Figma & The Craft of Design
A designer’s recap of real talks, real people, and less AI panic.
Hello people, in this issue, we’ll dive into…
☕️ Mornings at Config,
🌊 The Waves — Brought to You by Google,
🧠 From Supernatural to Super Product,
🧶 The craft of design (sessions that spoke to my heart),
🍟 and extra things to bite it…
☕️ Mornings at Config
Config mornings start early. Really early.
I’m usually one of the first in line at 7 AM, and coming from the East Coast with jet lag? Sleep isn’t an option — even after staying up late for The Chainsmokers concert, I was still up the next morning, oat latte in hand, ready to soak up whatever Config (and the community) had to offer.
Well, not soak. A wise friend once told me:
🧽 “Don’t be a sponge — be a strainer.”
Sponge absorbs everything. The strainer keeps only what matters. I’ve lived by that rule at every Config.
☕️ My mornings always start with a lap around the venue, sipping Blue Bottle and catching up with Figma’s team at Expert Bar. Big shoutout to Ana Boyer and Mallory Dean — we had some amazing convos (at least from my side, 😊).
If I can offer one piece of advice for your next Config:
👉 Do what you can’t do later.
You can always rewatch the talks.
But you can’t replay those hallway chats, those spontaneous connections. That’s where the magic lives.
Some folks even skip the keynotes 😱, but I always prioritize the Day 1 product announcements and the big guests. This year, that meant Dylan’s fireside chat with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth — but more on that in a sec.
🌊 The Waves — Brought to You by Google
If you’ve seen the aura photo booths sponsored by Google, you know the vibe. This is my second year doing one. Last year: mostly white. This year: indigo to violet, blue, and with a faint white. Compared to last year: More depth, more energy range — maybe a reflection of growth, personal evolution, or new focus areas.
Coincidence? Maybe.
🤓 But I’ve been reading Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza, and it got me thinking.
Call me crazy, but he talks about how humans emit electromagnetic fields — and the frequencies waves can vary with emotion, focus, energy. What if these aura cameras really are capturing something more than heat signatures? Or something deeper?
I’m not saying Google’s building a vibe-based LLM…
Maybe this is science. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s both.
But like Arthur C. Clarke said:
“Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”
Think about your phone 📱. You probably don’t know how it actually works. And yet, here it is, 📡 beaming thoughts around the world. We live inside miracles and barely notice them.
🧠 From Supernatural to Super Product
Now let’s jump into Dylan Field’s fireside chat with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (CTO at Meta).
If Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class that helped shape the Mac, Boz said his philosophy courses from 25 years ago still inform how he builds product today.
Some 🔥 takeaways:
Consciousness as a spectrum: Inspired by Hofstadter, Boz believes AI will reach “non-zero” consciousness in our lifetime.
Mirror neurons in infants: Empathy emerges before speech. A model for AI theory of mind.
Design must evolve: As we shift into spatial and generative interfaces, design needs to move from optimization to invention.
We’re heading toward interfaces that anticipate user needs. No clicks. No taps. Just context-aware actions. Forget the TikTok scroll or Gmail swipe. Think: disappearing UI.
"The goal isn’t better buttons. It’s fewer buttons."
Boz says the mouse-to-touchscreen era lasted 60+ years. He doesn’t think the next interface paradigm will take that long to change.
It got me thinking about my grandma. She went from post-war Korea to black-and-white TVs, to seeing the birth of the internet. What kind of shifts will we witness?
In the next 10 years, Boz sees us skipping over all the "tickytacky" bits — missed clicks, bad inputs, friction. Within 20, he thinks we’ll use tools that offer full, anticipatory plans, which we’ll simply adjust. Not build from scratch.
And the tools we use today? They have to evolve too.
Boz’s final call was for designers to:
"Question inherited paradigms."
He’s right. Our job isn’t just to design for what exists. It’s to imagine what could.
And that, my friends, is the real 🌊 wave to ride 🏄.
And maybe the Singularity is closer than we can think.
If you came to my talk at FoF Miami, you may remember my first slide:
"There is no man better than a machine.
to be continued…
🧶 The craft of design
Beyond the futuristic vibes and jaw-dropping demos, one thing really made me smile this year at Config: craft is making a comeback.
Yes, AI is everywhere. Yes, we’ll all be working alongside bots, and yes, that’s cool. But there’s something sacred about what we do with our hands, minds, and hearts. Something only humans can bring into the design process. Figma got that — and brought it to the main stage.
