10:00–10:15 AMET
Opening remarks
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Program
Two days of talks, live sensemaking, and practical conversations that will shape the future of UX—and your future in it. We've designed both "In person" or "Remote" formats to give you a world-class conference experience from wherever you attend.
Research, knowledge, and organizational orchestration
Day one moves from strategic research and knowledge sensemaking into the operating models organizations need to remain human-centered in a post-AI era.
9:00–10:00 AMET
In person
Registration and breakfast
10:15–11:00 AMET
Strategic Research
Research has escaped the research team. Designers interview. Product managers test. Data teams interpret behaviour. AI synthesizes. Researchers enable, coach, connect and make sense. Research is becoming less of a role and more of a distributed organizational capability.
The result? Organizations aren’t short of evidence: they’re drowning in it. So the question is no longer how we get organizations to use research strategically, but how we help them to metabolize knowledge and create the conditions for action. No matter where we sit, or what our job title is.
We’ll zoom out from the individual changes reshaping research to look at the bigger shift: from data, to insight, to knowledge health. And why, now, turning what an organization knows into what it does is the most important commercial advantage it can have.
Then we’ll get into the skills that shift demands. What happens to critical thinking, nuance and our ability to sit with uncertainty when answers are instant and abundant? How do we create the psychological safety needed for hard conversations that drive change? How do we create the conditions for action and make ourselves heard when fact competes with feeling? And as research shows up in new places, where else can these skills create value if we stop trying to get back to where we were?
Together, these talks explore the new knowledge system that is emerging, the people within it and the skills we need next: for people newly expected to do research, researchers evolving their practice, and leaders shaping the capabilities, careers and organizations around them.
11:00–11:15 AMET
From Research to Knowledge
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
We spent years getting better at producing insight—but what happens if insight is no longer the point?
Research has shifted. Not simply because of AI, democratisation, new tools or shrinking teams, but because organizations are awash with evidence. Research studies sit alongside behavioural data, customer conversations, market intelligence, support tickets, experiments, lived experience, signal, feeling and a growing amount of machine-generated synthesis. The scarce and valuable thing isn’t data. Increasingly, it isn’t insight either.
It’s the ability of an organization to turn what it knows into better decisions: its knowledge health.
This talk puts some of the changes happening to research into that bigger picture. It will track how we have evolved from data, to insight, to knowledge, and ask what it means to work in a knowledge ecosystem where research is increasingly a skill practised across an organization rather than an activity contained within one team.
For researchers, that changes the job. For everyone now expected to research as part of their role, it changes the skills and responsibilities that come with it. For agencies and consultants, it changes the partnership. And for leaders, it raises a bigger question: if knowledge is becoming a commercial advantage, how do we build organizations that are actually good at knowing things and acting on it?
11:15–11:30 AMET
Session information to come
Brooke HopperSr Principal Designer, Machine Intelligence & New Technology
11:30–11:45 AMET
Unpacking Uncomfortable Truths
Candi WilliamsCoach and Content Design Leader
While everyone's talking about AI taking our jobs, what aren't we talking about?
What about how it might be impacting critical thinking or our ability to hold nuance. The space to sit with a question instead of prompting our way past it. The permission to not have an opinion on everything, immediately, publicly.
For so long, research has helped us hold contradictions, interrogate bias, and be comfortable not knowing yet. But in a world that increasingly rewards speed and certainty—where a new tool or update drops every hour—are those skills quietly under threat, and what does that mean for all of us?
This talk makes space for slightly uncomfortable truths: what it means to accept you can't be an expert in everything. What if you don't want to make AI your entire personality? How to stay authentic when everything sounds the same. How to look after yourself through layoffs and uncertainty. And why caring a little less about some things might be how to care more about what matters. Part coach, part design leader, part person who is deeply interested in humankind—I don't have this figured out. But I do believe these are the conversations we're not making enough space for. So, let's do that. Together.
