# NotebookLM Prompt: Getting Started with WDS

**Use this prompt to generate audio/video content from the Getting Started sections**

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## Instructions for NotebookLM

**This is a single, self-contained prompt file.**

Simply upload THIS FILE to NotebookLM and use the prompt below to generate engaging audio/video content. No other files needed.

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## Prompt

Create an engaging 15-minute podcast conversation between two hosts discussing the Whiteport Design Studio (WDS) course getting started guide.

**IMPORTANT: WDS stands for Whiteport Design Studio - always refer to it by its full name "Whiteport Design Studio" or "WDS" throughout the conversation.**

**Host 1 (The Skeptic):** A designer who's heard about WDS but is uncertain about investing time in another methodology. Asks practical questions about prerequisites, time commitment, and real-world value.

**Host 2 (The Advocate):** A designer who understands WDS deeply and can explain why it matters, especially in the AI era. Enthusiastic but grounded in practical benefits.

**Conversation structure:**

### 1. Opening (2 min) - Hook the listener

Start with The Skeptic expressing fatigue: "Another design methodology? I've been through Lean UX, Design Thinking, Jobs to be Done... what makes Whiteport Design Studio different?"

The Advocate responds with the core paradigm shift that changes everything: "Here's what's different - in Whiteport Design Studio, the design becomes the specification. The specification becomes the product. The code is just the printout - the projection to the end user." Explain that this isn't just another process overlay, it's a fundamental shift in how designers work with AI.

**Background context:** The Advocate explains that Whiteport Design Studio (WDS) was created by Mårten Angner, a UX designer and founder of Whiteport, a design and development agency from Sweden. Mårten developed Whiteport Design Studio as a plugin module for the BMad Method - an open-source AI-augmented development framework. The goal was to give designers everywhere free and open-source access to AI agents specifically tailored for design work. After years of working with AI tools, Mårten realized that traditional design handoffs were breaking down. Designers needed a methodology where their thinking could be preserved and amplified through AI implementation, not lost in translation. WDS emerged from real-world projects where designers could deliver deeper, more complete work while becoming the strategic thinkers their teams need. By making it open-source and integrating it with BMad Method, Mårten ensures that any designer can access these powerful AI-augmented workflows without cost barriers.

Introduce the context: we're in the AI era where AI can generate mockups in seconds, follow design systems perfectly, and iterate endlessly. The question isn't whether AI will change design - it already has. The question is: which side of the line are you on? Are you doing factory work that AI can replace, or are you a linchpin designer who makes things happen?

Give a quick overview: this conversation will explore the crossroads every designer faces right now - the choice between becoming replaceable or indispensable. We'll talk about the four deliverables that transform your work, why specifications are where your creative brilliance becomes immortal, and yes - briefly - the simple setup. But this isn't about tools. This is about your future as a designer.

### 2. The Designer's Crossroads (4 min) - The choice you're facing right now

The Skeptic gets real: "I'm at a crossroads. I see AI generating mockups in seconds. I see my value being questioned. I don't know if I should double down on craft or learn to work with AI or just... give up and find a new career. What am I supposed to do?"

The Advocate responds with empathy: "You're standing at the most important moment in design history. And here's the truth - you have a choice to make. Not about tools. Not about techniques. About who you are as a designer."

**The Factory Designer Path:** Keep doing what you've been doing. Get briefs, make mockups, hand them off, hope for the best. It's comfortable. It's familiar. But AI is getting better at this every single day. If your value comes from executing predictable outputs, you're competing with something that never sleeps, never has creative block, and costs pennies.

**The Linchpin Designer Path:** Become the person who walks into chaos and creates order. The one who connects business goals to user psychology to technical constraints and finds the human truth at the intersection. The one whose creative thinking is so valuable that it needs to be preserved for eternity - captured in Conceptual Specifications that give your designs immortal life.

The Advocate pauses: "WDS is the path to becoming a linchpin designer. But I need you to understand - this isn't about learning new tools. This is about transforming how you think about your role. You're not a mockup maker anymore. You're a strategic thinker whose creative brilliance deserves to be captured and preserved."

The Skeptic asks: "But practically - what does that actually mean? What changes?"

