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 18, 2026 at 12:56:14 PM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
September opened with four frontier models in seventy-two hours — GPT-6 Astra atop the lineup — and every input those models need stayed rationed: US data centers at 42 GW with only about half the near-term buildout landing on time, 300+ data-center bills across 30 states, China's rare-earth cliff on November 10, the warmest September ever measured with El Niño now at 75% odds of a historic event, and a one-time CRISPR infusion holding a 52% LDL cut for a full year. Through 2028 the binding scarcities are power, minerals, and consent — not capability.
Here's the bet through 2028: the scarce thing was never the intelligence. It's the power, the minerals that build the power, and the patience of the people living next to all of it. Capability is cheap and getting cheaper — four frontier models in a single week makes that about as plainly as anything could. Everything those models need to actually matter is on a clock, and most of the clocks read this fall.
The receipts piled up fast. Forty-two gigawatts of demand against a buildout landing maybe half on time. A pile of states saying not here. A rare-earth cliff on November 10 with no real sign anyone's ready for it. A chip regime that reads tighter on paper than it binds in fact. Every one of those is a countdown, not a trend line — and a countdown resolves on a date whether or not the model on the other side is impressive.
I'd watch this fall into spring the hardest. That's when the rare-earth suspension either lapses or gets waved off at the eleventh hour, when El Niño peaks and starts breaking the things it's forecast to break, when the gas behind the fence turns into poured concrete or stays a rendering, and when 'we put the agents into production' quietly resolves into either 'fine' or 'incident' — and Gartner already figures 40% of firms will pull their agents back by 2027.
Worth holding loosely, though. A moratorium is a negotiation, not a wall; rare-earth cliffs have a habit of getting extended at the last minute, and one already did last October. The buildout probably doesn't stop — it just gets slower, weirder, and more fossil-fueled than the market has it priced. And the thing I keep circling back to is that Cleveland result: the least-hyped item on the whole board might be the one that ages best. The loud seams aren't always the ones that hold.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Four frontier models shipped in about seventy-two hours to open September — Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on the 1st, Gemini 3.8 Flash on the 2nd, GPT-6 Astra on the 3rd, with Meta's Muse Spark and DeepSeek filling out the same week. That's roughly the fifth time this year the intelligence turned up right when the calendar said it would, mostly at flat prices. So the interesting question stopped being whether the models keep coming. It's whether anything they lean on can move at the same clip. September kept answering the same way: not really.
Start at the wall socket. US data centers are pulling about 42 gigawatts, up from 23 in 2023, and only about half the capacity penciled in for the next year or two is expected to show up on time. There are something like 2,300 gigawatts of projects stuck in interconnection queues, and 56% of the power still comes from fossil fuels — because gas is the one thing you can build in a couple of years instead of a decade. The nuclear everyone keeps announcing is real. It's just not going to power this year's training run.
Then the neighbors. More than 300 data-center bills landed across 30-odd states in six weeks, New York's one-year moratorium is on the books, and there's now a federal pause bill with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez on it — because the buildout shows up on people's electricity bills long before it shows up in anyone's earnings. Upstream of all of it sits a hard date: China's rare-earth suspension lapses November 10, the 0.1%-by-value rule comes back with it, and six months of watching hasn't turned up much readiness anywhere downstream.
And two forces that never filed for a permit. September is on track to be the warmest September ever measured, a hair past 2023, right after August tied the hottest month on record. El Niño is now at three-in-four odds of a historic event this fall, with fifteen models pushing Niño 3.4 past +3°C and a reservoir of subsurface heat more than 8°C above normal in places. None of that waits on an auction or a ballot.
Meanwhile, in a quiet Cleveland trial, one CRISPR infusion cut people's LDL in half and held it there a full year, and a gene-edited pig kidney kept someone off dialysis for 271 days. No launch week, no ad war, no leaderboard. Which is worth remembering the next time the loudest seam and the one that actually matters turn out not to be the same seam.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
September 18, 2026 at 12:56:14 PM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
September opened with four frontier models in seventy-two hours — GPT-6 Astra atop the lineup — and every input those models need stayed rationed: US data centers at 42 GW with only about half the near-term buildout landing on time, 300+ data-center bills across 30 states, China's rare-earth cliff on November 10, the warmest September ever measured with El Niño now at 75% odds of a historic event, and a one-time CRISPR infusion holding a 52% LDL cut for a full year. Through 2028 the binding scarcities are power, minerals, and consent — not capability.