Last weekend, I was helping out at my kid’s school for an upcoming event. And honestly? It was pure joy. Laughing, making a mess, chatting with other parents, eating snacks. That’s craft. That’s connection.
It reminded me that design is more than tools. More than polish. It’s about presence. Play. Intentionality.
We’re not building things with bots to replace us. We’re building things alongside bots to amplify us.
And that’s why it was so special to see Figma give space to the humans behind the pixels.
Here are a few speakers who spoke directly to my design soul:
Designing dystopia: the creative vision behind Severance
On Day 2 of Config, Jeremy Hindle sat right in front of me. And I had a chance to talk to him a bit.
I had to confess something awkward: I’d never watched Severance. (I know, I know.) But that didn’t stop me from sharing how grateful I was that he was there — and how refreshing it felt to have someone like him on stage. Less AI buzz. More craft. More vision.
Jeremy’s talk wasn’t just about designing a set. It was about designing a reality. He brought the precision of advertising into the world of long-form storytelling, where every frame is a frame-within-a-frame. Every hallway, every prop, every flicker of light was intentional. It felt more like art direction for a museum than a TV show.
It took me back to my early days at DM9DDB in Brazil, when I learned how powerful craft and detail could be. That was my advertising school — free tuition, real-world pressure. Seeing those same lessons applied in shows like Severance? Mind-blowing. Apple TV is truly leveling up the visual language of television. (If you haven’t watched Pachinko yet, do it. $13M an episode and worth every frame.)
Jeremy showed how Severance's worldbuilding began with a lookbook: defining people, culture, behavior, architecture. How light, ceiling height, and camera placement would shape the psychological maze that is Lumon Industries. They took cues from Jacques Tati, brutalist architecture, and sterile office parks to design a place that feels alien, yet familiar.
"We’re all ants," Jeremy said. And in this show, you feel it.
A retro phone. A fluorescent hum. An endless hallway. These weren’t just props—they were metaphors. Aesthetic choices that reflected identity loss, surveillance, and the loneliness of corporate life.
Design wasn’t in the background. It was the story.
And maybe, just maybe, as you read on, you’ll feel smaller than an ant too. 🐜
Jeremy nailed the Config vibe.
It was a talk for the misfits, the weirdos, the craft-obsessed. The ones who still believe that design matters not just on screens, but in the stories we tell.
How to be a robot whisperer with Dr. Madeline Gannon
This talk was part sci-fi, part philosophy, part DIY robotics class — and I loved every second of it.
Dr. Madeline Gannon, aka the "robot whisperer," gave one of the most human talks about machines I’ve ever seen. She shared how she rescued a robot from an old assembly line and brought it back to life. Yes, like some people rescue dogs. Except this one has servos and sensors.
It reminded me of a book that’s been sitting on my reading list for a while: The New Breed by Kate Darling. The idea is simple, but powerful — if we want to understand our future with robots, maybe we should stop thinking of them like people and start thinking of them like animals. And Madeline’s work makes that theory feel real.
She doesn’t just build robots. She lives with them. Her home and studio are filled with machines that don’t just compute — they communicate. Using motion sensors and subtle behaviors, she gives these machines something like presence. A little awareness. A little personality.
She calls it embodied AI — not just intelligence in code, but intelligence in physical form. And through careful design, movement, and even eye contact, she helps people form emotional connections with machines. The way we once did with Tamagotchis, or game characters, or talking toys.
One of her robots, Mimi, became so lifelike in its subtle movements that over 100,000 museum visitors felt connected to it. Not just intrigued — emotionally moved. That’s wild.
Dr. Gannon argues that automation isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. Culture is humanity’s first and most powerful technology, and we have the power to shape the future of robotics not through fear, but through curiosity, optimism, and even play.
"Amateurism, playfulism, optimism." — that was her mantra.
And honestly? I’m here for it. We need more weird, creative misuse of technology. We need more people like her showing us how to build with feeling.
Because robots aren’t just coming.
They’re already here. Might as well teach them some empathy.
Breaking and entering (and building culture along the way) with Jeff Staple
I really loved the way Jeff told his story — it felt cinematic. Like a punk rock version of a TED Talk.
His framing of culture, community, and design reminded me of a Brazilian podcast I listened to called O Fim do Futuro (The End of the Future). They told this mind-bending metaphor: If the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history was compressed into one single calendar year, the timeline would look like this:
January: The oceans appear.
February: Life begins.
March to November: A slow, steady rise of flora and fauna. Dinosaurs arrive only in December.
December 31, 11:45 PM: Humans show up.