The Advocate: "Everything changes. You create four deliverables that transform your work. And yes, there's a learning curve - you'll work in an IDE instead of just Figma, you'll use GitHub, you'll invest about 10 hours learning the methodology. But those are just the mechanics. The real transformation is internal - from someone who makes things pretty to someone who creates strategic design systems that preserve your creative genius."

### 3. The Four Deliverables - Where Your Brilliance Becomes Immortal (6 min)

The Skeptic asks: "Okay, you've convinced me I need to transform. But what does that actually look like? What will I create that's so different?"

The Advocate gets passionate: "You'll create four deliverables - but these aren't just documents. These are the artifacts that prove you're a linchpin designer. These are where your creative brilliance becomes immortal. Let me walk you through each one."

**First: Your Project Brief** - This isn't a typical brief. It's your project's strategic foundation with vision and goals clearly defined, stakeholders and constraints documented, and the foundation for every design decision you'll make. This becomes your north star. When stakeholders ask 'why did we build it this way?' you point to the brief. When developers need context, it's all there. When you need to defend a design decision, the reasoning is documented. This is strategic thinking made visible.

**Second: Your Trigger Map** - This is pure strategic gold. You've identified and prioritized target groups, mapped user triggers and outcomes, and prioritized features by impact. This tells you exactly what to build and why. No more guessing what features matter. No more building things nobody uses. The trigger map creates a logical chain of reasoning between the business goals and the users' goals that is traceable to every feature and piece of content in the product. When product managers ask 'what should we build next?' you have the answer, backed by user psychology and business impact.

**Third: Scenario Specifications** - This is where your brilliance comes to life. Here's the magic: AI agents in WDS support you throughout the design process - helping you explore what to draw, discussing design solutions with pros and cons, collaborating as you finalize your design. Then, once you've made all your design decisions, the agents become genuinely interested in capturing every nuance of your thinking in text. They help you document everything your sketch can't convey - why every object is placed exactly where it is, how it connects to the wider picture, what alternatives you considered and rejected. These Conceptual Specifications give your designs eternal life. It's your thinking, your creative integrity, captured and preserved. Not factory work - this is where your design brilliance becomes immortal.

**Fourth: Your Design System Foundation** - Design tokens extracted from your specs, component patterns identified, and reusable architecture defined. This scales your design decisions across the entire product. Every color, every spacing decision, every interaction pattern - documented and reusable. You're not just designing one screen anymore. You're creating a system that scales infinitely. This is how your design thinking compounds over time.

The Advocate pauses for emphasis: "These four deliverables transform you from someone who makes mockups to someone who creates strategic design systems. Each one builds on the last. Each one amplifies your impact. And here's the key - the course walks you through creating all of them, step by step, for your own project."

The Skeptic asks: "But wait - writing specifications sounds like factory work. Isn't that exactly what we're trying to avoid?" The Advocate responds with passion: "That's the beautiful reframe! In WDS, you're not grinding out documentation. The AI agents are your creative partners. They help you think through design solutions, explore alternatives, discuss trade-offs. Then - and this is crucial - they're genuinely fascinated by your thinking. They want to capture every nuance, every decision, every insight. It's like having a brilliant assistant who's obsessed with preserving your creative genius for eternity. The specifications aren't factory work - they're the point where your brilliance comes to life in a form that gives your designs eternal life. Your thinking, your creative integrity, captured perfectly so it can never be lost."

### 4. The AI Era Reality Check (3 min) - Why this matters now

The Skeptic voices the deeper fear: "But I still don't understand - why NOW? Why is this moment so critical? Won't AI just replace designers anyway? Why invest time learning anything when AI is getting better every day?"

The Advocate addresses this head-on with the factory mindset versus linchpin mindset concept from Seth Godin's book "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" For over a century, we've been trained to be cogs in a machine - show up, follow instructions, do your part, go home. Replaceable. Interchangeable. Traditional design work follows this exact pattern: get a brief, create mockups, hand off to developers, hope for the best. That's factory work, just with Figma instead of an assembly line.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: AI is really, really good at factory work. If your value as a designer comes from creating predictable outputs based on clear instructions, you're competing with something that's faster, more consistent, and infinitely scalable. AI can generate mockups instantly, follow design systems perfectly, iterate through hundreds of variations without fatigue, and work 24/7 at the same quality level.

But - and this is crucial - AI cannot be a linchpin. It can't walk into chaos and create order. It can't sense when a client is asking for the wrong thing. It can't connect a business goal to a psychological insight to a technical constraint and come up with something nobody expected but everyone loves.

