Keynote speakers
Kent EisenhuthStaff Product Designer @ Waymo, Google
As a design lead at Waymo, Google, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Kent has two decades of experience in developing visual languages that improve collaboration, comprehension, and decision-making across a wide array of products, including Google Cloud, Fitbit, Search, Alphabet’s Loon, and Waymo.
Kent led Fitbit’s Generative AI Charting program and co-founded Google’s Data Accessibility program. He previously and co-authored the data visualization specs for Material Design.Kent’s work and ideas have appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, UXmatters, ACM journals, and Smashing Magazine. His book, Drawing Product Ideas, delivers a new and exciting guide to effectively communicating product ideas by drawing simple shapes.
Kent has presented talks and ideas at many conferences, such as IxDA’s Interaction, SXSW, UXDX, and the World Usability Congress, and he is a frequent guest lecturer at several universities in the United States of America.
Data Visualization & Generative AI: Principles for Building Human-Centered Data Experiences
Working with AI can often feel intimidating and opaque, but thoughtful UX can change that. This talk highlights how Kent’s team used timeless design methods to create more intuitive, informative, and engaging consumer AI experiences with data visualization. Drawing on his work with Google Health’s (formerly Fitbit) Personal Health Coach, Kent will walk through the process of integrating visual data into a chatbot environment. He will share guiding principles and practical takeaways for anyone building human-centered AI data experiences, created by humans, for humans.
What you’ll learn:
- A behind-the-scenes look at integrating co-design and UX research into AI workflows.
- Key lessons learned when applying data visualization to generative AI products.
- Why design craft, attention to detail and originality matter now more than ever.
Miss Beehives / Aleksander TonheimDrag artist & senior UX designer @ Knowit
Aleksander is a creative, empathetic, and analytical senior designer at Knowit. He is also part of the UX Norge crew and board, contributing to Norway’s growing design community of 7,500 members through events, conversations, and knowledge sharing.
Alongside his work in design, Aleksander is the creator behind Miss Beehives: a cheeky and celebrated drag performer from Haus of Friele, known for warmth, wit, and the ability to command any stage with controlled chaos. Through drag, performance, and visual storytelling, Miss Beehives explores the intersection of art, design, identity, and point of view. With experience spanning major festivals, television, corporate events, cinemas, Pride celebrations, and club stages, including NRK, Bergen Kino, Oslo Drag Festival, and Pride events across Norway.
Miss Beehives has built a strong reputation for engaging performances, sharp creative direction, and high audience connection. In addition to performing, Aleksander also develops and produces shows and stage concepts that bring together entertainment, storytelling, and immersive audience experiences.
CREATIVITY, DARLING
Creativity is often framed as a skill: something you can learn, optimise, and scale. But in practice, most creative work doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails because we don’t know how to handle uncertainty, tension, and the dynamics around ideas.In this talk, the Norwegian drag queen Miss Beehives takes the audience on a journey through the worlds of drag and design, revealing the surprising parallels between the two. Through personal stories, creativity, performance, and point of view, the talk explores how ideas come to life when we dare to draw inspiration from unexpected places and when we allow ourselves to stand in what makes us different.This talk will be honest, personal and thought-provoking.
Speakers
Ida Håkonsson / Rebekka Valdmanis MørkenProduct Design Leads @ NRK
Ida and Rebekka have worked together for a decade and share a passion for fun and delight in digital product design. In recent years, they have been working on NRK Super, Norway’s award-winning streaming service for children. Drawing on their extensive experience designing for young users who cannot yet read or write, they advocate for bringing the joy of children’s products into the adult world. This approach allows them to craft user experiences that are both intuitive and impactful.
Design for Delight
How do you make a digital experience feel alive and human, moving beyond the screen to spark a real connection with the user?
In this talk, we take you through our journey of designing for our most honest and demanding audience: children. When we built the login experience for NRK Super, we couldn't rely on text or standard conventions. Instead, we used gamification, nudging, and storytelling, turning it into a login flow that children actually want to complete again and again.
We’ll share our lessons in extreme accessibility and inclusive design that apply to all users, demonstrating how sometimes adding in extra steps and intentional friction can actually drive higher completion. It is a reminder that the most impactful products are those that still know how to spark wonder.
As AI becomes increasingly integrated throughout the design process, this talk focuses on the deep, intentional, and strategic craft that AI cannot replicate. We believe that by utilising play, mischief and wonder, we can reclaim the sense that technology is still magic.
