Kicking off AI × Design Mornings

Something is shifting in the London design community right now, and this morning that energy was palpable ⚡️

Simon and I gathered 25 seasoned designers in a room to get hands-on building with AI tools. And it was so much fun.

We kicked off with three walkthroughs that showed the breadth of what people are exploring right now:

Domingo gave us a glimpse into how Intercom’s (impressively AI-mature) design team is actually operating at scale. Not just through shiny outputs, but the compounding productivity gains as new ways of working start to solidify across their organisation.

Simon brought practical SwiftUI tips (and a little mad-scientist energy) to show how he’s built a prototype version of the Sling app inside Xcode. Lovely attention to motion and fluid interaction quality throughout. And very accessible to anyone in a small design team just starting to explore AI tools.

ÌníOlúwa took us behind the scenes of her new personal site (link in the comments), built with Flora AI. Exceptional attention to detail, and a bold willingness to make it deeply personal, not ‘built for recruiters’. Removing that constraint really made the visual impact shine.

Then after 90 minutes of building, we walked through 7–8 demos from the group. We had playful iOS apps, a game card scanning Android app, an accessibility Figma plugin, lava-lamp shader generators, and a recreated product detail page with upgraded dynamic experiences. That last one was honestly ready to take straight into an exec meeting.

One thing that stuck with me: someone mentioned they'd literally never opened terminal before today, because the friction to get started was just a little too high. And yet, within 90 minutes, they'd built a working travel relocation app in Cursor and Claude Code. That's the thing about this stuff. Yes, it fails miserably at some tasks, but it's truly magical in others. And the only way to find out which is which is to get your hands dirty and push the edges yourself.

I'm increasingly convinced that AI confidence is indirectly correlated to reading LinkedIn posts or listening to AI podcasts. Yes, that stuff is great and serves an important purpose, but you only really start to build intuition for what's possible with these tools by making things yourself. And doing that surrounded by likeminded peers adds a little accountability, support and momentum on that journey. I hope today gave people some of that energy to carry back into their teams.

We're planning to run another one next month. So if you're a seasoned designer knee-deep in AI experimentation, or figuring out where to start, just drop a comment below. Something is building here and I'd love to keep iterating on this ✨