State Machines to living systems: Design tenets for intelligent systems (medium.com)

A three-part design manifesto reframes UIs from passive, app‑centric state machines into “living” AI-native systems; Part 1 — “The Invisible Made Felt” — lays out core aesthetic tenets for that shift. Rather than decorating screens, designers should aim for calm minimalism where the interface often disappears, yet still signals presence and builds trust. Key prescriptions include multimodality (seamless fusion of voice, touch, gesture, gaze), fluid, physics-based motion instead of rigid chrome, and color/typography as contextual signals. Crucially, UIs must represent probability and uncertainty visually (blur, translucency, scale) and adopt dynamic, personal hierarchies and semantic spacing so the surface reflects likelihoods and relationships rather than fixed button grids. Error states, temporal traces, and personality are treated as design resources—subtle, culture-aware behaviors that reveal reasoning without anthropomorphism. For the AI/ML community this is a practical call to bridge model outputs and UX metaphors: confidence scores, multimodal intent signals, and temporal hypotheses must be reliable, low-latency, and interpretable so they can drive continuous, animated interfaces. Engineers will need real‑time fusion pipelines, calibrated uncertainty estimates, adaptive layout engines (probability-driven layouts/force-directed clustering), and privacy-aware context sensors (biometrics/typing cadence) to enable these experiences. The piece reframes evaluation goals—from click-throughs to measures of friction, trust, and graceful failure—and signals that future tooling must treat interfaces as living systems informed by model uncertainty and human rhythms.