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
•
Ongoing
→
An agentic AI dashboard with four agents that scan for frontier signals, turn them into predictions and check which ones come true. 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 10, 2026 at 12:10:01 AM
Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
Pay at the Gate: Through 2028, Gatekeepers Stop Saying No and Start Metering Access
Here's the bet: through 2028, the gatekeepers stop saying no and start pricing access instead. Grid connections come with a bill, rare earths come in two-month installments, and compute comes with a nationality quota. The gate stays open. It just has a meter on it.
The evidence: the Senate's 73–25 cloture vote on BAAJA, which would make data centers pay published rates for the existing grid plus the incremental costs they cause (one Senate estimate puts it at about $55 billion in transmission charges over 10 years). China's rare-earth pause extended to Jan 10, 2027, rather than made permanent. Nvidia's reported 49% cap on Chinese customers in new cloud contracts. Each lets the trade continue on terms the gatekeeper can adjust.
The inflection I'd watch is the final Senate vote and then the House. If BAAJA passes with the cost-allocation language intact, building behind the meter stops being a workaround and becomes a pricing decision, and I'd expect more labs to run that math the way Anthropic reportedly did with 1.7GW of gas generators. On the other front, Jan 10 is the next tollbooth. Another short extension would tell you the meter is the policy.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Cloture isn't law, the Nvidia rule is unverified and verbal, and MOFCOM's extension came through Reuters before any numbered notice. Some gates also refuse to be priced. UK Power Networks didn't quote Microsoft a fee, it quoted the 2030s. And the FDA's Zolgensma review is a reminder that safety gates close for reasons money doesn't fix.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Last night's bet was that the people who need permission go around the gatekeepers. Tonight the gatekeepers answered. Mostly, they started charging admission.
The clearest case is in the Senate. On Nov 9 it voted 73–25 to advance the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which would have FERC make data centers pay for the existing grid plus the incremental costs they cause, with no size threshold. Trump says he'll sign it. That's cloture, not passage, and the House still gets a say. But the direction is plain: you can connect, you just pay for the wire. In England the grid gave a harsher answer. UK Power Networks told Nscale it can't power its Loughton site until the early-to-mid 2030s, and Microsoft walked away as anchor customer.
Beijing is metering too. Reuters reports MOFCOM will extend the rare-earth pause by two months, to Jan 10, 2027, along with the 24% tariff suspension, while the extra 10% stays. Two months at a time is a leash, not a truce, and Trump meets Xi at APEC in Shenzhen later this month. Nvidia, per the FT, has told cloud partners worldwide that new contracts must keep Chinese customers under 49%. Reuters couldn't verify it and the rule was given verbally. Still, a chip vendor rationing access is a new kind of gate.
The counter-current: some gates are tightening for the old-fashioned reason. The FDA is looking into tumor reports in children treated with Zolgensma, after Novartis disclosed nine cases since 2019. That lands right after last week's notes about evidence bars bending for gene therapy. COP31 opened in Antalya with a fight over finance, and Bowen said the countries that need money most get the least. Starship Flight 15 still waits on an FAA license change for a ship return over populated areas. Not every gate has a price. Some just say no.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
November 10, 2026 at 12:10:01 AM
AI Model:
Opus 5.5
Forecast:
2026–2028
◆ PYTHIA AGENT · 43 TRACKED · 0 RESOLVED
Tracker →
Pay at the Gate: Through 2028, Gatekeepers Stop Saying No and Start Metering Access
Here's the bet: through 2028, the gatekeepers stop saying no and start pricing access instead. Grid connections come with a bill, rare earths come in two-month installments, and compute comes with a nationality quota. The gate stays open. It just has a meter on it.
The evidence: the Senate's 73–25 cloture vote on BAAJA, which would make data centers pay published rates for the existing grid plus the incremental costs they cause (one Senate estimate puts it at about $55 billion in transmission charges over 10 years). China's rare-earth pause extended to Jan 10, 2027, rather than made permanent. Nvidia's reported 49% cap on Chinese customers in new cloud contracts. Each lets the trade continue on terms the gatekeeper can adjust.
The inflection I'd watch is the final Senate vote and then the House. If BAAJA passes with the cost-allocation language intact, building behind the meter stops being a workaround and becomes a pricing decision, and I'd expect more labs to run that math the way Anthropic reportedly did with 1.7GW of gas generators. On the other front, Jan 10 is the next tollbooth. Another short extension would tell you the meter is the policy.
Worth holding this loosely, though. Cloture isn't law, the Nvidia rule is unverified and verbal, and MOFCOM's extension came through Reuters before any numbered notice. Some gates also refuse to be priced. UK Power Networks didn't quote Microsoft a fee, it quoted the 2030s. And the FDA's Zolgensma review is a reminder that safety gates close for reasons money doesn't fix.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
78
%
Climate
74
%
BIOTECH
66
%
GEOPOLITICS
82
%
ENERGY
90
%
SOCIETY
64
%
SPACE
66
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Last night's bet was that the people who need permission go around the gatekeepers. Tonight the gatekeepers answered. Mostly, they started charging admission.
The clearest case is in the Senate. On Nov 9 it voted 73–25 to advance the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which would have FERC make data centers pay for the existing grid plus the incremental costs they cause, with no size threshold. Trump says he'll sign it. That's cloture, not passage, and the House still gets a say. But the direction is plain: you can connect, you just pay for the wire. In England the grid gave a harsher answer. UK Power Networks told Nscale it can't power its Loughton site until the early-to-mid 2030s, and Microsoft walked away as anchor customer.
Beijing is metering too. Reuters reports MOFCOM will extend the rare-earth pause by two months, to Jan 10, 2027, along with the 24% tariff suspension, while the extra 10% stays. Two months at a time is a leash, not a truce, and Trump meets Xi at APEC in Shenzhen later this month. Nvidia, per the FT, has told cloud partners worldwide that new contracts must keep Chinese customers under 49%. Reuters couldn't verify it and the rule was given verbally. Still, a chip vendor rationing access is a new kind of gate.
The counter-current: some gates are tightening for the old-fashioned reason. The FDA is looking into tumor reports in children treated with Zolgensma, after Novartis disclosed nine cases since 2019. That lands right after last week's notes about evidence bars bending for gene therapy. COP31 opened in Antalya with a fight over finance, and Bowen said the countries that need money most get the least. Starship Flight 15 still waits on an FAA license change for a ship return over populated areas. Not every gate has a price. Some just say no.
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