There’s no shortage of writing about AI right now. Most of it is about prompts. Most of it is about chat interfaces. Most of it treats “AI design” as a UX problem for a single conversation between a person and a model. That’s not what this is.

This is a blog about the bigger design problem underneath. The one that shows up the moment a team tries to ship a real product. Humans, agents, and systems: three kinds of actors, all doing work, all acting on each other, all living inside something somebody has to design. That something has a shape. The shape needs a vocabulary. It needs premises, phenomena, definitions, lineage, a working method. That’s the project.

I’ve been calling it HAS-D: Human-Agent-System Design. A new sub-discipline of HCI for the agentic era. HCI has made room for new territory before. CSCW named the design problem of cooperative work. HAI named human-agent interaction. HRI named human-robot interaction. Each got named when a new kind of interaction grew big enough to need its own vocabulary. HAS-D is next. It treats the Human, the Agent, and the System as three co-equal design objects, instead of leaving the System as infrastructure.

v1.0 is written. Thirteen concepts. A triad. Prior art named, because new frames stand on shoulders, not out of thin air. A blog plan. v1.0 doesn’t mean finished. It means ready to meet readers, take pressure, and evolve in public. That’s what’s happening here.

If you’ve spent any part of the last five years building, shipping, testing, or collaborating with agentic products, welcome. This is for you. Come in.

Chad