11:45 AM–12:00 PMET
Dislocation
Robert FabricantCo-Founder & Partner, Dalberg Design
Much of the debate within the UX community during this period of transition has been focused on redefining our “what,” as in: what are the critical UX skills we need to acquire for the future, or what are the most important ways to increase our value to business leaders again. This can be seen as a reflection of the deep desire amongst our community to “get back to where we were” in the increasingly AI dominated tech sector. But, as many are finding, you can't really go back.
This talk will focus on the “where” and “how” instead of the “what,” as in: where else can we apply our skills for the greatest impact and how will this offer new pathways to grow. It will draw on Robert’s deeply personal journey to explore the frontiers of UX, user research and strategic design in social systems in a diverse, global context. Drawing from his 15+ years in social impact and systems design, Robert will tease out dimensions of design practice that have been hiding in plain sight, and might open up the dialogue about where we go next as individuals, and as a community.
12:00–12:30 PMET
In person
Coffee break
12:30–1:15 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How might we better metabolize knowledge?
Dan BrownPrincipal, Curious Squid
With three diverse perspectives laid out on the modern research and knowledge management landscape by our Thursday morning speakers, we will collectively take a step back and get practical. Join information architect Dan Brown as he leads us through what he sees as the ties that bind the stories speakers shared around this theme, as well as what the tangible take-aways are when you get back to work on Monday.
1:15–1:30 PMET
Closing thoughts
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
1:30–2:45 PMET
In person
Lunch break
From Operations to Orchestration
Operations as Orchestration explores how organizations can remain human-centered as AI transforms the way products, services, and decisions are made. Rather than treating operations as back-office efficiency, this session reframes it as the coordination layer that aligns people, technology, governance, and organizational understanding. Together, these speakers explore how to build durable operating models that embed human judgment, create shared understanding, and help organizations navigate increasing complexity with confidence.
2:45–3:00 PMET
Coordinating Human-Centered Organizations in the Post-AI Era
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
As AI reshapes how organizations design, decide, and deliver, human-centered outcomes can no longer be the responsibility of a single team or discipline. In increasingly complex organizations, awareness is becoming the currency of organizational health and the shared understanding of how people, systems, AI, policies, data, and decisions influence one another. The shift from operations to orchestration is about building and sustaining that collective awareness: coordinating people, knowledge, technology, and judgment so organizations can remain adaptable, accountable, and human-centered amid continual change.
3:00–3:15 PMET
Architecting Organizational Understanding
Sean McKayFounder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant, Whole Product Thinking
Organizations have spent decades getting better at understanding customers. Today, the next challenge is helping organizations understand themselves. Sean McKay introduces Architecting Organizational Understanding—a practical framework for connecting customer insights, business strategy, operational context, and AI into shared organizational awareness. Drawing on his Whole Product Thinking framework, Sean explores why collective understanding is becoming a strategic capability, how AI amplifies both strong and weak organizational thinking, and why human-centered practitioners are uniquely positioned to architect the systems that improve alignment, decision-making, and organizational resilience.
3:15–3:30 PMET
Shared Accountability in Enterprise UX
Jamika BurgeAI Design Insights Lead, blackcomputeHER.org
As organizations accelerate product delivery with AI, research can no longer remain a siloed practice responsible for carrying the human perspective alone. Jamika Burge explores how research evolves into a shared organizational capability by distributing accountability across Product, Design, Data, and Engineering. Through practical governance models and enterprise research strategies, she demonstrates how organizations can balance speed with rigor, scale human-centered decision making, and ensure that AI-enabled innovation remains grounded in evidence, ethics, and real human needs.
3:30–3:45 PMET
The Judgment Layer: Operations After Throughput
Alison RandSenior Director, Head of Design Operations, InVision
AI has dramatically increased our ability to generate ideas, content, and decisions—but speed alone doesn’t create better outcomes. Alison Rand argues that the next frontier for operations is not oversight after the fact, but embedding judgment into organizational operating models from the beginning. Drawing on foresight, systems thinking, and living systems, she explores how organizations can establish decision rights, governance, and intentional operating practices that keep human wisdom at the center of increasingly automated work.
