Wake Up Excited!

Ioana Teleanu is running the Design Wellbeing Index, a rigorous, anonymous study of how designers are actually feeling in the AI moment, and we talk about why she built it the hard way, why the site is designed around a blur, and why adding your voice matters. Share how you're feeling: take the survey at https://designwellbeingindex.com/ (12 to 15 minutes, closes November 10, 2026).

Ioana (UX Goodies, formerly Miro and UiPath) brought in a PhD researcher and accepted clinical scales rather than running another Instagram poll, made the whole thing anonymous, and worked hard not to lead with doom so that the enthusiasts show up alongside the exhausted. From there we wander into the parts of this moment nobody has a clean answer for: AI as a comfortable echo chamber, algorithms that reward the extremes and bury nuance, what it means to feed a family as a creator, holding your identity apart from your employer, and the strange paralysis of being able to build anything at all.

Highlights

• 05:55 Why a PhD researcher and an accepted burnout scale, not a poll
• 18:23 The website is designed around the blur
• 36:38 "I wanna know if I live in the same reality as other people"
• 51:17 Casino design, presence, and asking an AI for ten viral posts
• 53:45 From "I work at Miro" to "I'm a creator"
• 1:07:40 Two futures: community councils and a boardroom with data

Share how you're feeling about this moment: take the Design Wellbeing Index survey at https://designwellbeingindex.com/. Anonymous, 12 to 15 minutes, closes November 10, 2026. Then pass it to your team and your design friends.

Ioana's music picks: Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Headache.

Find Ioana

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uxgoodies/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ioanateleanu/
• X: https://x.com/uxgoodies
• AI Goodies newsletter: https://aigoodies.beehiiv.com/
• Honest UX Talks podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honest-ux-talks/id1547832809
• AI for Designers (Interaction Design Foundation): https://www.ixdf.org/courses/ai-for-designers

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:37 What has Ioana waking up excited
• 02:55 Ioana's origin story and the Design Wellbeing Index
• 05:20 Building a rigorous, anonymous study
• 12:18 Framing the study for both positive and negative views
• 17:08 Designing the website around the blur
• 20:41 What the Design Wellbeing Index measures
• 30:08 Our responsibility to contribute to the collective voice
• 37:38 Shared reality, community, and AI isolation
• 42:31 Polarization and social media algorithms
• 50:33 Being a creator and feeding a family
• 55:47 Identity beyond your employer
• 59:39 Leaving corporate paths and new careers
• 1:05:02 Choice paralysis and productive procrastination
• 1:07:30 Hopes for the study a year from now
• 1:12:36 Call to action and results timeline
• 1:21:58 Where to follow Ioana

What does it take to make a design system useful to AI agents? Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent joins me to talk through his State of AI in Design Systems report and try its audit tools on Eddie, the design system Ian and I are building.

We explore how MCP servers, documentation, and agent skills connect AI tools to design systems, then get into the practical work of keeping those foundations useful. We also talk about the design engineer job hunt and the pressure AI-generated contributions put on open source maintainers.

In this conversation:
- Making a design system available to AI-assisted workflows
- Auditing Eddie and exploring what to improve
- Keeping documentation current through feedback
- Working at the intersection of design and engineering

Music pick: bassist Kinga Głyk.

Resources
Kaelig: https://www.kaelig.fr/
State of AI in Design Systems: https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/
Kinga Głyk: https://kingaglyk.com/

Prefer to see the live audit? Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKSAsRqb6LE

Follow Wake Up Excited! in your podcast app for more conversations about living an exuberant, creative, and fulfilling life.

Recorded August 14, 2026. Job-search and event references reflect that conversation.

Andy Clarke shares what excites him lately, sparking memories of his early photography career and frequent trips to Schaffhausen. His pivot from art school and darkroom work into technical sales, and lessons about good selling as an art of solving real problems. The discussion moves to creative storytelling on the web, focus and distraction habits, challenges with open-plan offices, and how he’s built a work life around late-night rhythms and self-managed attention. Clarke also reflects on family history, his father’s suicide and trauma, changing views on mental health and heredity, and a desire to do more consequential political or social work while relearning how to create for pleasure.

Topics:

• (00:00) - Introduction

• Up (2009 film)
• Love Story (1970 film)
• Philadelphia (1993 film)
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
• Mister Rogers biography
• Billy Bragg
• Motörhead
• Meat Loaf
• Led Zeppelin
• Miranda Lambert
• Megan Moroney
• The Rolling Stones
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• Wilco
• Woody Guthrie
• Bat Out of Hell
• Between the Wars
• Power in a Union
• Unfinished Business
• stuffandnonsense.co.uk
• Sinar P2
• Schneider Super-Angulon
• IWC Schaffhausen
• Rolex
• Hermès
• Rickenbacker
• Gibson Les Paul
• iPod Classic
• Game Boy
• Tiffany & Co.
• Amazon
• David Hockney
• Jeremy Keith
• Preston North End F.C.

We’re finding renewed excitement for discovering music through going to gigs and reflecting on how live shows offer an irreplaceable shared experience. The discussion shifts to the indie web, hyperlink culture, and how social platforms and chatbots reduce discoverability, while AI could lower barriers to building websites but raises concerns about credit, control, hosting complexity, and accessibility.

