TL:DR: AI answers close the gap between question and curiosity before your brain can use it, and that gap is exactly where learning and discovery happen.
We used to search the internet. Now we mostly extract from it (extract, as the brutalist version of capitalism does). Google’s AI overviews, plus Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, turn what used to be a wander through links into one instant answer.
That feels like a win for the user: less time spent, more certainty gained. But the neuroscience says otherwise. Curiosity isn’t just wanting a fact, it’s a biological state that opens the brain up to learn more broadly, and it only stays open while the question is still unanswered. Answer it in three seconds and you get what you came for, but you lose the adjacent article, the tangent, the connection you weren’t looking for.
That loss matters because most real discovery comes from incidental learning, not efficient retrieval (Have you ever heard about berrypicking and Marcia Bates?). Probably James Watson e Francis Crick didn’t stumble onto the double helix structure of DNA by getting a quick answer to a narrow question. They found it because they kept asking.
When search architecture treats the space between question and answer as dead time to eliminate, it’s cutting out the part where most of the thinking actually happens. No single search costs us much. But train a whole generation to expect instant, packaged conclusions, and you end up with people who are great at extracting answers and worse at building their own connections.
None of this means AI summaries need to disappear. It means the design choices matter: keep sources visible instead of buried, show competing explanations instead of one smoothed paragraph, build modes that reward exploring instead of just speed. Nobody’s forcing anyone to stop clicking links, but default design shapes behavior more than good intentions ever will. If the companies building these tools don’t leave room for the detour, they’ll end up optimizing us toward a world that only gives us what we already knew to ask for.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science… is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.'”
INTERESTING OPPORTUNITY OF THE MONTH
Senior Quantitative UX Researcher, Material Design at Google in Munich
At Google, we “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” As a Quantitative User Experience Researcher (Quant UXR), you make this possible. You will join a multi-disciplinary team, collaborating closely with Engineering and Product Management to create industry-leading, innovative products.
You will drive impact at all stages of development by investigating user behavior through empirical methods like logs analysis, survey research, and regression. We value diverse educational experiences—from Computer Science to Psychology—and require a blend of behavioral research design, statistical proficiency, and programming skills to uncover actionable insights. Beyond the work, you will grow within a supportive Quant UXR community offering mentorship, regular meetups, and exclusive internal tools to help you thrive.
A few themes stand out:
- Quant + qual bridge role: this isn’t pure stats so you’ll partner tightly with Designers, Qualitative Researchers, Data Scientists, Engineers, and PMs to define what “good” looks like, then measure it. Translation between disciplines is core to the job, not a side skill.
- Metrics-as-craft for a design system: rather than researching one product, you’re building the measurement layer for Material Design itself, figuring out how to quantify its usage and impact across every team and surface at Google that touches it. That’s an unusually meta mandate: measuring the thing that shapes measurement.
- Live experimentation at scale: a big chunk of the role is running experiments (A/B tests, live studies) on other teams’ interfaces to see how design components and tactics actually perform with real users, then turning that into evidence.
- Communication as a deliverable: the listing explicitly calls out making findings “convincing for both research experts and non-experts” — the insight only counts if it changes minds and decisions, not just if it’s statistically sound.
Why it matters
Material Design underpins UI decisions across a huge swath of Google’s products, so this role has outsized leverage: a metric or insight you establish here doesn’t just inform one team’s roadmap, it can shape design standards company-wide.
It’s a good fit if you want research work with systemic reach rather than single-product scope, and if you enjoy the “build the ruler, then use it” problem of inventing measurement frameworks for something as abstract as a design system’s real-world impact.
JOBS I CHOOSE TO PROMOTE
JOB20260801 – Head of UX (m/w/d) at DEPT® (Berlin)
JOB20260802 – Director Product Design at Miro (Copenhagen – Denmark)
JOB20260803 – VP Product Experience at the LEGO Group (Billund – Denmark)
JOB20260804 – Head of UX (f/m/d) at Trusted Shops (Cologne – Germany)
JOB20260805 – Lead User Researcher at Monzo (Dublin – Ireland)
JOB20260806 – Director of User Experience at ESET (Cracow – Poland)
JOB20260807 – Sr Manager, UX at Glovo (Barecelona – Spain)
JOB20260808 – Head of Product Design at Joko (Paris – France)
JOB20260809 – Director of User Experience, Core Commerce team at VistaPrint (Spain)
JOB20260810 – Digital Consumer Experience Strategy & Research at Sanofi (Lyon – France)
JOB20260811 – UX Senior Manager at Bank of Valletta plc (Santa Venera – Malta)
JOB20260812 – Product Design Director – Doctors & Clinics at Docplanner (100% Remote-friendly, Spain)
JOB20260813 – Senior Director of Product Design at Factorial (Barcelona – Spain)
JOB20260814 – Senior Experience Strategy Designer at IBM (Milan – Italy)
