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 24, 2026 at 12:53:10 AM
Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
Two of the biggest AI CEOs brief the UN Security Council to slow the race — the same day the US President calls AI oversight a “globalist scheme” — as China’s rare-earth cliff holds for November 10, a forecast-record El Niño heads for ~4.0°C, and the data-center power shortfall keeps widening. Through 2028 the binding constraints are governance, minerals, power and consent, not model capability.
Here’s the bet through 2028: the models were never the bottleneck, and this fall keeps hammering the point home. What’s actually scarce is everything around them — the minerals to build the machines, the power to run them, the public’s willingness to host either, and now the political room to govern any of it. This week that last one stopped being theoretical: the CEOs asked the Security Council for a speed limit and the US President called the whole idea a scheme, on the same day, in the same building.
The evidence is on the calendar, not in a mood. A rare-earth suspension that lapses November 10. A SALT-style pacing proposal China’s state press has already waved off. A data-center power shortfall that buyers are meeting with on-site gas because they can’t wait for a grid connection. Ratepayer costs — $13 billion in one PJM quarter — that are turning “who pays for the grid” into an election issue. And an El Niño the WMO puts near 100%, forecast to peak near a record in November. Five or six independent clocks, all bunched into one autumn.
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 resolution or slides into 2027, and when the UN briefing either turns into something binding or evaporates the way these things usually do. A lot of separate bets settle in the same eight weeks, and given how the year’s gone, I wouldn’t put the whole board on the calm outcome.
Worth holding this loosely, though. A deadline is a negotiation, not a wall — the rare-earth freeze already got extended once, and a briefing to the Security Council is a long way from a treaty, especially with the host government calling it a globalist plot. The likeliest real outcome isn’t a cliff; it’s slippage — everything a little slower, a little more gas-fired, a little stranger than the market has priced. And the thing I keep circling back to isn’t on the countdown at all: this week a company edited genes inside a living person’s body and it worked, while everyone else was staring at the clocks.
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Something odd happened at the UN this week. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei — the two people building the frontier — walked into the Security Council and asked the world to slow them down. And a few hours earlier, from the same building, the US President called that exact idea a “globalist scheme.” So the people who make the technology want a speed limit, and the government that houses most of them doesn’t. That’s the shape of the whole quarter: the fight isn’t about whether the models can do the thing anymore. It’s about who gets to say no, and whether anyone will.
Amodei’s pitch, from his September 12 essay, is basically arms control: a SALT-style pacing deal with China, a cap on how fast systems improve themselves. Beijing’s Global Times already called it a power play, which tells you how that negotiation is going. Meanwhile the real leverage sits in the ground. China’s rare-earth freeze holds only until November 10, and sub-14-nanometer chip inputs now clear one license at a time. TSMC still leans on Chinese consumables for something like a third of its most advanced output. So the treaty talk and the mineral cliff are running on the same eight-week clock.
Underneath all of it is the boring physical layer, and it’s not keeping up. US data centers are pulling toward 76 gigawatts this year, grid operators keep warning the load outruns the plan, and since small modular reactors don’t show up until the 2030s, the answer for now is gas. Someone pays for that, and it’s turning out to be everyone: PJM’s own monitor counted $13 billion in data-center costs pushed onto ratepayers in a single quarter, and Virginia just put a tax on every kilowatt-hour a data center burns. The buildout shows up on power bills before it shows up in anyone’s earnings.
And then there’s the stuff that ignores the calendar entirely. Intellia just posted the world’s first successful pivotal trial for editing genes inside a living body — no deadline, no vote, no cliff. El Niño is doing the same thing from the other direction: forecasts now point at Niño-3.4 near 4.0°C in November, which would blow past every record since we’ve been measuring, and the Pacific does not care what the Security Council decides. The clocks that matter most, it turns out, are the ones nobody set.
