Sara Vienna - Taste, Meaning, and How to Stand Out in an AI world

What does it take to make people feel something with design...?

This week's guest is kind of an expert on the question.

Sara Vienna (https://x.com/sravienna?lang=en) , the Chief Design Officer at Metalab, talks about the responsibility that designers have to shape this AI world that we're entering without losing the heartbeat of a brand.

We don't hold back on the current state of the industry and what it feels like to be a designer today.

Some highlights:

- How to not get swept up in current design trends

- How Metalab has adopted AI workflows internally

- Strategies for leveraging AI to understand research data

- What it takes to put meaning at the heart of a brand/product

- How Metalab invests in the collective taste of the design org

- Where Sara derives signals and how she filters out the noise

- Being late on a trend is bad taste even more so than ugly design

- + a lot more

- Windsurf https://windsurf.com/) and [Suno](https://suno.com/home?wpsrc=Google%20AdWords&wpcid=22042553892&wpscid=173890219393&wpcrid=726251362516&wpkwid=kwd-2827037661&wpkwn=suno&wpkmatch=e&wpsnetn=g&gad_campaignid=22042553892&gbraid=0AAAAA9pWpduFan7icL90FczgyQploCsYi) rebrands

- Jony Ive’s Stripe Sessions talk (https://stripe.com/sessions/2025/a-conversation-with-sir-jony-ive)

- Erica Hall’s book “Just Enough Research” (https://www.mulebooks.com/just-enough-research)

- Anthropic’s Machines of Loving Grace paper (https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace)

- Blok for focus (https://blok.so/)