Designing What Comes Next: Why UI Will Define the AI Era

A quiet vision for building soulful, ambient interfaces in the age of AI.

The next interface might not be built. It might grow.

For decades, user interfaces have lived in the shadows of operating systems. Mostly inherited, slightly iterated and rarely reinvented. Whether you’re on a phone, laptop, or tablet, your experience is still governed by a hierarchy built for static screens, file trees and 2D boxes.

But we’re not in that world anymore. We’re interfacing with AI agents. We’re streaming live data across contexts. We’re navigating identity in abstract and dynamic ways. And yet our UI is still shaped like the past, folders, rows, rectangles and tabs. The future needs something else.

Most of us are still operating on a visual language optimized for desktop workflows. Apple defined so much of that experience and in many ways, they perfected it. But now it’s limiting.

AI doesn’t belong in a box on the corner of your screen. It’s ambient. Contextual. Multimodal.

The interface has to evolve if we want users to truly engage with intelligent systems. And if we want those systems to feel emotionally resonant, not just efficient or cool, we need to rethink how we see, touch and navigate information entirely. This is what I spend most of my time exploring now, not just what the next UI looks like, but what it feels like. Not just how it functions, but how it connects.

I’m not interested in novelty for novelty’s sake. I’m interested in how we design interfaces that are alive with intent, memory, beauty and emotional feedback. Imagine waking up and looking at something that doesn’t behave like a screen at all. No widgets. No unread notifications. Just a quiet visual rhythm that understands where you are in your life and shows you what matters.

Maybe it changes with the seasons. Maybe it clusters what you care about, not what’s most recent. Maybe it decays when something’s been ignored too long. Not to be clever. But to be human.

Maybe that sounds poetic. But why shouldn’t it be? We’ve reduced UX to dashboards and clickstreams. But AI changes the rules. It invites abstraction. Nuance. Even artistry. As our systems evolve to process information through real-time pipelines, autonomous agents and personal knowledge graphs, the interface becomes the translator. The interpreter. The layer that turns chaos into clarity.

Years ago, I stumbled across a piece of software called TheBrain. It felt like someone else had already built what I was dreaming of, a nonlinear, spatial UI for ideas and relationships. It didn’t take off at mass scale, but it sparked something in me. I kept wondering why we’d settled. Why everything had to be a feed, a form, or a static screen. The same question is even more urgent now. Because AI is generating more information, more possibilities, more pressure. And we’re still scrolling and swiping like it’s 2012.

Spatial computing isn’t the answer for everyone. I’ve worked in XR, VR, and AR and while the ambition is there, the adoption curve is steep. Motion sickness, device fatigue, interface bloat. But the idea beneath it, that information can live in space, with emotion, rhythm and shape, that’s not a gimmick. That’s a guidepost. And it’s not about building a metaverse. It’s about building meaning.

Right now, I’m exploring this actively with my team. We’re not publishing glossy concept videos. We’re quietly prototyping what a new kind of interface might feel like for teams, for brands, for individuals trying to make sense of fast-moving systems and information. It’s not a startup pitch. It’s a design question. What happens when you stop thinking of UI as a screen, and start thinking of it as a landscape?

What if your interface could sense rhythm? Memory? Intention? What if it could be felt, not just clicked?

The next leap in AI won’t just come from smarter models. It’ll come from better systems. And the interface, the one part users actually touch, has to catch up. Not to be trendier. But to be truer.

We’re not designing for the desktop era anymore. We’re designing for what comes next.

This isn’t about screens anymore. It’s about soul. Let’s build from there.