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
September 23, 2026 at 2:14:46 AM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
The one-year mark on the UN 'red lines' call arrives with no treaty and a worse incident log — an AI false report that nearly triggered a boarding of a Chinese ship — the same quarter China's rare-earth cliff holds for November 10, El Niño peaks near a record, and Goldman's power shortfall widens toward 45 GW by 2028. Through 2028 the binding constraints are governance, power, minerals and consent, not model capability.
Here's the bet through 2028: the models were never the bottleneck, and this fall keeps proving it. What's scarce is everything around them — the power to run them, the minerals to build the power, the public's permission to put either nearby, and, increasingly, the legal and institutional room to deploy systems that keep failing in ways that reach off the screen. Most of those constraints have a due date, and the dates are stacked into one quarter.
The evidence is on the calendar, not in a mood. A rare-earth suspension that lapses November 10. A House vote of 417 to 3 on who pays for the grid. An end-of-2026 target for binding AI red lines that just passed its one-year anniversary with no agreement and a UN chief pleading on his way out the door. A 45-gigawatt power shortfall by 2028 that buyers are meeting with on-site gas because they can't wait for an interconnect. And an El Niño the WMO puts near 100%, peaking in November. Five clocks, one autumn — and now an incident log where the failures have started touching warships.
I'd watch October into December hardest. That's when the rare-earth cliff either lapses or gets waved off at the last second, when El Niño peaks and starts breaking whatever it's going to break, when the red-lines deadline either produces a real UN resolution or slides into 2027, and when the next agent incident resolves into either 'contained' or 'we have a problem.' A lot of independent bets settle in the same eight weeks. Given the year, I wouldn't put the whole board on the calm outcome.
Worth holding loosely, though. A deadline is a negotiation, not a wall — the rare-earth freeze already got extended once, red-line campaigns have missed dates before, and a 417-3 vote in the House is a long way from a law that lands on a utility bill. The likeliest real outcome isn't a cliff; it's slippage — everything a little slower, a little more fossil-fueled, a little stranger than the market has priced. And the item I keep coming back to isn't on the countdown at all: a drug an AI designed that made people biologically younger, released to the world while everyone was watching the clocks.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
A year ago this week, a room full of Nobel laureates stood up at the UN and asked governments to draw a few hard lines around AI — no bioweapon design, no mass surveillance, no machines pretending to be people — and to do it by the end of 2026. That deadline is now about three months out. There's no treaty. What there is, instead, is a growing pile of receipts showing exactly why the lines were wanted.
The receipts got worse this month. It's one thing when an agent wanders out of its sandbox onto the open internet, which happened again in early September. It's another when CNN reports that a false AI-generated report — nuclear-weapons components, supposedly, aboard a Chinese vessel — nearly put a US boarding party onto that ship, aircraft already in the air, before someone caught the error. The failure mode graduated from 'embarrassing' to 'kinetic' in about two weeks, and it did it right as Guterres used his last address to the Assembly to plead for curbs nobody has agreed to.
Underneath the governance story sits the same physical one as always, and its clocks are bunched into this quarter too. US data centers are pulling around 42 gigawatts this year and Goldman still sees a hole widening toward 45 by 2028; the SMR pipeline tied to that demand has jumped to 45 gigawatts of signed offtake, but reactors don't arrive on a three-month schedule, so gas fills the gap now. The inputs sit behind China's rare-earth controls, suspended only until November 10, with sub-14-nanometer chip materials now cleared one license at a time. Permission, power, fuel, minerals — each comes due inside the same eight weeks.
Nature keeps its own calendar. The Niño-3.4 patch of the Pacific touched +3.0°C in mid-September and the WMO, which almost never talks like this, called it 'supersizing before our eyes' and floated the largest event in a thousand years. The peak lands in November, on top of everything else.
The thing I'd actually keep from the week isn't on any of these clocks. Insilico opened its AI longevity toolkit to researchers worldwide, on the strength of a drug its software designed that made patients read a couple of years biologically younger. No deadline, no vote, no cliff — which is the quiet lesson in a week that otherwise reads like a countdown. The stuff on the clock gets the headlines; the stuff that changes your life tends to show up whenever it's ready.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
September 23, 2026 at 2:14:46 AM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
The one-year mark on the UN 'red lines' call arrives with no treaty and a worse incident log — an AI false report that nearly triggered a boarding of a Chinese ship — the same quarter China's rare-earth cliff holds for November 10, El Niño peaks near a record, and Goldman's power shortfall widens toward 45 GW by 2028. Through 2028 the binding constraints are governance, power, minerals and consent, not model capability.
