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.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes that children have the right to express their views freely in all matters affecting them, and that their views shall be given due weight. However, youth still experience public services as inaccessible, fragmented and confusing. This limits youths access to their judicial rights, ultimately increasing societal differences.

Inclusive digital services lead to more than good user experiences, they are fundamental for democratic and inclusive societies. Trine Erga and Mira Krogh have together with 47 Norwegian youth defined «Digital services on youths' premises», a package of design principles, methods and opportunities for more inclusive service systems.

Erga and Krogh show how participatory processes can be used to create solutions that are relevant, understandable and valuable to youth together with those concerned. You will get a greater understanding of inclusive design processes, and concrete frameworks and methods to use in your own practices. The insights, frameworks, tools and processes are applicable to vulnerable and hard to reach user groups.

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 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.

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.

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.

We explore attachment and empathy through the lived experience of one individual. Rather than attempting to represent or generalise the experiences of people with a particular attachment style, the project translates a single personal narrative into an immersive VR experience.

The experience deliberately introduces moments of emotional dissonance, creating a gap between what participants expect, what they perceive, and how they might instinctively respond. This dissonance is used as an opportunity to challenge assumptions and encourage participants to consider the emotional context behind behaviours they may otherwise find difficult to understand.

The project asks whether VR can move empathy beyond simply knowing about another person's experience, towards perspective-taking through experiencing something unfamiliar.

Rather than claiming to represent a universal experience of attachment, the project offers one person's story as a starting point for exploring how immersive media might create space for greater understanding, reflection, and empathy.

What if becoming a designer begins not with learning how to make things better, but with learning to question what better means?

Designers are trained to solve problems, remove friction and improve what already exists. Today, our tools can produce answers faster than ever. But better is never neutral. Every idea of better carries assumptions about what matters, for whom, and how it should improve everyday life.

A tabula rasa was a Roman wax tablet, scraped clean to be written on again. At the Royal Danish Academy, it is how students of visual design and interaction begin their education. Before they design anything, they study how the world around them has already been designed, step away from it, and ask what they believe is worth designing for. Months later, they return to their answer to see what has moved and what has held.

The talk draws on this experiment to ask how designers develop the judgement that methods alone cannot provide. Such judgement grows
slowly, through making, failing, paying attention and reconsidering. The reset is not only for students. Now and then, every designer may return to the blank slate and question the assumptions they design from.

To become a designer is not simply to make things better. It is to decide what better means, knowing that every design shapes how someone will act and live.

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.

You used to be able to have an argument in a bar for hours. Who was in that film? What year did that song come out? People would trade memories, build elaborate cases, triangulate from anecdotes. The point was never the answer. It was the reasoning, the sparring, the collective act of not knowing. Then someone pulled out a phone and the conversation ended. AI didn't start that, but it may end it.

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.

Cognitive work: uncertainty forces reasoning, and reasoning is how we develop judgment.

Social work: shared silences and unanswered questions are how people build trust and coordinate.

Creative work: the browse-and-discover space, where you find what you didn't know you wanted, is where serendipity lives.

Organizational work: the "we'll figure that out" space is where teams improvise, exercise judgment, and build the tacit knowledge that no documentation captures.

At Knapsack, I'm building the intelligence layer that connects design systems to AI tools — making what teams already know available to the machines they work with.

The hardest problem we face isn't what the AI should surface. It's what it should leave alone. We're encoding knowledge into AI. But we also need to encode restraint — teach the system when to stay silent, because the most intelligent response is sometimes no response at all.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a design problem. Designers have always worked with absence. Whitespace that gives a layout meaning, the interaction that deliberately doesn't happen, the feature you chose not to build. We know that what you leave out shapes the experience as much as what you put in. That instinct is exactly what the things we're building with AI are missing.

Participants will leave with:

1. A new framework for deliberate absence. Four modes of productive emptiness (cognitive, social, creative, organizational) and what we lose when AI fills each one

2. A practical lens for evaluating AI integration: not just "what should this tool do?" but "what should this tool deliberately not do?" Three questions to ask before filling any gap

3. A design vocabulary for silence. How to encode intentional absence into systems, interfaces, and organizational processes, so that the spaces worth protecting survive automation

The gap was never empty. It was full of work we'd stopped noticing. Designing what isn't there is the most important skill we have left.

In moments of instability, what fails are not just systems and infrastructure, rather the assumptions we have about how communities assess, adapt, and take action. Design often assumes a sense of predictability, but what happens when conditions are shifting, needs are evolving and the psychological weight of uncertainty gets heavier by the minute?

