Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is the discipline for designing trust-governed relationships between humans and autonomous AI systems. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, United Kingdom, AXD addresses how humans delegate, calibrate, observe, interrupt, and recover trust in 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 Failure Architecture framework is an AXD methodology for designing how autonomous AI agents detect, respond to, and recover from failures. It treats failure not as an exception but as a designed state, with specific protocols for different failure types: operational failures, trust violations, scope breaches, and cascading failures.
Failure architecture supports trust recovery by ensuring failures are handled transparently and consistently. When an agent fails, the framework triggers: immediate safe-state transition, principal notification with honest explanation, damage assessment and remediation, and a structured trust repair process. This designed response preserves the possibility of relationship recovery.
Framework 10 of 12 · Recovery Phase · Graceful degradation The kintsugi principle: failures repaired visibly become sources of deeper trust Commerce Application: Transaction reversal and dispute A design template for how agentic systems fail gracefully - including detection, communication, containment, recovery, and trust restoration. The kintsugi principle: failures repaired visibly become sources of deeper trust. Failure Architecture Blueprint: Core Principles The measure of an agentic system is not whether it fails - all systems fail. The measure is how it fails: how quickly it detects, how honestly it communicates, how effectively it contains, and how completely it recovers. Failure Architecture Blueprint: Implementation Patterns Failure Architecture Blueprint: Commerce Applications Kintsugi teaches that broken things repaired with gold become more beautiful than they were before. In agentic design, failures handled with transparency and care become the foundation of deeper trust. Failure Architecture Blueprint: Guidance for Teams Failure Architecture Blueprint: Lifecycle Connections Failure Architecture Blueprint: What Comes Next Failure Architecture handles what happens when things go wrong. The next framework - Onboarding & Capability Discovery Framework Failure Architecture Blueprint: The Framework Ecosystem Navigate the complete lifecycle of Agentic Experience Design. Each framework addresses a distinct phase of the human-agent relationship. Multi-Agent Orchestration Visibility Model Agent Memory & Context Continuity Framework Explainability & Observability Design Standard Onboarding & Capability Discovery Framework Ethical Constraint & Value Alignment Architecture