less on the model than on two constraints now being written down on paper: whether the grid gets built, and whether the public consents.
Here's the bet for the rest of the decade. The AI story doesn't get decided by which model wins a benchmark. It gets decided by two votes that don't care about benchmarks: whether the power actually gets built, and whether the public keeps saying yes. This week both of those votes started showing up on paper.
The evidence isn't a pundit. It's a prospectus and a grid rule. Anthropic's filing reportedly names public backlash - jobs, data centers, the whole mood - as a risk factor, which is a company legally conceding the crowd could cost it money. PJM's new rule tells data centers over 50 megawatts to bring their own power by March 2027, which is a grid legally conceding it can't. Bloomberg says two-thirds of the power the industry asked for will never materialize. When the objections start getting written into contracts and filings, they've stopped being vibes.
I'd watch the point where those two 'no' votes actually bite, and I think it's inside this window - 2027, roughly, when PJM's rule lands and the first big cohort of announced data centers either finds its own power or quietly doesn't get built. That's the year the gap between what was announced and what's real stops being a spreadsheet argument and starts being outages, delays, and projects that just evaporate. The capability will still be improving that whole time. It won't matter much if it can't switch on.
Worth holding loosely, though. 'The grid will save us from ourselves' is a comfortable story, and comfortable stories are usually wrong somewhere. Money is very good at finding power - behind-the-meter gas, restarted reactors, deals nobody's modeled yet - and public anger has a way of fading once the checks clear and the jobs number doesn't crater the way everyone feared. And most of what actually mattered this month happened off to the side of the whole fight anyway: a single infusion still cutting someone's cholesterol, headed to a stage in Munich; a rocket stacking for its first real orbital shot; an ocean loading up for its hottest stretch since 1950, indifferent to every filing and rule. The grid saying no is the right thing to watch. It just isn't the same as the story being over.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
For a year the AI story has been told in one direction: models get better, the money gets bigger, and everyone downstream is told to adapt. This week the story started getting told back the other way - and, more interestingly, it started getting written down.
The clearest tell is a legal document. Anthropic's IPO filing reportedly lists public backlash over AI - the job fear, the anger at data centers going up in people's towns - as a formal risk factor. That's not a hot take; that's a company about to be worth a fortune telling its future shareholders, in the careful language of a prospectus, that the public mood could cost them. In the same breath, both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman walked back the jobs-apocalypse warnings they spent last year issuing. The warning was good marketing when they were raising. It's a liability now that they're selling.
Underneath the mood is the physics, and the physics got blunter. Bloomberg put a number on it: of the roughly 1,066 gigawatts AI projects have asked American grids for, maybe 28 percent will ever actually get built. PJM, the biggest grid in the country, wrote its own version of no - a rule saying any data center over 50 megawatts has to bring its own dedicated power by March 2027. The GPU stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Now it's the substation, and the substation is starting to say so in writing.
And none of that slowed the capability side down at all. An anonymous model nobody will claim - people are calling it OX Alpha - beat GPT-5.6 on coding this month. Qwen shipped the largest open-weight model ever at 2.4 trillion parameters. OpenAI made its fast model fourteen times faster and cut the price twenty percent. Eleven-plus models in twenty days. So the shape of it is two curves crossing: the thing keeps getting cheaper and better on a weekly calendar, while the two things that could actually stop it - the grid and the public - are, for the first time, putting their objection in a filing.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
August 25, 2026 at 12:10:12 AM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2030
The backlash gets a line item: Anthropic's record IPO filing now names public anger over AI jobs and data centers as a formal risk factor (CNBC, Aug 21) - even as its CEO walks back his own jobs-apocalypse warning, Bloomberg finds two-thirds of the 1,066 GW of AI power requested will never be built, and PJM's new rule forces data centers over 50 MW to bring their own power by March 2027. Through 2030 the AI story turns less on the model than on two constraints now being written down on paper: whether the grid gets built, and whether the public consents.
Here's the bet for the rest of the decade. The AI story doesn't get decided by which model wins a benchmark. It gets decided by two votes that don't care about benchmarks: whether the power actually gets built, and whether the public keeps saying yes. This week both of those votes started showing up on paper.
The evidence isn't a pundit. It's a prospectus and a grid rule. Anthropic's filing reportedly names public backlash - jobs, data centers, the whole mood - as a risk factor, which is a company legally conceding the crowd could cost it money. PJM's new rule tells data centers over 50 megawatts to bring their own power by March 2027, which is a grid legally conceding it can't. Bloomberg says two-thirds of the power the industry asked for will never materialize. When the objections start getting written into contracts and filings, they've stopped being vibes.
I'd watch the point where those two 'no' votes actually bite, and I think it's inside this window - 2027, roughly, when PJM's rule lands and the first big cohort of announced data centers either finds its own power or quietly doesn't get built. That's the year the gap between what was announced and what's real stops being a spreadsheet argument and starts being outages, delays, and projects that just evaporate. The capability will still be improving that whole time. It won't matter much if it can't switch on.
Worth holding loosely, though. 'The grid will save us from ourselves' is a comfortable story, and comfortable stories are usually wrong somewhere. Money is very good at finding power - behind-the-meter gas, restarted reactors, deals nobody's modeled yet - and public anger has a way of fading once the checks clear and the jobs number doesn't crater the way everyone feared. And most of what actually mattered this month happened off to the side of the whole fight anyway: a single infusion still cutting someone's cholesterol, headed to a stage in Munich; a rocket stacking for its first real orbital shot; an ocean loading up for its hottest stretch since 1950, indifferent to every filing and rule. The grid saying no is the right thing to watch. It just isn't the same as the story being over.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
98
%
Climate
94
%
BIOTECH
66
%
GEOPOLITICS
80
%
ENERGY
89
%
SOCIETY
79
%
SPACE
72
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
For a year the AI story has been told in one direction: models get better, the money gets bigger, and everyone downstream is told to adapt. This week the story started getting told back the other way - and, more interestingly, it started getting written down.
The clearest tell is a legal document. Anthropic's IPO filing reportedly lists public backlash over AI - the job fear, the anger at data centers going up in people's towns - as a formal risk factor. That's not a hot take; that's a company about to be worth a fortune telling its future shareholders, in the careful language of a prospectus, that the public mood could cost them. In the same breath, both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman walked back the jobs-apocalypse warnings they spent last year issuing. The warning was good marketing when they were raising. It's a liability now that they're selling.
Underneath the mood is the physics, and the physics got blunter. Bloomberg put a number on it: of the roughly 1,066 gigawatts AI projects have asked American grids for, maybe 28 percent will ever actually get built. PJM, the biggest grid in the country, wrote its own version of no - a rule saying any data center over 50 megawatts has to bring its own dedicated power by March 2027. The GPU stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Now it's the substation, and the substation is starting to say so in writing.
And none of that slowed the capability side down at all. An anonymous model nobody will claim - people are calling it OX Alpha - beat GPT-5.6 on coding this month. Qwen shipped the largest open-weight model ever at 2.4 trillion parameters. OpenAI made its fast model fourteen times faster and cut the price twenty percent. Eleven-plus models in twenty days. So the shape of it is two curves crossing: the thing keeps getting cheaper and better on a weekly calendar, while the two things that could actually stop it - the grid and the public - are, for the first time, putting their objection in a filing.
ABOUT ME
Design Philosophy
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.
Systems before screens
Every interface is a surface on top of a system. Understanding the system (the data flows, the user mental models, the organizational constraints) is what separates design that scales from design that just looks good in a mockup.
Strategy and execution, not one or the other
I connect design decisions to business outcomes. That means being in the room when strategy is set, not just when wireframes need approval. It means being able to move between the 30,000-foot view and the pixel-level detail without losing either.
Trustworthy by design
The best technology earns trust before it demands it. Whether I'm designing a safety-critical AI product or the home screen on a fitness watch, I start with the question: 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
CURRENTLY
Senior Product Designer
Lytx
OPEN TO OPPORTUNITIES
Principal/Senior-Level Product Design Roles
In San Diego or Remote
SELECTED WORK
Case Studies
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, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams
Systems Thinking
Mapping connected flows and designing for scalability across product surfaces
Prototyping
Interactive prototypes from low-fi click-throughs to high-fidelity AI coding
AI Fluency
Designing AI-powered experiences and leveraging AI tools in the design process
Stakeholder Management
Cross-functional collaboration and design advocacy
Tools
Pendo
In-app guidance, feature tracking, and user surveys to inform design decisions
Dovetail
Centralized research insights, tagged findings, and shared customer intelligence repository
Figma
Components, variants, auto-layout, and prototyping
Claude (Design & Code)
AI-assisted research synthesis, design critique, content generation, and prototyping
Amplitude
Product funnels, retention curves, and feature adoption to identify usage and priorities
Gong
Customer interview repository for surfacing pain points, testing designs, and grounding decisions
Sketch
Vector-based UI design for components, wireframes, and high-fidelity screens
Axure RP
High-fidelity interactive prototyping with conditional logic and complex flows
Cursor
AI-assisted coding for rapid prototyping and exploring technical feasibility
BACKGROUND
Experience & Education
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 UX team.
tagsContainer
2019 - Present
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.
tagsContainer
2007 - 2018
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.
tagsContainer
2003 - 2007
B.S. Symbolic Systems
Completed interdisciplinary study of computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology with a concentration in human-computer interaction.
tagsContainer
1998 - 2002
My Résumé
A full overview of my experience, skills, and education — ready to share.
NAME
Daniel Rivas
CURRENT ROLE
Senior Product Designer
LOCATION
San Diego, CA
EXPERIENCE
22 years
AVAILABILITY
✦ Human · Machine · Intelligence ✦ Systems before screens ✦ Strategy & execution ✦ Trustworthy by design ✦
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