Topics:

• (00:00) - What has you waking up excited?

Brad chats with Miriam Suzanne about pottery, theater, CSS, and why we shouldn’t just accept AI as the way. Miriam describes their through-line as collaborative creativity across pottery, theater, client work, and CSS standards, arguing process shapes results and that CSS is inherently collaborative with users, browsers, and devices. She critiques rigid notions of originality and authenticity, emphasizing growth and multiplicity. Miriam rejects “results over process” arguments, challenges claims of democratization amid surveillance, environmental costs, and corporate control, and calls for collective agency to imagine and build better tools and systems. 

Topics:

• (00:00) - Waking Up Excited

• oddbird.net
• grapefruitlab.com
• miriamsuzanne.com
• courses.oddbird.net
• Balsamiq
• Harvest
• Claude
• ChatGPT
• Discord
• The Rolling Stones
• Velvet Underground
• Lou Reed
• Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk)
• Maggot Brain by Funkadelic
• Teacup Gorilla
• Emily Rogers
• "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov
• Walt Whitman
• John Allsopp — "Dao of Web Design"
• Busch Gardens
• Riverdance
• "12 Angry Men"
• Timnit Gebru
• Emily Bender

Scott Jenson joins Brad to chat about how UX designers thrive in ambiguity and why wrestling with confusing, failing experiments, especially around AI, can signal real progress. The conversation covers open source’s multiplier effect, the need for sustainable funding, and Scott’s work with Mastodon. Jenson also describes practical AI value for prototyping and coding, while emphasizing nuance, trust, and asking questions over online pile-ons.

Topics:

• (00:00) - Why Ambiguity Excites

Paul and Brad discuss how AI has reintroduced “Wild West” chaos to the web, which Paul finds energizing after years of predictable maturity in the industry. Drawing parallels to past disruptions like desktop publishing, CSS/web standards, and the dot-com bust, Paul argues that panic about AI replacing specialists will settle as organizations realize quality still matters. They emphasize learning through sharing, rejecting performative content marketing, and valuing humility over guru certainty. The conversation explores consulting as amplifying in-house teams’ knowledge, the need to adapt rigid UX processes, and how AI can help democratize UX by empowering non-specialists through playbooks, design systems, and easier access to research. Paul shares how he intentionally built a lifestyle business enabling RV travel, and closes on resilience, change, and optimism.

Topics:

• (00:00) - Hello Chaos

Nathan Curtis discusses how his work has shifted over the past two years from leading design system teams to focusing on strict architecture and building tools that communicate design intent to engineering, energized by faster iteration enabled by AI. He reflects on his long history in design systems, including his 2009 book “Modular Web Design”. Curtis addresses why teams may feel threatened by AI amid layoffs and rapid tool adoption, arguing that system thinking, governance, and coordination remain essential even as non-deterministic workflows grow. He explains building an evolved Specs tool that extracts structured data from Figma via plugin and CLI for repeatable, cross-platform specifications, while cautioning against using agents where deterministic processes are more precise. They explore flexibility vs lockdown culture, Figma’s role as a typed database, ecosystem interoperability, and advice on writing, consulting, and choosing work that sustains energy.

Links:

• Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation [Book]
• Directed Edges / Nathan Curtis
• Wake Up Excited! | Ben Callahan on Building Community, Your Values, and the Power of Connection
• Center Centre
• FROSTAPALOOZA
• Max Richter - On the Nature of Daylight - YouTube
• Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (Remastered 2012) - YouTube
• Specs
• DirectedEdges/specs: Schema, types, and command line tools to record and manage UI component specifications.
• nathanacurtis on GitHub

Topics:

• (00:00) - Introduction

Ridd feels like he’s having more fun than ever as a designer because he can now code and close the gap using Claude to build features with full control over pixels, animations, and interactions. Brad and Ridd discuss how AI shrinks learning barriers, helps translate vague intentions into technical language, and enables individuals to realize ideas with less reliance on others, while complicating collaboration and threatening specialized roles. They explore problem-finding, local/community applications, hybrid service-plus-software models, anxiety about oversupply and discoverability, and Ridd’s deliberate optimism and early-adopter mindset.

Links:
◉ Jitter · A fast and simple motion design tool on the web
◉ Dive Club 🤿
◉ Ridd 🤿 (@ridd_design) / X
◉ Emancipator
◉ Layup

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction

Afyia Smith talks about her separation from Epic Games and choosing optimism by exploring the city and visiting new coffee shops, even amid anxiety and uncertainty. Afyia explains her work as a design systems documentation specialist, arguing that documentation is becoming foundational, especially with AI and agentic workflows, because it captures rationale, behaviors, edge cases, and shared truth across teams.

Topics:

• (00:00) - Meet Afyia Smith

◉ Michael Jackson — Bad

◉ Michael Jackson — Thriller

◉ Xscape — Who Can I Run To

◉ Lauryn Hill — The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

◉ Michael Jackson biopic (Michael)

◉ afyiasmith.co

◉ LinkedIn — Afyia Smith

◉ ChatGPT

◉ Figma

◉ Storybook

◉ Jira

◉ Google Docs

◉ Epic Games

◉ Tower Records

◉ AI and Design Systems course