Wake Up Excited!

We’re finding renewed excitement for discovering music through going to gigs and reflecting on how live shows offer an irreplaceable shared experience. The discussion shifts to the indie web, hyperlink culture, and how social platforms and chatbots reduce discoverability, while AI could lower barriers to building websites but raises concerns about credit, control, hosting complexity, and accessibility.

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Brad chats with Miriam Suzanne about pottery, theater, CSS, and why we shouldn’t just accept AI as the way. Miriam describes their through-line as collaborative creativity across pottery, theater, client work, and CSS standards, arguing process shapes results and that CSS is inherently collaborative with users, browsers, and devices. She critiques rigid notions of originality and authenticity, emphasizing growth and multiplic...

Scott Jenson joins Brad to chat about how UX designers thrive in ambiguity and why wrestling with confusing, failing experiments, especially around AI, can signal real progress. The conversation covers open source’s multiplier effect, the need for sustainable funding, and Scott’s work with Mastodon. Jenson also describes practical AI value for prototyping and coding, while emphasizing nuance, trust, and asking questions...

Paul and Brad discuss how AI has reintroduced “Wild West” chaos to the web, which Paul finds energizing after years of predictable maturity in the industry. Drawing parallels to past disruptions like desktop publishing, CSS/web standards, and the dot-com bust, Paul argues that panic about AI replacing specialists will settle as organizations realize quality still matters. They emphasize learning through sharing, rejecti...

Nathan Curtis discusses how his work has shifted over the past two years from leading design system teams to focusing on strict architecture and building tools that communicate design intent to engineering, energized by faster iteration enabled by AI. He reflects on his long history in design systems, including his 2009 book “Modular Web Design”. Curtis addresses why teams may feel threatened by AI amid layoffs and rapi...

Ridd feels like he’s having more fun than ever as a designer because he can now code and close the gap using Claude to build features with full control over pixels, animations, and interactions. Brad and Ridd discuss how AI shrinks learning barriers, helps translate vague intentions into technical language, and enables individuals to realize ideas with less reliance on others, while complicating collaboration and threatening ...

Afyia Smith talks about her separation from Epic Games and choosing optimism by exploring the city and visiting new coffee shops, even amid anxiety and uncertainty. Afyia explains her work as a design systems documentation specialist, arguing that documentation is becoming foundational, especially with AI and agentic workflows, because it captures rationale, behaviors, edge cases, and shared truth across teams.

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Luke Wroblewski talks about what’s waking him up excited these days and draws an analogy between trail building and product building, emphasizing prototyping and especially maintenance. The conversation shifts to parenting teens and Luke’s view that people should find their own path, criticizing cookie-cutter career thinking and overly mechanical approaches to life and design. They discuss AI’s rapid, compounding ...

Luke and Brad discuss feeling newly unblocked by today’s tools which enable rapid experimentation, which must be done at a human level. Exploring nuance over binary positions, comparing reactions to AI to stages of grief, and exploring baking harm reduction and accessibility into systems.

Links:

• Try This At Home by Frank Turner
• THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development
• Future Teens
• Ace of Cups - Luke Murphy's personal website
• Luke...

Don Norman discusses how his best ideas arrive through “incubation,” often waking him at 1–2 AM to write, and explains how he starts books by finding a guiding title and compelling theme rather than dull “history and basics.” He compares the subconscious to AI: it creatively assembles plausible outputs that may be wrong, requiring conscious evaluation—unlike today’s AI, which can “hal...

Abby Covert shares what excites her now, leaving corporate life, reclaiming creativity through recovery work, sobriety, journaling, and disciplined writing, and how community builds confidence beyond capability. They explore being willing to be bad at things, the pressure to “pick a specialty” online, and bringing fun and psychological safety into work by modeling humanity. They also talk about knowledge decay on the we...

Dan and Brad explore AI as a creative partner for drafting and ideation while requiring strong human direction, and compare today’s shift to the desktop-to-web and mobile transitions, including recurring backlash to new tech. They address risks: metacognitive laziness, erosion of expertise, stolen training data, environmental and geopolitical harms, and weak regulation, alongside benefits like empowering small nonprofits and ...

Sacha Judd discusses what excites her now: founding Lume Music, which aims to fix broken subscription-era music economics by launching a digital album format bundled with behind-the-scenes content in a beautiful app for dedicated music lovers. She argues the core problem online isn’t digital vs analog but feed vs queue—algorithmic, engagement-driven firehoses versus intentional, chosen experiences—and critiques ve...

Amber Case reflects on where you live and how returning to a familiar place can help think clearer. Case discusses seeking authentic, small-scale community, work nights, recess-like breaks, welcoming rituals, and mutual support. She contrasts these with expensive, scalable “community” models and argues effective communities rely on kindness, simplicity, history, and durable governance patterns. She connects this to &ldq...

Brendan Dawes is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and technologist. joins me to talk about creativity, curiosity, and what it actually means to thrive as a maker right now — when everything feels like it's being disrupted overnight.

Brendan has been combining different inputs with creative outputs for his vast career, so I've been thinking about him a lot as we enter this new creative age. When I saw his name in the cred...

As we put our course together, I want to have conversations with people who are thinking about things deeply, creatively, and responsibly. That's why it was an absolute pleasure to chat with my long-time internet friend, Jem Gold, technology as a creative medium, the soul of the early web, and the new era of AI-assisted making.

💥 Want to learn how to use AI & Design Systems together to make great digital products? Preorder our ...

Georgia Lupi shares what she’s excited to wake up for with us. She recounts getting COVID in 2020, developing worsening long COVID symptoms with reinfections, becoming house- and sometimes bed-bound, and stopping work in 2023 before beginning recovery in early 2024. Lupi and Brad discuss the anxiety and trauma that can persist during physical recovery, the scientific mind-body connection, and how nervous system regulation, br...

Ben Callahan joins Brad to discuss what’s currently motivating him, from enjoying homemade ham and bean soup in Ohio to a deeper focus on connecting people through curiosity-led facilitation. Ben reflects on a transitional season of life, the importance of personal and organizational values, and how communities work best when they’re allowed to form organically. He describes his annual values exercise, the role of shari...

Brad Frost welcomes Sydney-based artist and designer Gemma O’Brien to Wake Up Excited to discuss her work in murals, lettering, and calligraphy and her recent move to London to study at the intersection of art and neuroscience. Gemma shares what she learned shifting from “thinking like an artist” to “thinking like a scientist,” including the rigor of statistics and research, and describes her flow-stat...