Where design met its next hard problem

01 — Arrival

A different kind of room.

Amsterdam AI's AI020 was held in a grand venue in the city — ornate ceiling, red velvet seats, the kind of space that signals something is being taken seriously.

Not a tech campus. Not a design conference. Something else.

02 — Before the crowd

The quiet before a room fills with intent.

I arrived early. The seats were still empty, the screen read "Welcome to AI020," and I had a moment to register where I was — a room built around the question of what AI is actually for.

Keynotes from Prof. Max Welling and Prof. Henk Marquering. Not product launches. Research with weight.

03 — In the minority

Researchers, engineers — and me.

The crowd was mostly AI researchers, ML engineers, and policy people. Product designers were rare. I was probably one of very few.

That asymmetry was the point. I didn't come to present my perspective. I came to update it.

04 — The talks

Every talk was grounded in real work.

Welling's framing: not what to build, but what problems are worth solving. Marquering walked through AI's history — the rises, the winters, the hype cycles — and what it means that this wave feels different.

05 — The identity I brought

Senior Product Designer. That badge matters.

The badge said Harver — an HR assessment platform where the people I design for grapple daily with accuracy scores, probabilistic outputs, and model confidence.

Tools like Claude or Figma handle the surface. The harder work is building mental models that help decision-makers trust — and interrogate — what an AI is actually telling them.