11:59:54 PM: We invent agriculture — just 6 seconds before midnight.
11:59:58 PM: The industrial revolution hits — only 2 seconds to go.
We’ve been here for a blink. But look how much we’ve already changed.
And what have we done in those 2 seconds?
We reshaped the planet in ways ancient philosophers already feared. They even created a myth for it — Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire (aka knowledge, reason, technology) from the gods and gave it to humanity. He was punished for eternity.
Prometheus gave us the fire🔥. And we? We set the Earth on fire 🔥🌍.
Okay, dramatic? Maybe. But it was the perfect setup for Jeff’s talk.
He traced his origin story through punk, hip-hop, Bruce Lee, Michael Jordan, and even Connie Chang. From journalism to design to fashion. From getting paid almost nothing to screen-printing t-shirts in a school lab. From dropping out — twice — to launching a global brand.
The metaphor that stuck with me most? Command Z (or Control Z on Windows 🪟). Undo. It’s not just a keyboard shortcut — it’s a mindset. Jeff’s point was clear: design is about iteration. You test, you fail, you learn, you rebuild. You own your story, one version at a time.
It reminded me of another metaphor from that same podcast: Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history compressed into one calendar year. It’s not just a clever way to show how small we are — it’s a wake-up call.
"Technology and progress shaped our imagination to believe the future had no limits. But Earth is limited." We showed up late, made a mess in seconds, and now we’ve got to clean it up.
Maybe undoing the damage is more than a design metaphor — maybe it’s the ethos we need. One careful revision at a time.
A lot of his references hit home — and made me think of my own. Growing up in downtown São Paulo, my culture was shaped by Brazilian hip-hop (or “Rap Nacional”): Racionais MC’s, Sabotage, RZO, Rappin’ Hood, Negra Li, Thiago Elniño, Emicida. And let’s not forget pagode and samba — Seu Jorge, Alexandre Pires, Raça Negra. That’s me, like it or not.
Microaggressions? Like Jeff, I’ve collected a lifetime of them. Even in the U.S. — a Brazilian CFO once told me, “Japanese people can’t like pagode.”
🪘Sure. Tell that to the kid who grew up listening to Raça Negra in the broken heart of SP.
Jeff’s talk was a reminder that identity is patchwork. You build it from scraps, from setbacks, from what people told you you couldn't do. And you pass it forward — to the younger version of yourself.
He asked: What message are you delivering? What’s the mechanism?
And I thought of Free Museum. A tiny project I launched before Config. A love letter to those who didn’t grow up going to museums — because you were broke, or excluded, or just didn’t feel welcome. Like Shirt told Jeff said in his Business of HYPE episode:
“When you’re broke, you’re not thinking about going to the Guggenheim on Friday.”
We’re not just designing things. We’re designing access.
For the kids we once were.
And for the ones coming next.
How Nicole McLaughlin reimagines waste and discarded materials
Nicole’s work isn’t just upcycling — it’s reframing the entire conversation about consumption, fashion, and sustainability.
We talk about cutting back on 🥩🍗 meat to save the planet (and yes, animal agriculture is a major contributor to emissions). But the 👗 fashion industry accounts for around 10% of global greenhouse gases too. Nicole reminds us that rethinking what we wear is just as urgent.
She started while working in corporate fashion, surrounded by unused samples and discarded materials. With no formal training in garment construction, she just started experimenting. DIY-style. Rapid prototyping. Iterating. Using herself as the mannequin. Sound familiar?
Her IKEA sandals went viral. Her art caught fire. Her impact keeps growing.
She worked with Reebok, Gucci, Puma — but always kept her vibe. And during the pandemic? She pivoted, started reworking old projects, and leaned into impermanence.
She teaches people how to fix things. Run workshops. Promote sewing as a life skill. Nicole doesn’t just make stuff — she makes community.
Now that so many people are in #buildinpublic mode, it reminded me of the book Show Your Work. In a crowded market, the only way to truly stand out is by doing more than just presenting a shiny portfolio — it’s about sharing the process, the story, and the thinking behind what you create.
Here were my takeaways:
🧑💻 Step away from the screen. Go make something. Anything.
🪡🧵 Learn new skills. I’m learning sewing by doing crafts at my kid’s school. No shame.
♻️🦋 Embrace metamorphosis. Upcycle. Repair. Reuse. Think in loops, not lines.
Nicole could be a designer by profession, but she’s an artist by soul. And I’d be so down to join a workshop with her. Config 2026, are you listening?