3:45–4:15 PMET
In person
Coffee break
4:15–5:00 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How Might We Move from Operations to Orchestration?
Sophia PraterUX Strategy Consultant and Coach, OOUX
Join Sophia Prater, creator of the Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) framework, as she brings together the key themes from the Operations as Orchestration speakers. Through live sensemaking, Sophia will connect the ideas of organizational understanding, shared governance, and embedded judgment into a cohesive perspective on the future of human-centered operations. Attendees will leave with a clearer picture of how these ideas fit together—and what they can begin applying immediately within their own organizations.
5:00–5:15 PMET
Closing Thoughts
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
Human-centered tooling and collective sensemaking
Day two explores tools that extend human capability, then brings the conference’s ideas together through live sensemaking and a closing keynote.
9:00–10:00 AMET
In person
Breakfast
10:00–10:15 AMET
Opening remarks
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Human-Centered Tooling
Human-Centered Tooling explores the concept of “tools” through multiple lenses: as the software and hardware you use and design, as catalysts for new workflows and collaboration models, and as one piece of a larger strategy or theory of change. It invites you to shift between timescales, from the daily discourse about AI developments to the broader bidirectional influence between UX and behavior, at the individual and societal levels. You’ll leave with all the ingredients you need to form a point of view on how you want to shape the relationship between people and technology and how you can lead as an agent of change toward that future.
10:15–10:30 AMET
Shaping the Tools that Shape Us
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
Stefanie Hutka's human-centered tooling session is a guide to steering AI automation to extend people's capabilities. This track explores how emerging technologies should be built ethically, thinking with us rather than for us; how these tools reshape our ways of working; and how to navigate these shifts to thrive as UX practitioners.
10:30–10:45 AMET
Tuning the Turing Machines
Dan SafferAssistant Professor of the Practice, Carnegie Mellon University
A hammer that requires practice to use is a bad hammer. A cello that doesn't is a bad cello. We judge tools by what they make; we judge instruments by what they make us. Almost every AI product right now is a tool: engineered so that what you get on day one is what you'll get in year three, and (don’t get me wrong) that's a real achievement. But what if AI products were something else? This talk makes the case for considering an instrument as a design target: capability that compounds with use instead of absconding with it. We'll go through the four properties that separate the two, and put our own practice on the table to see which of our skills we've surrendered.
10:45–11:00 AMET
What the Floor Buys the Ceiling
Changying 'Z' ZhengDesignOps Leader and Educator
Tooling raises the floor by baking good design into automation. Done right, it also raises the ceiling, giving practitioners back time for the work that matters most: what customers can see, feel, and use.
Through practical case studies of design teams in transformation, this talk explores what AI buys us when we pair speed with genuine care, and how teams can move faster without sacrificing intentionality, responsibility, or the human touch.
11:00–11:15 AMET
The Scenic Route: Navigating the New with Systems Thinking
Sheryl CababaAuthor of Closing the Loop, Optimistic Design
So much of our work as designers revolves around efficiency, particularly with the increasing integration of AI tools. What happens when we ditch the focus on efficiency and take the long way round? When we start thinking about the long-term and focus on the broader systems that surround us? This talk is centered on shifting our mindsets toward productive struggle and how we want to work and learn long-term. Sheryl will share experiences and principles for how we might navigate our evolving design approach.
11:15–11:45 AMET
Coffee break
11:45 AM–12:30 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How Might We Shape Tools that Extend Us at Every Level, from Product to Workflow to Community?
Hang XuDesign Recruiter, Collective Supply
Join Hang Xu as he connects the three speakers’ threads across “zoom levels”: from product design, to workflows, to communities beyond our teams. He’ll braid together best practices at each level, identifying intersections such as the bidirectional impact of AI tool design on our ways of working. Attendees will leave with new mindsets and frameworks to navigate—and thrive—in the current UX shift.
