WORKSHOP

Critique is the craft: Leading AI model design with a UX lens

Designers are watching AI reshape their field at a breakneck pace. And understandably, many are unsure whether their skills still matter, or how to get taken seriously when everyone is using AI to design.

This workshop gives you an answer: the discipline of model design—and the confidence to pursue it alongside the work you’re already doing. At its core, model design is knowing how to evaluate whether a model is doing what it’s supposed to do, and having the evidence to say so.

Rather than treat AI adoption as a choice between enthusiasm and refusal, this workshop offers designers a practical middle ground to grow their AI competency while also protecting the reasoning, collaboration, and standards that make their work meaningful. Together, we’ll tackle the following:

• Building a working eval rubric and using it to judge whether an AI system is doing its job

• Learning about what model design is and isn’t, and how it diverges from prompting

• Understanding how model design draws on the design skills you already practice

By the end, you’ll have a working vocabulary for model design and a framework for evaluating AI outputs against stated intent. More practically, you’ll have language that makes your work legible to PMs, engineers, and executives trying to figure out what designers will do in an AI-first org.