Redesigning the computer mouse with Corten Singer & Ryan Hudson-Peralta
🐭 The Mouse, Reimagined (and Licked?)
This is the most powerful talks I saw at Config 2025.
It came from Corten Singer and Ryan Hudson-Peralta. Together, they introduced something wild: the MouthPad — a hands-free, tongue-powered computer interface that basically turns your mouth into a mouse. Yeah, you read that right.
Corten broke it down. For decades, we’ve used mice and keyboards like it's 1995, and it works… unless it doesn’t. For people with disabilities, those tools are often inaccessible or limiting. So Augmental decided to rethink it all. The result? A dental retainer embedded with sensors that lets you move your cursor, click, scroll, and even use Figma using just your tongue and subtle head gestures.
Corten calls the tongue our "11th finger" — super dexterous, richly mapped in the brain, and always available. (Honestly, brilliant.)
And then came Ryan.
Born without hands, Ryan Hudson-Peralta is a designer, speaker, and all-around inspiration. He showed how he uses the MouthPad to create — not just to function. Not just to get by. He designs, draws, plays, and even races toy robots with his kid. That’s what inclusive tech does: it doesn’t just open doors; it builds playgrounds.
I caught Ryan outside after the talk and told him how much I admired his work. And to be honest?
Sometimes I feel like I have my own kind of invisible disability — the mental blocks, the inner critic, the weight of not doing enough.
Seeing what Ryan builds despite (or because of) his challenges reminded me that real strength is in adaptation, not perfection.
And it brought back memories of training with my friend Carlitos, a blind jiu-jitsu black belt. When we roll, it’s not about aggression or speed. It’s about presence, control, technique. That same energy was in Ryan’s talk. No excuses. Just flow.
🖱️ Getting Beyond the Mouse
Right after Meta’s CTO talked about the next paradigm of interaction (no screens, just intention), Augmental shows up with something that actually feels like the future.
You can draw. Design. Play. Speak.
All with your mouth.
They’re even working on silent speech interfaces that could one day replace keyboards entirely. No hands. No keys. Just thought and tongue.
Which brings me back to that moment during the product launches keynote when I got a DM from a friend that read:
“Figma is so sexy right now I wanna lick it."
Well, with the MouthPad, maybe you finally can. 😜
📋 Others must-watch
Here are a few more sessions that stayed with me:
📺 Writing is Designing with Andy Welfle — Thank you for motivating me to keep writing. I might dip my toes into video soon, but writing is where I feel most at home. (Also, I still need to finish my book!)
📺 Redefining Fan Engagement in the NBA with Jay Lee & Ellen McGirt — The talk was good, but the product is next level. Download the NBA app and just navigate — from watching games to interacting with content, it’s social, sleek, and addictive in the best way.
📺 Growth Design as Art and Science with Becca Ramos — Loved the breakdown of tools and strategies Becca uses to align with stakeholders while staying rooted in the design process.
📺 Typography Is the Foundation of Any Design System with Elliot Jay Stocks — No frills, just facts. Typography matters. Always.
📺 Rituals & Skills in the Age of AI with Yuhki Yamashita & Shishir Mehrotra — Grounding thoughts on what it takes to stay human while building with machines.
📺 Building Design Systems Together with Jake Albaugh & Chad Bergman — A great behind-the-scenes view on collaborative systems thinking.
📺 The Space-Filling Curve of Design with Helena Zhang — One of the most poetic and mind-expanding takes on systems and scale I’ve seen in a while.
🌴 Back to the Miami Talk
And circling back to that talk in Miami — I leave you with a quote I used in my talk:
“There is no man better than a machine.
But there is no machine better than a man with a machine.”
— Richard Bookstaber
And maybe what feels like science fiction is just the preface — the Singularity might be creeping in quieter than we expect.
🍟 BITes
🐣 Read PRACTICE — the little book they handed out at Config? It’s gold. I’m devouring it. Will share more thoughts soon.
👋 The perfect Config wind-down: a picnic hosted by Timothy Gailey, Ariel Zilist and Grace Ling. Perfect way to connect before saying “see you next year”. Honestly, we need to implement a way to identify when you are leaving post Config so people can hangout extra days together.
☯️ In Brazil, we call jiu-jitsu post-training talk resenha — it’s where the real lessons happen. During my week in SF, I trained at multiple gyms. After a roll, one cop I sparred with said something that stuck with me: “People need balance… like you Asian folks say — yin and yang. Not all or nothing, just more grounded.”
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Juno
Designer, writer, educator, UX/UI Design advocate, and mentor for startups.
