AI on Andy Polaine

AI Demos are the new storyboards

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

AI demos are the new storyboards.

Call them prototypes if you must, but I think they make much more sense to think of as storyboards and pre-viz videos of a film. The combination of script and storyboard allows everyone in the production to understand what’s going to be made. What shots need to be captured or created, interiors or locations, crew, actors, visual effects, etc. That shot breakdown is one of the big tasks of pre-production.

Discernment, Design and AI

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

I think both physical and digital product design has become rather boring over the past decade. In digital, designs and designing became systematised for fast delivery at scale and the The Age of Average kicked in hard.

A lot of the time that’s fine. Mediocrity is better than awful, after all, and not everything needs to be a bespoke suit. Sometimes an H&M t-shirt is all you need. Most public service touchpoints are better than they were 10 years ago, which is a Good Thing. By contrast, many commercial products and services fell into feature enshitification and have become worse. This is a Bad Thing.

A Slopsided Marketplace

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Recently, I’ve found myself switching off as soon as I get a whiff of an LLM in a message or post. These days, it’s difficult to know for sure, because people have started to copy the style in their own posts.

In this way I think of AI slop as a double polluter. It pollutes the environment through excessive resource consumption and it pollutes the cultural landscape with slop. LinkedIn is the prime example of an increasingly enslopified commons.

Joel Bailey – The Role of AI in Social Media Management

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0200

My guest in this episode is Joel Bailey, product and service director at Arwen.ai, a four-year-old marketing technology startup that uses AI to help brands to manage and moderate their social media comments at scale.

Joel brings 25 years of experience working in service design roles, leading change and building new stuff for a diverse range of organisations. We talked about his journey into Service Design, Service Design and AI, navigating AI and social media, the future of design and much more.