12:30–12:45 PMET
Closing thoughts
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
12:45–2:00 PMET
In person
Lunch break
Sensemaking
Sensemaking is the deeply personal process we use to understand complex, messy, and/or ambiguous situations so we can make better decisions and take more thoughtful action.
Honing your own sensemaking is becoming even more important in a world that makes less and less sense. Throughout the conference experience you will observe sensemakers working in the wild, both in-person and remotely. We have asked them to take us behind the scenes into their sensemaking process.
If you are allergic to seeing design theater and edutainment content at UX conferences, we believe these unique sensemaking sessions are the antidote we all collectively need.
2:00–3:00 PMET
Is the shift greater than the sum of its parts?
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Dan BrownPrincipal, Curious Squid
Sophia PraterUX Strategy Consultant and Coach, OOUX
Hang XuDesign Recruiter, Collective Supply
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
Join information architect Abby Covert for a conference wrap-up for the ages. All the sensemakers (Dan Brown, Sophia Prater, Hang Xu, Joe Elmendorf, Melissa Burnett, and Dave Hoffer) will return to help us bring all the threads together. Our collective goal: figure out where we are, what we uncovered and the paths of where this might all go and how we might support one another during this shift.
3:00–3:30 PMET
In person
Coffee break
3:30–4:15 PMET
Keynote
Closing keynote
Jesse James GarrettAI Transformation Consultant & Private Leadership Advisor, Intentional Associates
4:15–4:45 PMET
Closing Words
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Research, knowledge, and organizational orchestration
Day one moves from strategic research and knowledge sensemaking into the operating models organizations need to remain human-centered in a post-AI era.
9:30–10:00 AMET
Remote
Pre-conference Warmup
10:00–10:15 AMET
Opening remarks
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
10:15–11:00 AMET
Strategic Research
Research has escaped the research team. Designers interview. Product managers test. Data teams interpret behaviour. AI synthesizes. Researchers enable, coach, connect and make sense. Research is becoming less of a role and more of a distributed organizational capability.
The result? Organizations aren’t short of evidence: they’re drowning in it. So the question is no longer how we get organizations to use research strategically, but how we help them to metabolize knowledge and create the conditions for action. No matter where we sit, or what our job title is.
We’ll zoom out from the individual changes reshaping research to look at the bigger shift: from data, to insight, to knowledge health. And why, now, turning what an organization knows into what it does is the most important commercial advantage it can have.
Then we’ll get into the skills that shift demands. What happens to critical thinking, nuance and our ability to sit with uncertainty when answers are instant and abundant? How do we create the psychological safety needed for hard conversations that drive change? How do we create the conditions for action and make ourselves heard when fact competes with feeling? And as research shows up in new places, where else can these skills create value if we stop trying to get back to where we were?
Together, these talks explore the new knowledge system that is emerging, the people within it and the skills we need next: for people newly expected to do research, researchers evolving their practice, and leaders shaping the capabilities, careers and organizations around them.
11:00–11:15 AMET
From Research to Knowledge
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
We spent years getting better at producing insight—but what happens if insight is no longer the point?
Research has shifted. Not simply because of AI, democratisation, new tools or shrinking teams, but because organizations are awash with evidence. Research studies sit alongside behavioural data, customer conversations, market intelligence, support tickets, experiments, lived experience, signal, feeling and a growing amount of machine-generated synthesis. The scarce and valuable thing isn’t data. Increasingly, it isn’t insight either.
It’s the ability of an organization to turn what it knows into better decisions: its knowledge health.
This talk puts some of the changes happening to research into that bigger picture. It will track how we have evolved from data, to insight, to knowledge, and ask what it means to work in a knowledge ecosystem where research is increasingly a skill practised across an organization rather than an activity contained within one team.
