Program

In this talk, Andreas will take the audience on a playful and thought-provoking journey through a near-future in which creative tools do more than obey. They suggest, improvise, perform, and sometimes seem to develop intentions of their own. Drawing on his work at the intersection of art, interaction, and emerging technology, he will explore how this changes the role of the designers and artist - from maker of finished forms to choreographer of shifting behaviours, relationships, and possibilities.

An interactive exhibition exploring how virtual reality can be used as a medium for human storytelling. However, this exhibition is not just to show stories, but to immerse audiences in perspectives that challenge their own, using sensory design and point of view shifts to create deeper empathy. 

This talk presents a critical analysis through case studies, examining prompts and AI-generated images to reveal recurring patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on Human-Centered Design and Tech Ethics Frameworks, the session explores the ethical, social, and design implications of generative AI, highlighting the responsibility of designers and the role of Eurocentric and North American big tech companies in shaping more equitable, representative, and socially responsible AI systems. Designing for users requires not only addressing functional needs, but also engaging with the social, cultural, and symbolic contexts in which users exist.

In this workshop, participants will explore what it means to leave the field, or to consider the responsibility of designing endings. Through concrete scenarios of researchers and designers exiting fieldwork, they explore the implications for you as a designer, for the project, and for the people involved. Drawing on experiences from both design practice and academic research, the workshop introduces a relational perspective on endings, where care, accountability, and co-creation extend beyond the formal duration of a project.

The session invites participants to reflect on why systems so often hesitate and wait for urgency and disruption before they are willing to act. Through frameworks and real-world examples, we look at how early frictions evolve into systemic strain, when design interventions can become critical and how tools like speculative design, foresight and game-based interventions can help shift mindsets, inspire action and shape more adaptive futures.

This talk offers a ground-level view of what happens when you rebuild design education for the AI era — not as theory, but as a living experiment running right now in a classroom in Gwangju, South Korea.

For decades, the metrics that reveal what users actually feel — EEG for cognitive workload, FACS for facial emotion, GSR for physiological arousal — have lived behind academic paper walls, out of reach for the designers and researchers shaping everyday products. That's no longer sustainable. As AI reshapes how quickly and pervasively products are built, self-reported feedback alone can't keep pace — we need objective, moment-by-moment signals of user experience now more than ever. This is the problem we set out to solve when we started building Fycely: how do you take tools that used to require a PhD and a lab, and put them in the hands of the people actually shipping product? We'll walk through what these signals actually measure and why they matter more in an AI-driven landscape — grounding each one in real examples from building Fycely's facial expression analysis engine, including what broke, what surprised us, and what we learned trying to make FACS-grade emotion detection work outside a controlled lab setting. From there, we'll get practical: how teams can start using these signals without a PhD on staff, drawing on the design decisions behind Fycely itself — where we drew the line between scientific rigor and usability, and how we scaled facial expression analysis into something a design team could run themselves, no research background required.

Drawing on years of WCAG practice, this talk reframes accessibility as the foundation of a new discipline: Agent Experience (AX). You'll leave seeing your craft in a new light, ready for a shift that's already underway.

This interactive workshop brings designers and creatives into a shared practice of regenerative thinking: imagining futures where wellbeing is collective, circular, and co-created. And then, re-grounding it into "what we can do today" to start co-creating that future.

Stay tuned! Details of the talk will be announced soon.

This talk explores how digital products capture and reward attention, drawing from UX research, behavioral economics, and global design patterns. Through a cross-cultural lens, we examine how norms around attention, friction, and influence differ across contexts—revealing that what feels intuitive in one place may feel deceptive in another.

Many of us came to design through how we see. We noticed things — a candy wrapper, subway tiles, traffic patterns — and couldn’t look away until we understood why and how, first steps onto the diving board of creating things ourselves. But professional design work doesn’t always demand that we notice omnivorously. Noticing is often boxed in by a brief or a process step. In this talk Chris will share how he tries to keep noticing: living with his own biases and assumptions, embracing rabbit holes, resisting quick or clean answers, and finding joy in looking closely with others. 

This talk is about regaining intentionality in design in a time where tools can move faster than our thinking. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of:

- the difference between generating design and actually designing, 

- when AI tools like Figma Make are useful—and when they are risky,

- how to avoid common pitfalls when introducing AI into real product workflows, 

- practical strategies for balancing speed, exploration, and design quality,

- how to manage expectations—both internally and with clients—when working with AI-generated prototypes

Stay tuned! Details of the workshop will be announced soon.

In this talk, I explore how motherhood reshaped the way I think about delight in product design. Through personal stories and practical product examples, I’ll argue that delight isn’t about surprise or surface-level polish — it’s about nervous-system relief.

AI is an engine of completion. It autocompletes your sentence before you've finished thinking it. It fills the search results before you've browsed. It generates the UI before you've sketched. It answers the question before you've sat with the doubt long enough to learn something from it. Every gap gets filled. That's the pitch. That's the product. But the gap was doing work.

What do you do when you have multiple design directions and no way to decide what's "best"? Some will go with their gut, because evidence feels slow and expensive. Others will do massive amounts of research, because getting it wrong feels worse than getting it late. But what if there’s another way: one that offers confidence at no additional cost?
Drawing on 10+ years working with enterprise organisations (with infinite budgets), and now advising startups that have zero budget and even less time, I’ll show you how to quickly get to confident design decisions. Using real examples from my work with clients, I’ll take decisions that product teams were stuck on, and show how to use existing data and insight to stretch the research you already have - including how to use new technologies to your advantage, areas where AI is helpful, and where it can mislead you.