Gabriel SvennerbergHead of Design @ Fortnox
Gabriel is Head of Design at Fortnox, where he leads a design organization of 60 designers in a fast-growing, product-led SaaS company. With nearly three decades in digital product design across agencies, startups, and in-house teams, he works at the intersection of design, technology, and product strategy.
Before Fortnox, he founded Boards on Fire and ran the design agency Meetod. He is also the author of Beginning Google Maps API. When he is not working you will find him outdoors, most happily asleep in a hammock somewhere in the woods.
Design Process is Culture
We tend to think of design process as a set of steps to follow. But process is never neutral. What gets celebrated, what gets skipped, who gets involved, and how decisions get made all shape the culture a team actually experiences.
In this talk, I'll share how we redesigned the design process at Fortnox for a growing team of 60+ designers, not as a workflow to enforce, but as a way to reinforce the culture we wanted to build. This shapes everything from collaboration and decision-making to the responsible use of AI.
Key takeaways:
- Why process shapes culture more than values statements do
- How to design processes that reinforce desired behaviors
- How responsible AI adoption starts with ways of working, not policies
Laura DalrympleUser Researcher @ Royal Navy, UK.
Laura is a Lead User Researcher who has spent the past decade exploring how people navigate complexity — from biotech, mental health and pharmaceuticals to financial regulation, public services and AI.
Laura specialises in helping complex organisations turn ambitious transformation and AI integration initiatives into change that works for real people. Currently Laura is using her expertise in Defence, with the UK's Royal Navy, supporting its ambition to integrate autonomy for the Hybrid Navy. Previously, as the Bank of England’s first permanent senior user researcher, Laura helped shape major transformation programmes and contributed to award-winning user-centred design work in 2025. Laura has also delivered NHS digital COVID initiatives with SPARCK/CGI and has extensive experience across security-cleared UK government projects.
At SXC 2026, Laura brings a practical user research perspective to one of today’s biggest questions: how do we harness AI to create meaningful, sustainable change without losing sight of the humans it is meant to serve?
Keeping the Human in the Loop
Government projects integrating AI decision making into their user journeys have taken off.
But have we done enough work to understand what AI automation really looks like in high risk government spaces and if, when and where we should keep humans in the loop?
We need to do more with less, now more than ever. In the context of lower UK economic output, but the higher demand for public services (with larger populations) we need to make sure we use AI to get our decision making right, keep costs down, reduce mistakes and stop the potential public scandals caused by AI inaccuracies/a lack of human oversight.
Laura will share learnings from working in an exclusively AI-orientated team in government, playing back the practical challenges of integrating AI decision making in previously human-led spaces (internal to the organisation) and what potholes we need to avoid.
The session will include recommendations on appropriate uses and considerations for the audience to take away and apply in their own work places.
Guillaume VaslinDirector of Design @ AOE
Guillaume Vaslin is a French-German product designer, founder of ENNOstudio and Director of Design at AOE. He works at the intersection of product strategy, UX design, and digital transformation, helping enterprises and startups design scalable digital products and services.
Alongside his industry work, Guillaume conducts independent research on universal digital interfaces, exploring how cultural and generational differences influence the way people understand and interact with technology. His research focuses particularly on trust, clarity, and usability in emerging AI driven experiences.
Designing AI Products People Can Trust
AI products are becoming deeply integrated into everyday life, yet most users still struggle to understand what these systems can do, when they fail, and whether they should trust them at all.
This talk explores how designers can shape trust in AI products through interaction design, transparency, feedback loops, and behavioral UX patterns, not branding or visual polish alone.
Drawing from real product experience, UX strategy, and research on cross cultural digital interfaces, the session will examine how trust emerges through predictability, explainability, user control, and the design of failure itself.
Key take aways:
- Design patterns for creating trustworthy AI experiences
- Common UX mistakes that reduce trust in AI systems
- How to communicate uncertainty and limitations effectively
- Why designing for failure matters more than designing for success
- How cultural expectations shape trust in AI interactions across different users and societies
- The evolving responsibility of designers in AI product development
Sophie AlbrechtConsultant for anything data-related @ Just Data
Sophie is a Data & Insights leader with a background in psychology and experience spanning product, gaming, user research, experimentation and analytics. She has spent her career helping teams make better decisions by combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, working at the intersection of design, research and data. Sophie consults with product and game teams, currently at Mojang, and is passionate about building products that balance strong conviction with a willingness to learn from users and data.