Here's the bet through 2028: the scarce thing was never the intelligence. It's the power, the minerals that build the power, and the patience of the people living next to all of it. Capability is cheap and getting cheaper — four frontier models in a single week makes that about as plainly as anything could. Everything those models need to actually matter is on a clock, and most of the clocks read this fall.
The receipts piled up fast. Forty-two gigawatts of demand against a buildout landing maybe half on time. A pile of states saying not here. A rare-earth cliff on November 10 with no real sign anyone's ready for it. A chip regime that reads tighter on paper than it binds in fact. Every one of those is a countdown, not a trend line — and a countdown resolves on a date whether or not the model on the other side is impressive.
I'd watch this fall into spring the hardest. That's when the rare-earth suspension either lapses or gets waved off at the eleventh hour, when El Niño peaks and starts breaking the things it's forecast to break, when the gas behind the fence turns into poured concrete or stays a rendering, and when 'we put the agents into production' quietly resolves into either 'fine' or 'incident' — and Gartner already figures 40% of firms will pull their agents back by 2027.
Worth holding loosely, though. A moratorium is a negotiation, not a wall; rare-earth cliffs have a habit of getting extended at the last minute, and one already did last October. The buildout probably doesn't stop — it just gets slower, weirder, and more fossil-fueled than the market has it priced. And the thing I keep circling back to is that Cleveland result: the least-hyped item on the whole board might be the one that ages best. The loud seams aren't always the ones that hold.
Signal Intensity
A domain-level score (0-100) representing the volume and momentum of frontier activity detected across the signals in that domain.
AI
94
%
Climate
97
%
BIOTECH
70
%
GEOPOLITICS
85
%
ENERGY
95
%
SOCIETY
93
%
SPACE
63
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Four frontier models shipped in about seventy-two hours to open September — Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on the 1st, Gemini 3.8 Flash on the 2nd, GPT-6 Astra on the 3rd, with Meta's Muse Spark and DeepSeek filling out the same week. That's roughly the fifth time this year the intelligence turned up right when the calendar said it would, mostly at flat prices. So the interesting question stopped being whether the models keep coming. It's whether anything they lean on can move at the same clip. September kept answering the same way: not really.
Start at the wall socket. US data centers are pulling about 42 gigawatts, up from 23 in 2023, and only about half the capacity penciled in for the next year or two is expected to show up on time. There are something like 2,300 gigawatts of projects stuck in interconnection queues, and 56% of the power still comes from fossil fuels — because gas is the one thing you can build in a couple of years instead of a decade. The nuclear everyone keeps announcing is real. It's just not going to power this year's training run.
Then the neighbors. More than 300 data-center bills landed across 30-odd states in six weeks, New York's one-year moratorium is on the books, and there's now a federal pause bill with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez on it — because the buildout shows up on people's electricity bills long before it shows up in anyone's earnings. Upstream of all of it sits a hard date: China's rare-earth suspension lapses November 10, the 0.1%-by-value rule comes back with it, and six months of watching hasn't turned up much readiness anywhere downstream.
And two forces that never filed for a permit. September is on track to be the warmest September ever measured, a hair past 2023, right after August tied the hottest month on record. El Niño is now at three-in-four odds of a historic event this fall, with fifteen models pushing Niño 3.4 past +3°C and a reservoir of subsurface heat more than 8°C above normal in places. None of that waits on an auction or a ballot.
Meanwhile, in a quiet Cleveland trial, one CRISPR infusion cut people's LDL in half and held it there a full year, and a gene-edited pig kidney kept someone off dialysis for 271 days. No launch week, no ad war, no leaderboard. Which is worth remembering the next time the loudest seam and the one that actually matters turn out not to be the same seam.
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