In this engaging conversation, designer and technologist Matt Webb shares his unique insights on emerging technologies and their implications. He discusses how generative AI represents a leap into capabilities that feel ahead of their time. Matt explores 'weak signals' and how personal experiments can hint at larger trends. He also highlights the evolving relationship between humans and design—where dialogue with AI tools replaces traditional search. Expect fascinating ideas about adaptive design and the potential for anyone to become a creator.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Design For AI Everywhere
Design for a world where artificial intelligence is ubiquitous and cheap to access.
Anticipate AI hidden within everyday tools, making it a seamless but powerful background presence for users.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Build Hands-On To Learn AI
To understand new tech like GenAI, you must get your hands dirty and build with it.
This active exploration builds intuition beyond relying on existing processes or intuition.
question_answer ANECDOTE
GPT-3 Transformed Data Extraction
Matt Webb built a website for finding radio show episodes using GPT-3 to save time extracting structured data.
It took 20 minutes and $30, compared to four days manually, showing GenAI's practical power early on.
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Invisible Cities is a novel by Italo Calvino that defies traditional narrative structures. The book revolves around the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, where Polo describes 55 imaginary cities he encountered during his travels. These cities are not just physical places but also metaphors for human experiences, desires, and the passage of time. The novel explores themes of memory, place, and the subjective nature of experience, highlighting how our perceptions of cities and the world are shaped by our personal histories and biases. The cities described by Polo are often reflections of his home city, Venice, and serve as vehicles for Calvino's commentary on human nature, culture, and the limits of communication[1][3][4].
Matt Webb doesn’t just talk about emerging technologies—he builds with them, lives with them, and prototypes the futures they might bring. In this episode, Lou Rosenfeld talks with Webb—designer, technologist, and featured speaker at the upcoming Designing with AI 2025 conference—about how GenAI represents a kind of temporal leap: a sudden arrival of capabilities that feel like they should've taken another decade to develop.
Matt shares how he explores "weak signals"—small, often personal experiments or observations that hint at larger shifts to come. From building an early website with GPT-3 to creating an app that tracks the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Matt explains how play, laziness, and curiosity drive his invention process. He also touches on how GenAI changes our relationship to search, learning, and even design itself—pushing us into a world where conversations with information replace traditional retrieval methods. The discussion spans adaptive design, epistemic journeys, and the potential for everyone to become a maker of tools, apps, and meaning.
Rosenfeld Review Podcast 