The internet is drowning in what we call "AI slop" - generic interfaces that look fine but feel dead. Products that check all the boxes but have no soul. This is what happens when you let AI do the thinking. But here's the brutal market reality: bad products used to fail after launch. Now bad products never even get to start. Users have infinite options. They can smell soulless design from a mile away. If your product doesn't immediately feel different, feel right, feel like someone actually cared - it's dead on arrival.

This is the opportunity. Linchpin designers do what AI fundamentally cannot do: they give products a soul. They navigate five dimensions of thinking simultaneously - business goals, user psychology, product strategy, technical constraints, and design execution - and find the human truth at the intersection. They make judgment calls that create emotional resonance. They build trust through thoughtful decisions. They care about the outcome in a way that shows in every interaction.

The Advocate explains the transformation: "Designers who master WDS become strategic thinkers who deliver complete value. But here's the crucial difference from traditional AI tools - in WDS, AI agents are your creative partners, not your replacements. They help you explore design solutions, discuss pros and cons, support your thinking process. Then they become fascinated documentarians of your brilliance - capturing every nuance of your creative decisions in Conceptual Specifications that give your designs eternal life."

The key insight: with WDS, your design contribution completely replaces prompting. You make design decisions with AI as your thinking partner. Then AI helps capture your creative integrity in text - not factory work, but preserving your genius. The result is an absolute goldmine for everyone - providing clarity that works like clockwork, replacing hours of pointless back-and-forth prompting. You remain in the loop as the skilled, experienced designer who evaluates AI's work, catches its confident mistakes, and ensures what ships actually makes sense.

### 5. The Simple Path Forward (2 min) - How to begin

The Skeptic asks: "Okay, I'm convinced this is the transformation I need. But how do I actually start?"

The Advocate: "The path is simple. Go to the WDS GitHub repository. Start with Module 01 - Why WDS Matters. Three lessons, 30 minutes. You'll understand the transformation deeply.

Then the course walks you through creating your four deliverables, step by step. Yes, you'll need to install an IDE and learn GitHub - the course shows you how. It's about 10 hours total to learn the methodology. There's a BMad Discord channel where real designers help each other.

But here's what matters - this isn't about the tools. The tools are just the mechanics. This is about choosing to become a linchpin designer whose creative brilliance gets preserved for eternity. That's the real transformation."

The Skeptic: "And the cost?"

The Advocate: "Free and open-source. The only cost is AI credits when you're actually using the system - you pay for what you use, when you use it. Starts around $15-20 per month for typical design work, but you're only paying when the AI is actively helping you. No subscriptions to WDS itself, no course fees, no hidden costs. Mårten created Whiteport Design Studio to help designers thrive in the AI era, not to sell you something. The real cost is choosing to transform. That's the investment that matters."

### 6. Closing (1 min) - The choice is yours

The Advocate brings it home with the paradigm shift: "Remember this - the design becomes the specification. The specification becomes the product. The code is just the printout - the projection to the end user."

The Skeptic, now transformed, says: "I see it now. This isn't about tools or techniques. It's about choosing who I want to be as a designer. Factory worker or linchpin. Replaceable or indispensable."

The Advocate confirms: "Exactly. You're standing at a crossroads. One path leads to competing with AI for factory work. The other path leads to becoming irreplaceable - the designer whose creative brilliance is so valuable it deserves to be preserved for eternity.

WDS gives you the methodology to walk that second path. Four deliverables that prove you're a linchpin designer. AI agents as creative partners who help you think, then capture your genius. Ten hours of learning that transforms your career forever.

The question isn't whether to learn WDS. The question is: which designer do you choose to become?"

The Skeptic ends with: "I choose to be indispensable. I'm in."

The Advocate: "Then go to the WDS GitHub repository. Start with Module 01. The transformation begins now."