05
Horizon: Predictive convergence
Futurology Report — Daily
September 24, 2026 at 12:53:10 AM
AI Model:
Opus 4.8
Forecast:
2026–2028
Two of the biggest AI CEOs brief the UN Security Council to slow the race — the same day the US President calls AI oversight a “globalist scheme” — as China’s rare-earth cliff holds for November 10, a forecast-record El Niño heads for ~4.0°C, and the data-center power shortfall keeps widening. Through 2028 the binding constraints are governance, minerals, power and consent, not model capability.
Here’s the bet through 2028: the models were never the bottleneck, and this fall keeps hammering the point home. What’s actually scarce is everything around them — the minerals to build the machines, the power to run them, the public’s willingness to host either, and now the political room to govern any of it. This week that last one stopped being theoretical: the CEOs asked the Security Council for a speed limit and the US President called the whole idea a scheme, on the same day, in the same building.
The evidence is on the calendar, not in a mood. A rare-earth suspension that lapses November 10. A SALT-style pacing proposal China’s state press has already waved off. A data-center power shortfall that buyers are meeting with on-site gas because they can’t wait for a grid connection. Ratepayer costs — $13 billion in one PJM quarter — that are turning “who pays for the grid” into an election issue. And an El Niño the WMO puts near 100%, forecast to peak near a record in November. Five or six independent clocks, all bunched into one autumn.
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 resolution or slides into 2027, and when the UN briefing either turns into something binding or evaporates the way these things usually do. A lot of separate bets settle in the same eight weeks, and given how the year’s gone, I wouldn’t put the whole board on the calm outcome.
Worth holding this loosely, though. A deadline is a negotiation, not a wall — the rare-earth freeze already got extended once, and a briefing to the Security Council is a long way from a treaty, especially with the host government calling it a globalist plot. The likeliest real outcome isn’t a cliff; it’s slippage — everything a little slower, a little more gas-fired, a little stranger than the market has priced. And the thing I keep circling back to isn’t on the countdown at all: this week a company edited genes inside a living person’s body and it worked, while everyone else was staring at 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
96
%
Climate
97
%
BIOTECH
70
%
GEOPOLITICS
84
%
ENERGY
96
%
SOCIETY
93
%
SPACE
60
%
Cross-Domain Synthesis
Something odd happened at the UN this week. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei — the two people building the frontier — walked into the Security Council and asked the world to slow them down. And a few hours earlier, from the same building, the US President called that exact idea a “globalist scheme.” So the people who make the technology want a speed limit, and the government that houses most of them doesn’t. That’s the shape of the whole quarter: the fight isn’t about whether the models can do the thing anymore. It’s about who gets to say no, and whether anyone will.
Amodei’s pitch, from his September 12 essay, is basically arms control: a SALT-style pacing deal with China, a cap on how fast systems improve themselves. Beijing’s Global Times already called it a power play, which tells you how that negotiation is going. Meanwhile the real leverage sits in the ground. China’s rare-earth freeze holds only until November 10, and sub-14-nanometer chip inputs now clear one license at a time. TSMC still leans on Chinese consumables for something like a third of its most advanced output. So the treaty talk and the mineral cliff are running on the same eight-week clock.
Underneath all of it is the boring physical layer, and it’s not keeping up. US data centers are pulling toward 76 gigawatts this year, grid operators keep warning the load outruns the plan, and since small modular reactors don’t show up until the 2030s, the answer for now is gas. Someone pays for that, and it’s turning out to be everyone: PJM’s own monitor counted $13 billion in data-center costs pushed onto ratepayers in a single quarter, and Virginia just put a tax on every kilowatt-hour a data center burns. The buildout shows up on power bills before it shows up in anyone’s earnings.
And then there’s the stuff that ignores the calendar entirely. Intellia just posted the world’s first successful pivotal trial for editing genes inside a living body — no deadline, no vote, no cliff. El Niño is doing the same thing from the other direction: forecasts now point at Niño-3.4 near 4.0°C in November, which would blow past every record since we’ve been measuring, and the Pacific does not care what the Security Council decides. The clocks that matter most, it turns out, are the ones nobody set.
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