For researchers, that changes the job. For everyone now expected to research as part of their role, it changes the skills and responsibilities that come with it. For agencies and consultants, it changes the partnership. And for leaders, it raises a bigger question: if knowledge is becoming a commercial advantage, how do we build organizations that are actually good at knowing things and acting on it?
11:15–11:30 AMET
Session information to come
Brooke HopperSr Principal Designer, Machine Intelligence & New Technology
11:30–11:45 AMET
Unpacking Uncomfortable Truths
Candi WilliamsCoach and Content Design Leader
While everyone's talking about AI taking our jobs, what aren't we talking about?
What about how it might be impacting critical thinking or our ability to hold nuance. The space to sit with a question instead of prompting our way past it. The permission to not have an opinion on everything, immediately, publicly.
For so long, research has helped us hold contradictions, interrogate bias, and be comfortable not knowing yet. But in a world that increasingly rewards speed and certainty—where a new tool or update drops every hour—are those skills quietly under threat, and what does that mean for all of us?
This talk makes space for slightly uncomfortable truths: what it means to accept you can't be an expert in everything. What if you don't want to make AI your entire personality? How to stay authentic when everything sounds the same. How to look after yourself through layoffs and uncertainty. And why caring a little less about some things might be how to care more about what matters. Part coach, part design leader, part person who is deeply interested in humankind—I don't have this figured out. But I do believe these are the conversations we're not making enough space for. So, let's do that. Together.
11:45 AM–12:00 PMET
Dislocation
Robert FabricantCo-Founder & Partner, Dalberg Design
Much of the debate within the UX community during this period of transition has been focused on redefining our “what,” as in: what are the critical UX skills we need to acquire for the future, or what are the most important ways to increase our value to business leaders again. This can be seen as a reflection of the deep desire amongst our community to “get back to where we were” in the increasingly AI dominated tech sector. But, as many are finding, you can't really go back.
This talk will focus on the “where” and “how” instead of the “what,” as in: where else can we apply our skills for the greatest impact and how will this offer new pathways to grow. It will draw on Robert’s deeply personal journey to explore the frontiers of UX, user research and strategic design in social systems in a diverse, global context. Drawing from his 15+ years in social impact and systems design, Robert will tease out dimensions of design practice that have been hiding in plain sight, and might open up the dialogue about where we go next as individuals, and as a community.
12:00–12:15 PMET
Remote
Break
12:15–12:30 PMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
12:30–1:15 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How might we better metabolize knowledge?
Dan BrownPrincipal, Curious Squid
With three diverse perspectives laid out on the modern research and knowledge management landscape by our Thursday morning speakers, we will collectively take a step back and get practical. Join information architect Dan Brown as he leads us through what he sees as the ties that bind the stories speakers shared around this theme, as well as what the tangible take-aways are when you get back to work on Monday.
1:15–1:30 PMET
Closing thoughts
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
1:30–2:00 PMET
Remote
Break
2:00–2:45 PMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
From Operations to Orchestration
Operations as Orchestration explores how organizations can remain human-centered as AI transforms the way products, services, and decisions are made. Rather than treating operations as back-office efficiency, this session reframes it as the coordination layer that aligns people, technology, governance, and organizational understanding. Together, these speakers explore how to build durable operating models that embed human judgment, create shared understanding, and help organizations navigate increasing complexity with confidence.
2:45–3:00 PMET
Coordinating Human-Centered Organizations in the Post-AI Era
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
As AI reshapes how organizations design, decide, and deliver, human-centered outcomes can no longer be the responsibility of a single team or discipline. In increasingly complex organizations, awareness is becoming the currency of organizational health and the shared understanding of how people, systems, AI, policies, data, and decisions influence one another. The shift from operations to orchestration is about building and sustaining that collective awareness: coordinating people, knowledge, technology, and judgment so organizations can remain adaptable, accountable, and human-centered amid continual change.