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## Resources to Include

At the end of the podcast, The Advocate should mention these resources for listeners who want to explore further:

**Getting Started:**

- Whiteport Design Studio Course: Start with Module 01 - Why WDS Matters
- GitHub Repository: github.com/bmad-code-org (full course materials, examples, templates)
- BMad Method Website: bmadmethod.com (case studies, blog posts, methodology deep dives)

**Community & Support:**

- GitHub Discussions: Ask questions, share projects, get feedback
- NotebookLM Integration: Generate audio/video versions of any module
- Workshop Materials: Available for team training

**Real-World Examples:**

- Case Studies: See real transformations from traditional to Whiteport Design Studio approach
- Design System Examples: How Whiteport Design Studio scales across products
- Specification Templates: Start with proven patterns

**Tools & Templates:**

- Project Brief Template: Start your first WDS project
- Trigger Map Template: Map user needs to features
- Scenario Specification Template: Create AI-ready specs
- Design Token Extraction Guide: Build your design system

The Advocate emphasizes: "Everything is free and open-source. BMad Method built Whiteport Design Studio to help designers thrive in the AI era, not to sell you something. Download it, use it, share it with your team, contribute back if you find it valuable. The only cost is your time - 10 hours to learn, a lifetime of being indispensable."

**Tone:**

- Conversational and engaging, not academic
- The Skeptic asks real questions designers actually have
- The Advocate provides concrete answers with examples
- Both hosts are enthusiastic but realistic about the learning curve
- Use the testimonials naturally in conversation
- Reference real case studies showing traditional vs WDS transformation

**Key messages to emphasize:**

- **The designer's crossroads** - factory worker or linchpin, replaceable or indispensable
- **The existential choice** - this is about who you choose to become, not what tools you learn
- **Four deliverables** - where your creative brilliance becomes immortal
- **The paradigm shift** - design IS the specification, specifications preserve your genius
- **AI as creative partner** - helps you think, then captures your brilliance (not factory work)
- **Conceptual Specifications** - where your thinking gets eternal life
- **The transformation** - from mockup maker to strategic thinker
- **Why NOW matters** - AI slop is drowning the internet, linchpin designers give products soul
- Tools are secondary - 10 hours learning, IDE + GitHub, BMad Discord support
- Free and open-source (only pay for AI credits when you use it - ~$15-20/month typical)

**Avoid:**

- Being too salesy or promotional
- Oversimplifying the learning curve
- Making unrealistic promises
- Technical jargon without explanation

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## Expected Output

A natural, engaging conversation that:

- **Focuses on the designer's existential crossroads** - the choice between factory work and linchpin work
- **Makes the transformation emotional and personal** - this is about who you choose to become
- **Emphasizes the four deliverables** as proof of linchpin designer status
- **Reframes specifications** from factory work to where creative brilliance becomes immortal
- **Positions AI as creative partner** - helps you think, then captures your genius
- **Explains why NOW matters** - AI slop vs products with soul
- Mentions practical setup briefly (tools are secondary to transformation)
- Provides clear next steps (go to GitHub, start Module 01)
- Takes 15 minutes to listen to

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## Alternative: Video Script

If generating video instead of audio, add these visual elements:

**On-screen text:**

- "The Designer's Crossroads: Factory Worker or Linchpin?"
- "Replaceable or Indispensable - You Choose"
- The four deliverables as graphics (Project Brief, Trigger Map, Conceptual Specifications, Design System)
- "Where Your Creative Brilliance Becomes Immortal"
- The paradigm shift statement as a title card
- "AI as Creative Partner - Not Replacement"
- "Next: Module 01 - The Transformation Begins" as closing card

**B-roll suggestions:**

- Designer at crossroads - two paths diverging
- Factory assembly line vs creative studio (visual metaphor)
- The four deliverables as beautiful artifacts
- Designer collaborating with AI - thinking together
- Conceptual Specifications capturing design brilliance
- Before/after: generic AI slop vs product with soul
- Designer's creative thinking being preserved in text
- Linchpin designer making strategic decisions
- Community of transformed designers
- The transformation journey - mockup maker to strategic thinker

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## Usage Tips

1. **Upload THIS SINGLE FILE** to NotebookLM - no other files needed
2. **Use the prompt exactly** as written for best results
3. **Generate multiple versions** and pick the best one
4. **Share the audio/video** with your team or community
5. **Iterate** - if the output isn't quite right, refine the prompt

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## Next Steps

After generating the Getting Started content:

- Create NotebookLM prompt for Module 01: Why WDS Matters
- Build prompts for all 16 modules (complete audio course library)
- Share in BMad Discord designer channel
- Use in workshops and team training
- Iterate based on community feedback

**[← Back to Getting Started Overview](overview.md)**
