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As AI moves beyond the screen and into the physical world, the next generation of intelligent products will be defined less by bigger models than by context, trust, and the ability to act. Renowned industrial designer Robert Brunner argues they'll be judged by whether they behave in a way you can predict, understand and switch off. His view: "smart" gadgets of the last decade were only connected. Give a product context and agency and you get something new, judgment, and with it a design problem that now pulls in ethics and psychology.
Brunner is the founder and creative director of Ammunition and one of the few designers who has shaped every major shift in personal tech. His work includes Apple's original PowerBook and Beats by Dre headphones, and sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian. Onstage at HumanX Amsterdam, I wanted to know what he's learned, from a smart home that knows nothing about him to a wearable that ran into a social problem no LED could fix.
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Three things to listen for
1. The best AI products may do less
Brunner's example is the June oven, a countertop oven with computer vision that recognized your food and took decisions off your plate. He also insisted it look like an oven, because familiarity is the entry point, and rethinking everything from scratch can wall people off.
2. Wearables have two audiences
Ammunition designed the Limitless pendant, later acquired by Meta, as quiet jewelry people would actually wear. The lesson: an LED that says it's recording isn't enough. You're designing for the wearer and for everyone standing next to them, and that's the gap that turned smart glasses into "pervert glasses."
3. Behavior is the new interface, and restraint is part of it
Trust, he says, comes from predictability, clear boundaries on data, and an off switch. Then comes the idea he says almost nobody is talking about: when should a product stop talking to you?
It's a new design material, like wood, glass, metal. Now we're designing intelligence.
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