Last week Haavn ran an AI prototyping session with Expedia Group's design leadership in London. The brief was deceptively simple: make, make, make.
For design especially, the shift from designing to making really matters. AI collapses the gap between idea and artifact. You stop describing experiences in static screens and start touching the medium directly. The designers who lean into this, who build, not just describe, will shape what comes next.
The room included the full design org (product, content, UX research, customer advocacy) and the full spectrum of AI comfort, from seasoned adopters to people picking up AI coding tools for the first time. The prevailing mood was honest: "I know this is powerful, but I'm not seeing it used well yet."
We set the stage with a talk on the future of product, then generated a quick, data-driven visualization to help people get comfortable with the tools. Next we worked with real datasets, writing queries and exploring large volumes of data in natural language. That set up the biggest chunk of the day: pulling those pieces together to build working prototypes that people could take with them and show off to their teams.
People went from cautious to bought-in fast. When you build something real from data in 60 minutes, the conversation changes.
Rachel Been and the Expedia Group design team already get that, which is what made this session so good. More to come.