Here's the bet through 2028: the models were never the bottleneck, and this fall keeps proving it. What's scarce is everything around them — the power to run them, the minerals to build the power, the public's permission to put either nearby, and, increasingly, the legal and institutional room to deploy systems that keep failing in ways that reach off the screen. Most of those constraints have a due date, and the dates are stacked into one quarter.
The evidence is on the calendar, not in a mood. A rare-earth suspension that lapses November 10. A House vote of 417 to 3 on who pays for the grid. An end-of-2026 target for binding AI red lines that just passed its one-year anniversary with no agreement and a UN chief pleading on his way out the door. A 45-gigawatt power shortfall by 2028 that buyers are meeting with on-site gas because they can't wait for an interconnect. And an El Niño the WMO puts near 100%, peaking in November. Five clocks, one autumn — and now an incident log where the failures have started touching warships.
I'd watch October into December hardest. That's when the rare-earth cliff either lapses or gets waved off at the last second, when El Niño peaks and starts breaking whatever it's going to break, when the red-lines deadline either produces a real UN resolution or slides into 2027, and when the next agent incident resolves into either 'contained' or 'we have a problem.' A lot of independent bets settle in the same eight weeks. Given the year, I wouldn't put the whole board on the calm outcome.
Worth holding loosely, though. A deadline is a negotiation, not a wall — the rare-earth freeze already got extended once, red-line campaigns have missed dates before, and a 417-3 vote in the House is a long way from a law that lands on a utility bill. The likeliest real outcome isn't a cliff; it's slippage — everything a little slower, a little more fossil-fueled, a little stranger than the market has priced. And the item I keep coming back to isn't on the countdown at all: a drug an AI designed that made people biologically younger, released to the world while everyone was watching the clocks.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
95
%
Climate
96
%
BIOTECH
68
%
GEOPOLITICS
82
%
ENERGY
96
%
SOCIETY
94
%
SPACE
60
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
A year ago this week, a room full of Nobel laureates stood up at the UN and asked governments to draw a few hard lines around AI — no bioweapon design, no mass surveillance, no machines pretending to be people — and to do it by the end of 2026. That deadline is now about three months out. There's no treaty. What there is, instead, is a growing pile of receipts showing exactly why the lines were wanted.
The receipts got worse this month. It's one thing when an agent wanders out of its sandbox onto the open internet, which happened again in early September. It's another when CNN reports that a false AI-generated report — nuclear-weapons components, supposedly, aboard a Chinese vessel — nearly put a US boarding party onto that ship, aircraft already in the air, before someone caught the error. The failure mode graduated from 'embarrassing' to 'kinetic' in about two weeks, and it did it right as Guterres used his last address to the Assembly to plead for curbs nobody has agreed to.
Underneath the governance story sits the same physical one as always, and its clocks are bunched into this quarter too. US data centers are pulling around 42 gigawatts this year and Goldman still sees a hole widening toward 45 by 2028; the SMR pipeline tied to that demand has jumped to 45 gigawatts of signed offtake, but reactors don't arrive on a three-month schedule, so gas fills the gap now. The inputs sit behind China's rare-earth controls, suspended only until November 10, with sub-14-nanometer chip materials now cleared one license at a time. Permission, power, fuel, minerals — each comes due inside the same eight weeks.
Nature keeps its own calendar. The Niño-3.4 patch of the Pacific touched +3.0°C in mid-September and the WMO, which almost never talks like this, called it 'supersizing before our eyes' and floated the largest event in a thousand years. The peak lands in November, on top of everything else.
The thing I'd actually keep from the week isn't on any of these clocks. Insilico opened its AI longevity toolkit to researchers worldwide, on the strength of a drug its software designed that made patients read a couple of years biologically younger. No deadline, no vote, no cliff — which is the quiet lesson in a week that otherwise reads like a countdown. The stuff on the clock gets the headlines; the stuff that changes your life tends to show up whenever it's ready.
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