thiagoxikota.com · xikota.design · LinkedIn · Medium · ORCID
Senior Product Designer and founder of Xikota Design, a design studio and mentorship practice based in Florianópolis, Brazil. Researcher at Lemme, the design, media and knowledge lab of UFSC's graduate Design program. Brazilian-Japanese, yonsei (fourth generation).
Everything I make sits on one thesis: as AI accelerates execution, the designer's value moves to understanding problems, specifying solutions and validating results. I design products, research how generative AI reshapes interface design, mentor designers, and write about what remains when the tools change.
Two named concepts run through the work: Structural Convergence, the drift toward sameness in unspecified AI output, and Specification Literacy, the ability to tell the machine precisely what to build and why.
| Paper | Venue | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Structural Convergence in AI-Generated Media | AIMEDIA 2026 (IARIA), Nice | Published |
| Designing Against Defaults: Prompt-Side Control Strategies for AI-Assisted Interface Prototyping | AID 2026, Seoul | Under review |
| Bold vs DSGov: comparative accessibility audit of Brazil's public design systems, 277 WCAG 2.1 AA non-conformities documented with six tools | UFSC, undergraduate thesis | Deposited, grade 10/10 |
Design na Era da IA (Design in the AI Era) · Casa do Código, in production. A book about what happens to the designer's role when execution gets cheap, written on the same spine as the research.
O cursor continua piscando. Agora ele espera a sua especificação. The cursor is still blinking. Now it waits for your specification.
- Wellhub · Global Product Designer · end-to-end journeys and accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) on a wellbeing platform serving about 50 million users across 18 countries
- Laboratório Bridge (UFSC/MEC) · UX/UI for Jornada do Estudante, a federal education platform with 14 million users, building with the Bold design system
- Multidrop · Lead Product Designer and only designer at a German startup; user activation grew from 25% to 50%
- touch-grass · open-source brutalist design system: zero rounded corners, zero grey text, zero animation
- aimedia2026-supplementary-data · visual dataset for the AIMEDIA 2026 paper on structural convergence
- bold-dsgov-a11y-dataset · raw Axe audit data and analysis scripts behind the Bold vs DSGov thesis
- ai-collective-content-lab · white-label content tooling built for The AI Collective Florianópolis chapter
- The AI Collective Florianópolis · Chapter Lead, first chapter in southern Brazil
- IxDA Florianópolis · volunteer organizer
- Mentorship · 10+ designers mentored one-on-one
- The hardest problem isn't the screen · talk at UX Time 2026 · recording
Four Mount Fujis drawn as one seal. At rest it reads X, the spelling a Brazilian registry office gave the family name in 1930.
Rotated 45 degrees, the peaks close into the kanji 田 (ta, rice field), the root of the original name, Shikoda (志小田).
Vermilion is the color of the hanko, the personal seal used as a signature.
Work and collaboration: LinkedIn
Notas de Produto: research notes on how AI is changing design. Method, not news.
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