3:00–3:15 PMET
Architecting Organizational Understanding
Sean McKayFounder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant, Whole Product Thinking
Organizations have spent decades getting better at understanding customers. Today, the next challenge is helping organizations understand themselves. Sean McKay introduces Architecting Organizational Understanding—a practical framework for connecting customer insights, business strategy, operational context, and AI into shared organizational awareness. Drawing on his Whole Product Thinking framework, Sean explores why collective understanding is becoming a strategic capability, how AI amplifies both strong and weak organizational thinking, and why human-centered practitioners are uniquely positioned to architect the systems that improve alignment, decision-making, and organizational resilience.
3:15–3:30 PMET
Shared Accountability in Enterprise UX
Jamika BurgeAI Design Insights Lead, blackcomputeHER.org
As organizations accelerate product delivery with AI, research can no longer remain a siloed practice responsible for carrying the human perspective alone. Jamika Burge explores how research evolves into a shared organizational capability by distributing accountability across Product, Design, Data, and Engineering. Through practical governance models and enterprise research strategies, she demonstrates how organizations can balance speed with rigor, scale human-centered decision making, and ensure that AI-enabled innovation remains grounded in evidence, ethics, and real human needs.
3:30–3:45 PMET
The Judgment Layer: Operations After Throughput
Alison RandSenior Director, Head of Design Operations, InVision
AI has dramatically increased our ability to generate ideas, content, and decisions—but speed alone doesn’t create better outcomes. Alison Rand argues that the next frontier for operations is not oversight after the fact, but embedding judgment into organizational operating models from the beginning. Drawing on foresight, systems thinking, and living systems, she explores how organizations can establish decision rights, governance, and intentional operating practices that keep human wisdom at the center of increasingly automated work.
3:45–4:00 PMET
Remote
Break
4:00–4:15 PMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
4:15–5:00 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How Might We Move from Operations to Orchestration?
Sophia PraterUX Strategy Consultant and Coach, OOUX
Join Sophia Prater, creator of the Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) framework, as she brings together the key themes from the Operations as Orchestration speakers. Through live sensemaking, Sophia will connect the ideas of organizational understanding, shared governance, and embedded judgment into a cohesive perspective on the future of human-centered operations. Attendees will leave with a clearer picture of how these ideas fit together—and what they can begin applying immediately within their own organizations.
5:00–5:15 PMET
Closing Thoughts
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
5:15 PMET
Remote
Remote social: Cozy Juicy Real virtual board game
Human-centered tooling and collective sensemaking
Day two explores tools that extend human capability, then brings the conference’s ideas together through live sensemaking and a closing keynote.
9:30–10:00 AMET
Remote
Friday Warmup
10:00–10:15 AMET
Opening remarks
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Human-Centered Tooling
Human-Centered Tooling explores the concept of “tools” through multiple lenses: as the software and hardware you use and design, as catalysts for new workflows and collaboration models, and as one piece of a larger strategy or theory of change. It invites you to shift between timescales, from the daily discourse about AI developments to the broader bidirectional influence between UX and behavior, at the individual and societal levels. You’ll leave with all the ingredients you need to form a point of view on how you want to shape the relationship between people and technology and how you can lead as an agent of change toward that future.
10:15–10:30 AMET
Shaping the Tools that Shape Us
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
Stefanie Hutka's human-centered tooling session is a guide to steering AI automation to extend people's capabilities. This track explores how emerging technologies should be built ethically, thinking with us rather than for us; how these tools reshape our ways of working; and how to navigate these shifts to thrive as UX practitioners.
10:30–10:45 AMET
Tuning the Turing Machines
Dan SafferAssistant Professor of the Practice, Carnegie Mellon University
A hammer that requires practice to use is a bad hammer. A cello that doesn't is a bad cello. We judge tools by what they make; we judge instruments by what they make us. Almost every AI product right now is a tool: engineered so that what you get on day one is what you'll get in year three, and (don’t get me wrong) that's a real achievement. But what if AI products were something else? This talk makes the case for considering an instrument as a design target: capability that compounds with use instead of absconding with it. We'll go through the four properties that separate the two, and put our own practice on the table to see which of our skills we've surrendered.
