About the E-P-I-A-S × SAE Framework
From John Maeda's Design in Tech Report 2026: From UX to AX, presented at SXSW 2026. This framework maps AI adoption for product designers along two axes:
SAE Levels (Automation)
| L0 | Manual — Classical Designer |
| L1 | AI-Assisted — Marketing Designer × AI |
| L2 | Partially Automated — Product Designer × AI |
| L3 | Guided Automation — Design Engineer × AI |
| L4 | Mostly Automated — Super Design Engineer × AI |
| L5 | Full Automation — AI × AI (aspirational) |
E-P-I-A-S (Maturity)
| E | Explorer — Experimenting and building intuition. Quality varies, still learning what works. |
| P | Practitioner — Consistent habits and repeatable techniques. Process is reliable. |
| I | Integrator — Fully integrated into workflow with documented decisions and traceability. |
| A | Architect — Builds reusable systems and templates that others adopt and trust. |
| S | Steward — Sets organizational standards, mentors others, and governs practice. |
“An S-Steward at L1 is more valuable than an E-Explorer at L4. Depth of judgment beats breadth of tooling.” — John Maeda, DIT 2026
This framework is a living document. The source content may have been updated since this app was built. Check the GitHub repository for the latest version.