The founding manifesto of AXD by Tony Wood. Five principles for designing trust-governed human-agent relationships in the age of agentic AI..
| Dimension | Traditional UX | Agentic Experience Design (AXD) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary material | Attention and affordance | Trust and delegation |
| User state | Present, navigating | Absent, delegating |
| Design output | Screens and interfaces | Outcomes and constraints |
| Temporal model | Session-based | Relationship-based |
| Success metric | Task completion | Trust calibration |
The AXD Manifesto is the founding declaration of Agentic Experience Design \u2014 a document that establishes the five principles, core claims, and philosophical foundations of the discipline. Written by Tony Wood in September 2024, it argues that the age of agentic AI requires a design discipline that is not a rebrand of UX but a parallel field built on trust architecture, delegation design, and outcome specification. The Manifesto is the canonical starting point for understanding AXD.
The five founding principles of AXD are: (1) Agency Requires Intentional Delegation \u2014 every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation. (2) Trust is the Primary Material \u2014 AXD works in trust rather than attention. (3) Absence is the Primary Use State \u2014 the most consequential experiences happen when no one is watching. (4) Relationships Have Temporality \u2014 agentic experiences accumulate history over time. (5) Outcomes Replace Outputs \u2014 AXD designers specify re
AXD (Agentic Experience Design) is not a rebrand or specialisation of UX \u2014 it is a parallel discipline. UX was built for screen-based interactions where the user is present and navigating an interface. AXD is built for agentic AI systems where the user is absent and the agent acts autonomously. In UX, the designer specifies what appears on screen. In AXD, the designer specifies what results \u2014 the outcomes, constraints, and conditions for human re-engagement. AXD works in trust architec
Agentic AI needs a new design discipline because traditional UX was built for three assumptions that agentic AI dismantles: the user is present, the screen is the medium, and the interaction is the unit of design. When an AI agent acts autonomously \u2014 shopping, negotiating, transacting \u2014 the user is absent, there is no screen, and the relationship replaces the interaction. These are not edge cases to be patched into existing UX frameworks; they are foundational inversions that require a
Delegation design is the practice of designing the structures through which humans grant, constrain, monitor, and revoke authority given to autonomous agents. It determines what an agent is permitted to do, for how long, under what conditions, and what triggers human re-engagement. Delegation design is the foundational design artifact of any agentic system \u2014 without it, there is no principled boundary between human intention and machine action. It encompasses scope, duration, escalation con
Section 01 · A Founding Declaration Version 1.0 · September 2024 · Tony Wood For thirty years, designers shaped the experience. We built the flows, mapped the journeys, crafted the affordances through which human intention flowed into action. We became very good at designing for systems that wait. We are now designing for systems that act. Autonomous agents do not wait for instructions. They anticipate. They orchestrate. They operate in the world while the human is absent - booking, filing, deciding, transacting - on behalf of the person who gave them permission, once, some time ago. The tools we built for screen-based design - user flows, wireframes, interaction patterns, usability heuristics - were forged for a world that no longer exists as the primary design challenge. Agentic Experience Design is not UX for AI. It is the design of trust-governed This manifesto states what AXD is, what it requires, and what it must not become. It is the living document at the centre of a new field. It will be revised. It will be contested. That is the condition of any valued discipline worth building. Agentic Experience Design is the discipline that emerges when machines begin to act in the world on our behalf. It addresses the five acts of the human-agent relationship: granting authority, setting boundaries, watching from a distance, stepping back in when needed, and rebuilding confidence after failure. It operates at the boundary between human intention and machine action - a boundary that UX has never been required to design because, until now, machines did not act without being told to. AXD draws from human factors, cognitive psychology, behavioural science, ethics, systems design, and service design. But it synthesises these into a new practice because none of them, alone, is sufficient for the challenge of designing human-agent relationships at scale. The AXD requires designers to develop fluency in domains they have not traditionally needed to master: