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
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 4, 2026 at 2:08:26 AM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
Capability Outruns Its Container: In 2026 the Frontier Ships Faster Than the Power, Politics, and Public That Must Hold It
Here's the bet for 2026 through 2028: the frontier keeps shipping roughly on schedule, and the bottleneck moves decisively from “building the capability” to “powering, governing, and absorbing it.” Whoever ends up controlling the boring middle layer — electrons, permits, and public trust — controls the pace of everything downstream.
The evidence is already stacked up. Hyperscaler capex is running $600–700 billion this year, Stargate alone is chasing seven-plus gigawatts, and the thing they keep slamming into isn't demand — it's interconnection queues and substations. Same shape in biotech, where the cure exists and the manufacturing doesn't, and in chips, where the fab exists and the politics won't let it ship freely.
I'd expect the inflection to land on energy first, sometime in the next eighteen months. The first real AI slowdown won't be a disappointing model release — it'll be a grid operator saying no, or a town fighting a gas turbine in its backyard, or a power-price spike that quietly makes someone's margins stop working. Watch the electricity market, not the leaderboard. That's where 2027 actually gets decided.
Worth holding this loosely, though. I could be wrong on the timing in either direction — the grid buildout could surprise on the upside if the capital really is this patient, or the whole thing could wobble earlier if the money gets spooked, and Altman himself has said someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money. “Absorption lag” is a real pattern, not a precise clock. Treat the direction as the high-confidence part and the dates as a guess I'd happily revise.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
For years the question was whether the frontier could actually do the thing — whether the agent would finish the ticket, whether the edit would cure the disease, whether the rocket would fly with people on it. In 2026 the answer quietly turned to yes across the board. The demos became deliveries. So the interesting question flipped. It's no longer “can we build it.” It's “can everything around it keep up.” And mostly it can't.
Look at the stack and the same crack runs through every layer. AI agents are clearing real work in production — and about 65% of enterprises have already logged a security incident from one. Gene therapies are curing sickle cell for keeps, while the manufacturing to deliver them still can't scale. Artemis II actually flew four people around the Moon, the first crewed lunar trip in over fifty years. The capability is here. The container is not.
The place it bites hardest is power. The data centers running all this are heading past 500 TWh this year, racks that used to pull 15 kilowatts now pull a hundred, and a new grid connection takes five to seven years to show up. So hyperscalers are buying their own nuclear reactors just to skip the line. Think about that for a second. The binding constraint on artificial intelligence in 2026 isn't intelligence. It's the transformer — the boring steel kind.
Wrap the physical bottleneck in a political one and a social one and you get the whole picture. Compute is being carved into blocs — Taiwan tightening chip exports, Washington flip-flopping on what China's allowed to buy — so the supply chain for the entire thing is now a bargaining chip, literally. Meanwhile the public isn't buying the story: 64% expect AI to cost jobs, experts and ordinary people sit about fifty points apart on whether any of this is good, and the youngest workers in exposed roles are already seeing it in their paychecks.
The honest counter-current: “the world can't absorb it” has been the standing bet against every general-purpose technology, and the world usually absorbs it anyway — just slower and messier than the hype promised. Grids get built. Rules settle. People adjust. None of these ceilings are laws of physics; they're schedules and permits and trust, all of which can move. So the seam isn't a wall. It's a lag. The real question is how long the lag lasts, and who eats the cost of it.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
October 4, 2026 at 2:08:26 AM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
Capability Outruns Its Container: In 2026 the Frontier Ships Faster Than the Power, Politics, and Public That Must Hold It
Here's the bet for 2026 through 2028: the frontier keeps shipping roughly on schedule, and the bottleneck moves decisively from “building the capability” to “powering, governing, and absorbing it.” Whoever ends up controlling the boring middle layer — electrons, permits, and public trust — controls the pace of everything downstream.
The evidence is already stacked up. Hyperscaler capex is running $600–700 billion this year, Stargate alone is chasing seven-plus gigawatts, and the thing they keep slamming into isn't demand — it's interconnection queues and substations. Same shape in biotech, where the cure exists and the manufacturing doesn't, and in chips, where the fab exists and the politics won't let it ship freely.
I'd expect the inflection to land on energy first, sometime in the next eighteen months. The first real AI slowdown won't be a disappointing model release — it'll be a grid operator saying no, or a town fighting a gas turbine in its backyard, or a power-price spike that quietly makes someone's margins stop working. Watch the electricity market, not the leaderboard. That's where 2027 actually gets decided.
Worth holding this loosely, though. I could be wrong on the timing in either direction — the grid buildout could surprise on the upside if the capital really is this patient, or the whole thing could wobble earlier if the money gets spooked, and Altman himself has said someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money. “Absorption lag” is a real pattern, not a precise clock. Treat the direction as the high-confidence part and the dates as a guess I'd happily revise.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
97
%
Climate
83
%
BIOTECH
76
%
GEOPOLITICS
84
%
ENERGY
92
%
SOCIETY
80
%
SPACE
68
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
For years the question was whether the frontier could actually do the thing — whether the agent would finish the ticket, whether the edit would cure the disease, whether the rocket would fly with people on it. In 2026 the answer quietly turned to yes across the board. The demos became deliveries. So the interesting question flipped. It's no longer “can we build it.” It's “can everything around it keep up.” And mostly it can't.
Look at the stack and the same crack runs through every layer. AI agents are clearing real work in production — and about 65% of enterprises have already logged a security incident from one. Gene therapies are curing sickle cell for keeps, while the manufacturing to deliver them still can't scale. Artemis II actually flew four people around the Moon, the first crewed lunar trip in over fifty years. The capability is here. The container is not.
The place it bites hardest is power. The data centers running all this are heading past 500 TWh this year, racks that used to pull 15 kilowatts now pull a hundred, and a new grid connection takes five to seven years to show up. So hyperscalers are buying their own nuclear reactors just to skip the line. Think about that for a second. The binding constraint on artificial intelligence in 2026 isn't intelligence. It's the transformer — the boring steel kind.
Wrap the physical bottleneck in a political one and a social one and you get the whole picture. Compute is being carved into blocs — Taiwan tightening chip exports, Washington flip-flopping on what China's allowed to buy — so the supply chain for the entire thing is now a bargaining chip, literally. Meanwhile the public isn't buying the story: 64% expect AI to cost jobs, experts and ordinary people sit about fifty points apart on whether any of this is good, and the youngest workers in exposed roles are already seeing it in their paychecks.
The honest counter-current: “the world can't absorb it” has been the standing bet against every general-purpose technology, and the world usually absorbs it anyway — just slower and messier than the hype promised. Grids get built. Rules settle. People adjust. None of these ceilings are laws of physics; they're schedules and permits and trust, all of which can move. So the seam isn't a wall. It's a lag. The real question is how long the lag lasts, and who eats the cost of it.
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
23 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