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The Agentic Design Stack  |  UX is the future of AI
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Season 7—Spring 2026  ·  12 episodes  ·  Through-line: the human architecture of institutional change
Boring AI
is Good AI
Gordon
Why AI Scaffolding
Matters More than Use Cases
Flowers · S6
Decentralized
AI is the Future
Goertzel
Canonical
Knowledge is Key
DosSantos
What AI as
Cheap Prediction Means
Gans
Cheap Prediction,
Expensive Change
Goldfarb
Folk Law &
Fax Machines
Pahlka
Inside The
Infinity Machine
Mallaby
Crisis Is
Your Opening
Nitze
The Confabulation
Machine
Ratliff
No Strategy
Without Vision
Evergreen
When Agents Have
Wallets, Trust Is Currency
Cohen Freue
Nuclear Fusion,
No Power Lines
Frankle
The Checklist Your
Deck Is Missing
McMillan ← Latest
Fellows › Ilana Westerman
Contributing Author

Ilana Westerman

Create with Context
Ilana Westerman

Ilana Westerman has for the past 15 years focused on helping bring people and technology together through seamless digital experiences. At Create with Context, Ilana leads strategic research and idea generation for global Fortune 500 companies.Ilana also shares her passion for research-driven design as a part-time faculty member at San José State University, where she has taught graduate level courses in the Industrial Systems Engineering/HFES program since 2005.Previously, Ilana performed strategic user research at Adobe, helping envision and define future products focused on digital youth and creativity.Prior to that, Ilana joined Yahoo! in its infancy and helped build the User Experience Research team, managing Community, Cross-platform, Mobile, and Living Room experience teams. Her group defined the strategic direction of Yahoo! with projects including Future of the Internet (3, 5, 10 years out), Platform Convergence, Internet Everywhere, What Can Be with Yahoo! Mobile, and Global Yahoo! Platform.

Contributions to UXM

2 pieces
1
Book Excerpt  ·  Crisis Engineering

The Crisis Worth Using

The five indicators of a genuinely useful crisis—and the difference between the kind that opens a window for transformational change and the kind that merely accelerates collapse. Excerpted from Crisis Engineering.

7 min read April 2025 ◆ The Useful Crisis
2
Guest Article

When the Window Opens: A Field Guide to Crisis Seizing

Written for UXM as a companion to the episode. Not theory—what Marina actually does when she walks into a failing system with a 90-day mandate and no authority to hire. Practical, specific, and unsettling in the best way.

11 min read April 2025 ◆ The Useful Crisis

Ideations

1 cluster
The Useful Crisis
S7 Ep. 4  ·  7 pieces  ·  April 2025