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I talked with Cal Thompson, a designer and product advisor who led product design and research at Headspace and now teaches product design strategy at Future London Academy.
Our big question was simple: when AI lets anyone build anything, what should we actually build?
Cal starts with a coffee cup. You pick it up, drink, and put it down. Nobody designed it to make you keep holding it. Yet so many digital products now measure success by how long we stay on them, a habit borrowed straight from social media.
She has a lovely metaphor for what AI is doing to products. Picture a hammer, clear and simple, and then imagine someone adding a little bell, a ribbon, and a sheet of screen hanging off the handle. She calls these extras “user need hallucinations.” Features that sound plausible but don’t come from any real human need.
One idea has stayed with me since: designers can advocate for human metrics. At Headspace, her team tracked stress, sleep, and anxiety, and found that the early habits that helped people feel better were the same ones that kept them subscribed.
We also talked about why she paints to stay grounded, why AI has never been inside a human home, and the new engineering college in Vermont she’s helping design, where students can graduate with little or no debt.
If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to watch or listen to the full conversation, and read the write-up on the blog here.
Till the next time ✨
All my best,
Egle
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