Test Like You’re Wrong
Too many teams treat user research and A/B testing as competing methodologies — one for the qualitative believers, one for the data people. But conviction and evidence aren’t opposites. Good research earns you the confidence to make a strong design call, and strong hypotheses make for better tests. In this session, we’ll explore how user research and A/B testing work best as a loop — not a debate — and why the teams that ship the best products aren’t the ones who test everything to death, but the ones who know when to back their instincts and when to let the data speak.
Key takeaways
- Why designing with conviction produces better tests — and better outcomes
- How to use research to build hypotheses, not just validate assumptions
- Where A/B testing alone goes wrong — and what research catches that data can’t
- How to run the research → design → test → learn loop in practice
- When to trust your instincts, and when to let the numbers win
Workshop: Test Like You're Wrong: From Assumption to Evidence
Bring a real UX problem or goal. You'll unpack the assumptions inside it, weigh the evidence you already have and turn a belief into a hypothesis that could actually be proven wrong - then map out the cheapest test/s that could kill it.
You'll leave with one testable hypothesis and a first test you could run this week.
Kalina TyrkielSenior Content Designer
UX writer by trade and psychologist by training, now Senior Content Designer working on AI experiences at Zendesk. Experienced trainer, lecturer, and consultant in UX writing; creator of Poland's first AI in UX writing course. After hours: Instagram foodie, local culinary evangelist, fueled by hot sauce and filter coffee.
Designing around AI: the psychology of new design patterns
Traditional design patterns assume a predictable system – but while generative AI is built on predictions, it is anything but predictable. As a psychologist and a designer working in Zendesk, an AI-first company and one of OpenAI’s top 30 customers, I’ll walk you through some of the most important new design patterns around AI. We’ll cover disclosing AI outputs to users, optimal levels of AI anthropomorphism, managing expectations, as well as ethical and psychological aspects, including common biases. Expect real-life use cases and fresh points of view.
Digital Workshop: Creating UX copy with AI (the right way)
Learn how to use AI to make UX writing more efficient, consistent, and scalable – without generating AI slop. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore how to build AI skills and agents that can review UX copy, apply content guidelines, identify inconsistencies, and support better writing decisions. Learn from an industry practitioner, try new skills as you learn, and leave with actionable takeaways.
Raff Di MeoSenior Product Design Manager @ Optimizely
Raff Di Meo has spent over 10 years designing products across agencies, startups, and enterprise SaaS, including a startup acquisition. Today, he leads the Experience Creation team at Optimizely, where he shapes how marketing teams build content experiences across the web with AI. He writes Some Designers on Substack and speaks regularly at UX events, championing inclusivity.
Beyond the Metrics: designing for consequences
Designing something that works isn't the same as designing something that's right. You can hit every metric — but are those metrics right?
Through a real-world example from building an e-commerce returns portal, we'll explore how chasing the wrong metrics can damage businesses, people, and the planet — and why sustainable design starts with asking better questions.
We'll challenge core UX assumptions about friction and conversion, learn to apply ethical techniques to the design process, and explore how to apply those same principles when shaping AI products responsibly.
Panel discussion: The Future of Experience: What Changes, and What Must Remain Human?
When AI can generate interfaces, prototypes and working products in minutes, the role of design begins to change.
What should designers stop doing? What must design continue to own? How do we protect craft, judgement and human responsibility when production becomes increasingly automated? And how will future designers learn when AI performs many of the tasks that once helped people develop their skills?
This panel brings together different perspectives from design, leadership and business for an open discussion about the future of experience. Not to predict exactly what will happen, but to explore the choices we need to make now.
Tirzo FernándezAI Experience Designer @ Nateevo
Tirzo is an AI Experience Designer helping drive the adoption of Generative AI at ING Spain & Portugal, as part of the Data & AI Adoption team, via Nateevo (a VASS company). His work spans identifying high-impact AI use cases, designing AI agents and workflows, and building the communication and enablement that gets people to actually use these tools with confidence, including leading the end-to-end design of a Generative AI proof of concept for ING's Voice of the Customer, a new dashboard turning raw customer feedback into actionable insight.
With a multidisciplinary background spanning filmmaking, creative direction, and product design, Tirzo specializes in translating complex AI concepts into experiences that people can easily understand, trust, and apply. He combines storytelling, design, strategy, and research to help organizations transform technical AI capabilities into products and experiences people actually want to use. His research focuses on the future of human-AI collaboration: how trust, transparency, and ethical design can keep autonomous AI systems aligned with human values and organizational goals.
