Pontus Wärnestål

From Pixels to Conversation: Systematic Crafting AI-Powered Experiences

As AI moves from back-end infrastructure into the heart of user experience, designers face a new challenge: shaping interactions with services that don’t just respond, but reason, anticipate, and express. The craft of UX now extends beyond screens into voices, behaviors, and personalities. How do we give AI experiences the same consistency, clarity, and brand fidelity that visual design systems brought to apps and websites? This talk introduces the Conversational Design System (CDS), a framework that adapts the principles of design systems to the realities of AI-powered interaction. By defining reusable dialogue components, stylistic tokens, and configuration layers, CDS helps teams design assistants that are coherent, emotionally intelligent, and deeply aligned with brand identity. Drawing parallels to the evolution of GUI design systems, we will explore how dialogue and personality can be modularized, constrained, and tuned — without losing the human touch that makes them engaging. For UX designers, researchers, and product thinkers, this session offers both inspiration and practical structure: a way to approach AI not as a black box, but as a new design material, with its own grammar, constraints, and opportunities for craft.

Pontus Wärnestål (PhD) is an award-winning designer, researcher, and educator with over two decades of experience shaping the intersection of human-centered design and emerging technologies. Author of Designing AI-Powered Services and 40+ peer-reviewed publications, Pontus has led design and AI initiatives across industry, academia, and startups, and delivered design work in both public and private sectors. Today, as Senior Designer at Ambition Grp, and Deputy Professor at Halmstad University, Pontus helps organizations translate cutting-edge AI into meaningful, brand-aligned user experiences.