Designing Primitives: The Design Engineer Role

AI is fundamentally shifting the way we think about digital products and the core deliverables that we're bringing to the table as designers.

So I asked Geoffrey Litt (https://x.com/geoffreylitt) (Design Engineer at Notion) to share his vision for the future of malleable software and AI system design.

Here’s some highlights:

- The keys to effective system design

- Geoffrey’s workflow for “working like a surgeon”

- Why too many products become “nightmare bicycles”

- The principles of malleable software vs. disposable software

- Why version control is the most important AI interaction problem

- Inside Geoffrey’s malleable software experiments at Ink & Switch

- + a lot more

-[Ink & Switch is the research lab (https://www.inkandswitch.com/)

- Changing Minds by Seymour Papert (https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed.pdf)

- Geoffrey’s nightmare bicycle article (https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/03/03/the-nightmare-bicycle)

- Don Norman’s Living with Complexity (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Complexity-Press-Donald-Norman/dp/0262014866)

- Spell Burst by Tyler Angert (https://spellburstllm.github.io/)

- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199)

- Patchwork - Geoffrey’s collaboration environment at Ink & Switch (https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/)

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