Creative prompts, April 2026
Issue of the Convocat newsletter Creative Prompts: garden updates, news for content professionals, seeds, and what I'm reading.
Dear Convofriends!
I’m so happy to reconnect with you all, and yesterday’s Convoclub really left me energised. So I thought, why not try a newsletter of some sorts. Probably going to be highly irregular, but hey, let’s go with the flow.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve created www.maaike.ai, a digital garden and a playground for my adventures in human thinking & writing and generative AI. It’s also where I publish my latest articles and jottings.
From the garden
Is conversation still a useful metaphor for human-machine interaction? Up till now, we’ve quietly assumed that, just because it mimics frictionless interaction between humans, conversation is the best interaction model for human-machine interaction as well. I’m exploring different perspectives; this article shows thoughts and ideas on alternative metaphors.
A digital garden as central space for my thoughts and writing One thing that I really miss doing lately, is writing longer pieces that require a bit of thinking, mulling and reordering. I typically resort to videos nowadays, and, to be honest, Claude is a pretty mean writing assistant for factual, functional texts. But I really miss sitting in front of a screen that doesn’t talk back, doesn’t distract and just offers me space for my own head.
garden-as-metaphor I really liked the idea of a place where things are allowed to be messy, unfinished, and in progress. And after about three weeks, I find this metaphor not only holds really well, but also gives me inspiration for extending it for separate parts of my website.
What’s in the news
Designing for agentic AI: practical UX patterns for control, consent, and accountability — Smashing Magazine on UX patterns for agentic AI: how do you design for consent and accountability when AI acts on your behalf?
The arrival of AI demands a new epistemic paradigm — argues we need a distributed epistemology that assigns credit and responsibility across human-AI networks, not just individual minds.
The internet’s hidden creative renaissance — people building personal, intentional sites again as a quiet rebellion against algorithmic platforms.
Seed of thought
Funny, isn’t it: for years, buttons were a no-go in chatbots: we should design voice first, natural language, conversational interaction. And lo and behold: Anthropic is reviving good old buttons-and-IVR! Much to my own delight, there’s nothing wrong with some solid, deterministic routing.
What I’m reading
Bacteria to AI by N. Katherine Hayles. This book is something to savour slowly and deliberately. It’s giving me so much new vocabulary for describing what I experience when I work with AI: definitely not embodied or conscious, yet weirdly cognitive and attuned.
Happening now
Cohort 17 of my Maven course is open: GenAI design fundamentals. The OG GenAI fundamentals course with a substantial refresh.
Looking forward to seeing you in the next meetup. Groetjes, talk soon! 🌸