JOB20260815 – UX Chapter Leader at Credit Agricole Bank Polska S.A. (Wroc?aw – Poland)
JOB20260816 – AI Integration & Experience Designer at Bludigit (Milan – Italy)
JOB20260817 – UX/UI designer at Bending Spoons (turin – Italy)
INTERNSHIPS I CHOOSE TO PROMOTE
INT20260801 – STAGE – UX/UI Designer at Havas (Milan – Italy)
INT20260802 – SEO & AI Intern (x/f/m) at Doctolib (Milan – Italy)
INT20260803 – Digital Transformation & Workplace Experience Internship at EssilorLuxottica (Milan – Italy)
INT20260804 – Experience Designer Intern at Capgemini Invent (Milan – Italy)
INT20260805 – Stage Digital Communication at Snam S.p.A. (Milan – Italy)
INT20260806 – ITALY E-COMMERCE INTERN at Davines Group | B Corp since 2016 (Parma – Italy)
INT20260807 – UX/UI Designer Intern at TheJackaL (Naples – Italy)
WORTH READING, WATCHING OR LISTENING
- ? (article) – Understanding the AI economy by Google
- ? (article) – How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions by OpenAI
- ? (article) – Design-System Maturity: A 6-Dimension Framework by Huei-Hsin Wang
- ? (article) – We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD
- ? (paper) – The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity by Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y Hayden
- ? (paper) – Function-Driven Design Method by Federico Badaloni
- ? (books) – The Product Management Playbook by Julia Barham
- ??(podcast) – The Product School ep. 302: Asana CPO on Why Every Employee Is Now an AI Eval and What That Means for How Enterprises Actually Capture AI ROI with Arnab Bose and Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
- ? (video) – How to speak by Patrick Winston
WORTH EXPLORING
- The Last Museum (Search among 6 millions of art pieces)
- Comms (iMessage agents)
- Tunio (AI Music operations platform for venues)
- Estera (AI Receptionist for HoReCa that Answers Calls & WhatsApp 24/7)
- Callcard (Business card system with dynamic fields, a CRM and payment options)
- Superfile (A modern, visual file manager for the terminal)
BEST UPCOMING EVENTS
UX Australia 2026 Now in its 17th edition, Australia’s leading UX conference brings together practitioners from across the Asia-Pacific region for two days of research, design and strategy.
- When: August 27–28, 2026
- Where: In-person at Sydney, AU
SmashingConf Freiburg 2026 One of Europe’s most beloved web and design conferences, known for its no-slides-without-demos format and unusually high signal-to-noise ratio.
- When: September 7–10, 2026
- Where: In-person at Freiburg, DE + Online
- Tickets: from ~€200 (online), ~€495 (in-person)
Hatch Conference 2026 A Berlin conference at the intersection of design, technology and leadership — aimed at senior practitioners ready to think beyond the screen.
- When: September 16–18, 2026
- Where: In-person at Berlin, DE + Online
uxcon vienna 2026 Vienna’s flagship UX event, now a fixture on the European design calendar, balancing hands-on workshops with sharp conference programming across three days.
- When: September 16–17, 2026
- Where: In-person at Vienna, AT
Design + AI Summit 2026 CreativePro’s online summit cutting through the AI noise for creative professionals — practical sessions on Firefly, Photoshop, Illustrator and the tools actually reshaping production workflows.
- When: September 17–18, 2026
- Where: Online
Future Product Days 2026 One of Europe’s largest gatherings of digital product professionals, three days in Copenhagen blending thought-provoking keynotes with deep-dive workshops on the future of product.
- When: September 22–24, 2026
- Where: In-person at Copenhagen, DK
AI Summit Barcelona 2026 Billed as Europe’s biggest AI event with 10.000+ attendees, the Barcelona summit is where enterprise strategy meets cutting-edge AI research on the shores of the Mediterranean.
- When: September 22–23, 2026
- Where: In-person at WTC Barcelona, ES
SmashingConf Antwerp 2026 The autumn edition of SmashingConf moves to Belgium for another round of rigorously curated talks on design, performance and the evolving craft of building for the web.
- When: October 12–15, 2026
- Where: In-person at Antwerp, BE + Online
- Tickets: from ~€200 (online), ~€495 (in-person)
PUSH UX 2026 Munich’s dedicated UX conference, two sharp days focused on pushing the boundaries of user experience design with a strong mix of international speakers and local community.
- When: October 22–23, 2026
- Where: In-person at Munich, DE
Y Oslo 2026 A Scandinavian conference exploring the future of design and technology, set in Oslo and known for its thoughtful curation and strong emphasis on design leadership.
- When: October 26–27, 2026
- Where: In-person at Oslo, NO
SDGC26 — Service Design Global Conference The Service Design Network’s flagship annual gathering, this year in Wiesbaden in partnership with World Design Capital 2026, under the theme “Beyond Boundaries: Enabling Solutions That Shape Tomorrow” — workshops on day one, keynotes and panels across days two and three.
- When: October 28–30, 2026
- Where: In-person at RheinMain CongressCenter, Wiesbaden, DE + Online
- Tickets: Early bird available until May 15
Leading Design London 2026 The go-to event for design leaders — not about tools or trends but about the harder questions of influence, culture, strategy and what it means to lead design organisations today.
- When: November 11–12, 2026
- Where: In-person at London, UK
THANKS AND KUDOS TO
? This edition is dedicated to Alberto Marradi, a real Maestro for me
? Federico Badaloni and Eugenio Menichella for having recommended me a lovely book
? Michele Pudda for being such a great host
? Carola Pescio Canale, Edoardo Sportelli, Ilan Dray, Andrea Baldin, Andrew Pucci, Francesco Splendori for their new roles.
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