In times of conflict, the role of design must be reframed as a tool to create the space and conditions for sense-making, connection, collective care, and shared agency across multiple realities, both physical and digital. How do we design, and what do we design, in the face of uncertainty and when communities are dispersed or unable to meet in person? We start by community-building. Digital platforms, tools, and participatory approaches allow us to convene communities, co-create solutions, and build systems of support that strengthen relational care and expand what is possible through collective action.

When we design from lived experiences we begin to uncover informal systems that shed light on the ways communities are already adaptive. We start to build trust and collective accountability. From there, we are then able to design for dignity, and, most importantly, we can co-create tools and systems that support and amplify existing strengths.

Drawing from our experience designing Beirut Design Week, where we engaged designers and citizens across and beyond Lebanon to respond to contemporary issues such as waste management during the trash crisis, as well as from our work convening the Lebanese diaspora and residents displaced by the current war, this talk explores the power of co-design and participatory practices. These approaches can surface lived experience, redistribute power, and support futures that are responsive, collaborative, and co-created over time.

Adaptive futures emerge from shared ownership. Ultimately, in times of uncertainty, design is not just about what we create, rather it is about how communities come together, even virtually, to care for each other, learn from lived experience and co-create pathways for collective action.

Goals:

(1) Explore the role of design as a tool for cultural enhancement, community building and collective care

(2) Evaluate ways in which design must adapt during times of uncertainty to reimagine co-created futures

(3) Demonstrate how co-design and participatory methods can uncover community knowledge and amplify existing strengths.

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

This workshop is for anyone who has ever wished they could quickly draw something that looks “-ish.”
“-ish” isn’t always meant as a compliment, but learning the techniques that make things “-ish” is easy to start, highly effective, and never strays from the path toward the real thing.
Learn a range of techniques for observing and drawing things “-ish,” then pick the ones you like.
Along the way, why not discover what makes your drawings “you-ish”?

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 can now generate a discussion guide, synthesise forty transcripts, and draft a report in minutes. This doesn't just change our tooling — it changes the question of what makes a designer or researcher good at their job.

As a Music Psychologist and UX Researcher, I've come to believe the answer isn't in the tools at all. It’s in a skill musicians have trained for centuries: improvisation. A jazz solo looks like instinct alone, but it's actually thousands of hours of practice, compressed into a few live seconds, played inside changes someone else wrote. Designers and researchers do this every day: the researcher who abandons the script to chase an unexpected answer, the designer who knows a layout is wrong before they can say why.

Now AI is writing some of those changes too. The real question is what it takes to keep improvising when the changes keep shifting. The instinct still has to be ours.

This talk draws on research into AI self-efficacy, anxiety, and psychological safety to reframe our evolving roles as designers and researchers: less rigid methodology executed step by step, more jazz musician reading the room, knowing which “wrong note” is actually the most interesting finding. You'll leave with a new way to think about rigour, listening, and error — and why our edge was never speed of output, but knowing which chord you're playing over.

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.

“I love the idea! But… has anyone done this before?” For a designer, “No!” might be the most exciting answer imaginable. For the person approving it? Not so much.

Design culture celebrates bold ideas, moving fast, and challenging conventions. But in risk-averse environments, including Japan, change isn't automatically an opportunity. It's also a potential liability. Stability and predictability aren't obstacles to good design; they're often what the system is designed to deliver.

Yet Japan is hardly allergic to change. A country that continually reinvents its infrastructure for earthquake and tsunami safety knows a thing or two about innovation. The question isn't whether change is possible, but what makes it worth the risk.

Drawing on cross-cultural experience, this talk explores why even brilliant, well-researched, user-centered ideas can struggle to see the light of day, and how designers can make innovation easier to say yes to.

Through practical “do this, not that” examples across UX, UI, and product design, we'll explore how to navigate resistance, address legitimate concerns, and advocate for solutions beyond the drawing board.

Because the designer's role is evolving. Our job doesn't end with imagining better experiences for users. We must also champion their realization, designing the conditions that allow the promise of good design to become reality.

You already know how to design. This workshop is about what changes when you design with AI. Pablo shares the tips and habits he actually uses with Claude: how to give it good context, how to go from a rough idea to something real you can click, how to push past the first generic answer, and how to keep your taste in the driver's seat. Then it's your turn. Bring a laptop, a Claude account and a real problem from your own work. You'll leave with a better feel for how to get AI to help you. Made for mid-level designers. No coding needed.