For our 11th birthday SydDT event on Thursday, we came back to a question that’s been sitting under so many of our recent conversations…
How do we keep people, customers, judgement, creativity, and trust at the centre as AI becomes part of more of what we design and do?
We were lucky to have Riley Coleman, Kristin de la Fuente, Alex Zinoviev share thoughtful, practical, and very human perspectives on AI in the real world – with Tarra van Amerongen guiding the panel conversation.
A few ideas stuck with me.
Riley’s point that the pause is where the value is. In a world pushing hard towards speed and automation, the moments where we take the time to pause, question, judge, make sense of what’s happening and then decide… are not inefficiency. They create the space for expertise, ethics, creativity, and care to show up.
Kristin’s framing of trust as a relationship, not just an interface pattern. The important design work in agentic systems is not always on the screen. It’s in the delegation logic, the checkpoints, the recovery paths, the guardrails, and the way trust and confidence are earnt over time.
The panel conversation kept coming back to a simple distinction… done is not the same as valuable.
AI can help us move faster, but if we’re building the wrong thing, solving the wrong problem, or removing human judgement that makes the work meaningful – faster doesn’t bring more value.
A fitting 11th birthday conversation for SydDT.
It looped back to our first meetup in 2015 when we debated the singularity and SydDT #2: Future of Work with Michelle Williams and Brian Lim where we explored the question – should we race against the machines, or run with them?
The tech has changed a lot. The pace is different. The stakes feel different. But the deeper question hasn’t changed much at all… how do we use design to help people solve problems that matter?
Thanks to everyone who came along and made it such a fun night. Couldn’t make it or just want to relive it? Watch it now.
A huge thanks to Riley, Kristin, Alex, and Tarra for such a generous and thoughtful conversation… and to Kristin for sharing her birthday with us.
Thanks to Resham Agrawal who did the awesome graphic recording this month. This initiative is a collaboration with Shapeshifters and their Think Visual! meetup community. SydDT is a friendly environment for people to practice their live graphic recording skills.
A shout out and thanks to Bex Haar for another great write-up with her reflections and key takeaways.
A massive thanks to Thoughtworks, GenAI Lab, Alan Chen and Diana Ayoub from Shapeshifters, and Dynamic4 for making it all happen. And Kate Linton for being the lead organiser for this one.
Finally, thanks to the whole SydDT community for 11 awesome years. Plenty to come 😃
Meetup Announcement
Thursday, 11 June 2026 @ 6pm. Thoughtworks, Sydney
As AI rapidly accelerates product delivery, it’s easier than ever to ship features that look impressive but fail to solve real customer problems.
For SydDT’s 11th birthday celebration, we’re collaborating with our friends from GenAI Lab to bring together a panel of design and product leaders to discuss how to balance the sheer speed of AI with genuine, human-centered design.
We’re lucky to have Tarra van Amerongen, Alex Zinoviev, Riley Coleman, and Kristin de la Fuente sharing their observations and insights.
They’ll cut through the hype to explore how user research needs to adapt for generative AI models, how to design for trust and transparency, and how the designer’s role is shifting from pixel-pusher to system orchestrator.
There might even be cupcakes 😃
Come join us for some fun conversations with interesting people in and around the design thinking community. New members are welcome!
Speakers
Tarra van Amerongen
VP of Product & Design | Asia-Pacific, Thoughtworks
Tarra is an award-winning user experience and digital transformation leader, guiding creative, technical and business teams towards experiences that change the game.
She’s worked as a practitioner, lecturer, consultant and leader with in-house teams, consultancies and agencies for the past 15 year after pivoting into design from software development.
Tarra is focused on taking a human-first approach to the application of AI, and challenges us to provide an informed view of what should remain human-first, what work means in this new paradigm, and how we stretch our craft as good design matters more than ever.
Alex Zinoviev
Head of Product, Neo Intelligence & Founder, GenAI Lab
Alex Zinoviev has spent 15+ years in product, most recently as Head of Product at Neo, an operations management platform for construction.
He founded GenAI Lab, a 1,400-member community of product and design practitioners across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, because he kept seeing the same gap: teams excited about AI but unsure how to adopt it without losing sight of the humans they’re building for. GenAI Lab runs workshops grounded in first-hand experimentation.
Riley Coleman (they/them)
Founder, AI Flywheel
Riley started their career as service designer creating behaviour change programs for marginalised communities in the not-for-profit sector.
Before studying a masters in human-centred multimedia and transitioning to user experience design. Riley has spent the last 12 years working in design leadership roles in Australia, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden.
Now, as founder of AI Flywheel, Riley teaches human-centric AI training programs to designers and leaders. Drawing from their extensive experience in behaviour change, human-centred design and technology transformation, they’re building a community of practice around effective Human+AI products, services and operations that people can trust.
Kristin de la Fuente
Design Lead – AI Products, SEEK & GenAI Lab Design Partner, GenAI Lab
At SEEK Kristin is pioneering trust architecture for automation and agentic experiences by recognising that trust failures are often psychological failures, not necessarily technical ones.
She’s designed practical mechanisms that keep customers centred and in control of agentic workflows. Working with teams to integrate Responsible AI principles and Strategic AI plays, Kristin leverages these frameworks to translate principles into concrete design decisions, ensuring they show up meaningfully in user experience.
She moves beyond shipping impressive features to ask harder questions: where should AI actually be used? How do we maintain human agency at scale? Her work makes the invisible visible turning complex AI capability into systems people can understand, trust, and actually control.
Event Sponsors
This event is brought to you by Thoughtworks, GenAI Lab, Shapeshifters, and Dynamic4.
We take photos and record our events for documentation and promo purposes. Just let us know if you prefer not to be featured.
