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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
Contributing Author

Samantha Starmer

REI
Samantha Starmer

Over the last 12 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of experience and information architecture projects and strategy. She started her career in the early days of Amazon.com, enjoying a year long stint in Slough to launch Amazon.co.uk, and later developed experiences for Amazon’s checkout functionality and the third party selling platform. She also honed her start-up skills at SchemaLogic, and her business strategy skills while at Microsoft. She is currently a senior manager at REI, leading teams for experience and, interaction design, information architecture, and customer experience research and analytics. Samantha’s most recent focus has been evangelizing and creating holistic customer experiences across channels, time, and devices. She regularly teaches at the University of Washington’s Information School, where she received a Masters of Library and Information Science degree in 2005. Samantha is active in the UX community and enjoys mentoring new UX practitioners and learning from as many different disciplines as possible. She has served on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals, and is currently on the Oversight Committee for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Samantha is creating a new blog, but in the meantime, you can follow her on Twitter at .

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