10:45–11:00 AMET
What the Floor Buys the Ceiling
Changying 'Z' ZhengDesignOps Leader and Educator
Tooling raises the floor by baking good design into automation. Done right, it also raises the ceiling, giving practitioners back time for the work that matters most: what customers can see, feel, and use.
Through practical case studies of design teams in transformation, this talk explores what AI buys us when we pair speed with genuine care, and how teams can move faster without sacrificing intentionality, responsibility, or the human touch.
11:00–11:15 AMET
The Scenic Route: Navigating the New with Systems Thinking
Sheryl CababaAuthor of Closing the Loop, Optimistic Design
So much of our work as designers revolves around efficiency, particularly with the increasing integration of AI tools. What happens when we ditch the focus on efficiency and take the long way round? When we start thinking about the long-term and focus on the broader systems that surround us? This talk is centered on shifting our mindsets toward productive struggle and how we want to work and learn long-term. Sheryl will share experiences and principles for how we might navigate our evolving design approach.
11:15–11:30 AMET
Break
11:30–11:45 AMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
11:45 AM–12:30 PMET
Live Sensemaking: How Might We Shape Tools that Extend Us at Every Level, from Product to Workflow to Community?
Hang XuDesign Recruiter, Collective Supply
Join Hang Xu as he connects the three speakers’ threads across “zoom levels”: from product design, to workflows, to communities beyond our teams. He’ll braid together best practices at each level, identifying intersections such as the bidirectional impact of AI tool design on our ways of working. Attendees will leave with new mindsets and frameworks to navigate—and thrive—in the current UX shift.
12:30–12:45 PMET
Closing thoughts
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
12:45–1:15 PMET
Remote
Break
1:15–2:00 PMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
Sensemaking
Sensemaking is the deeply personal process we use to understand complex, messy, and/or ambiguous situations so we can make better decisions and take more thoughtful action.
Honing your own sensemaking is becoming even more important in a world that makes less and less sense. Throughout the conference experience you will observe sensemakers working in the wild, both in-person and remotely. We have asked them to take us behind the scenes into their sensemaking process.
If you are allergic to seeing design theater and edutainment content at UX conferences, we believe these unique sensemaking sessions are the antidote we all collectively need.
2:00–3:00 PMET
Is the shift greater than the sum of its parts?
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Dan BrownPrincipal, Curious Squid
Sophia PraterUX Strategy Consultant and Coach, OOUX
Hang XuDesign Recruiter, Collective Supply
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
Join information architect Abby Covert for a conference wrap-up for the ages. All the sensemakers (Dan Brown, Sophia Prater, Hang Xu, Joe Elmendorf, Melissa Burnett, and Dave Hoffer) will return to help us bring all the threads together. Our collective goal: figure out where we are, what we uncovered and the paths of where this might all go and how we might support one another during this shift.
3:00–3:15 PMET
Remote
Break
3:15–3:30 PMET
Remote
Group sensemaking
Joe ElmendorfCreator of Shitty Maps and Principal, Maps and Mirror
Melissa BurnettLead Technical Program Manager, Dell Technologies
Dave HofferDesign Leader
3:30–4:15 PMET
Keynote
Closing keynote
Jesse James GarrettAI Transformation Consultant & Private Leadership Advisor, Intentional Associates
4:15–4:45 PMET
Closing Words
Jemma AhmedAdvancing Research Curator, Rosenfeld Media
Jon FukudaCo-founder, Limina.co
Stefanie HutkaFounder & Head of Design Research, Sendfull
Abby CovertChief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Louis RosenfeldFounder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
4:45 PMET
Remote