Designing AI That Knows Too Much About You
AI agents are starting to know more about us than any technology we've used before. They remember what we say, understand our habits, and increasingly make decisions on our behalf. That raises an important question: how do we design AI that helps people without quietly influencing or manipulating them?
This talk explores the fine line between AI assistance and manipulation, revealing how the way we design AI shapes whether it empowers people or influences them in ways they may not even notice.
Key takeaways
- Help vs. Hijack: A practical way to tell when AI is genuinely helping users versus nudging them toward someone else's goals.
- Spotting Agentic Risks: Learn how to identify UX dark patterns unique to AI agents before they reach users.
- The AI Review Kit: A lightweight framework for evaluating AI experiences from an ethical and human-centered perspective.
Kim Feenstra KuiperUX research lead, Expedition UX
Kim is a freelance UX researcher with over a decade of experience across different product companies, including Spotify, King, and Goodnotes, whose app took home Apple's App Store Award in 2022.
Her background is a little unusual: she originally studied AI (before it was cool), which gives her a grounded, hands-on understanding of what these tools actually are under the hood. These days she partners with companies to launch innovative new projects, build out research operations, and make sure the right user experience decisions are made along the way. No matter the project she is on, she lives by one value: good research means understanding real people, not just generating answers about them.
AI is not your UX researcher
Software has never been cheaper to build, which makes it easier than ever to build things nobody needs.
With a background in both artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction, Kim looks at what the evidence says about using LLMs in place of real users. Having worked on both sides, she sees a real danger when teams ask the AI what their users think instead of asking the users. She'll also share the workflows she uses to set up AI as a research assistant: one that helps you run your research while leaving the judgement to you.
You'll leave knowing when a model is a reasonable stand-in, when it isn't, and how to get more out of the research you're already doing.
Anna SwartlingDesign & Product Leader @ Independent
Anna Swartling has spent more than twenty years turning an understanding of human behaviour into products, services and organisations that work. She holds a PhD in Human–Computer Interaction from KTH and has led designers since 2011 at Scania, SEB and, most recently as Head of Product & Concepts at SJ. This year she has been building Oavo, a proptech product, together with a former colleague, working hands on with AI as co-creator and UX lead. She sits on the board of Design Leadership Community Sweden.
Your design organisation was built for a world that just ended! What it’s for when everyone can build.
I’ve built design organisations for a long time, and the same questions keep coming back. Where should designers sit for the company to get the most out of their work? How should teams work together? Who gets to decide about the user experience, and how do we balance what users need with what the business needs? And how do we give designers room to grow, do good work, and feel good doing it?
Then I spent this year building a product with AI, hands on. When anyone can produce a prototype, an interface or working code in a matter of days, roles change, both within design and around it. The way we collaborate has to change at its core, and so does what we expect a junior and a senior designer to do. Those old questions need new answers.
I’ll share where I’ve landed, and why I think we might finally move from opinions to insights. For real this time.
Panel discussion: The Future of Experience: What Changes, and What Must Remain Human?
When AI can generate interfaces, prototypes and working products in minutes, the role of design begins to change.
What should designers stop doing? What must design continue to own? How do we protect craft, judgement and human responsibility when production becomes increasingly automated? And how will future designers learn when AI performs many of the tasks that once helped people develop their skills?
This panel brings together different perspectives from design, leadership and business for an open discussion about the future of experience. Not to predict exactly what will happen, but to explore the choices we need to make now.
Terry Y. HanProduct Designer @ Airspace
Terry is a product/UX designer who works where digital products meet messy, real-world operations, across logistics, automotive HMI, industrial robotics and healthcare.
Currently at Airspace, she designs SaaS dashboards in a live B2B logistics product, including how people supervise and step in when automated systems make decisions. Her role spans design and product management. Before that, she worked at Volvo Cars and different startups.
Before design, she was a journalist, and it still shapes how she works: she starts with questions, not interfaces, and reframes briefs before designing anything.
Alongside her day job, she runs 'Sthlm AI & Product Design Community' and 'AI Design x Build Lab (STHLM)' with around 300 people , where designers and product people learn AI hands-on. When what she needs doesn’t exist, she tends to build it (like these communities).
Beyond the AI Tool of the Week: Building Judgement Together
Most designers feel behind on AI, and the honest answer is that everyone is. New tools appear every week, and the gap between reading about AI and actually trying it is where most of the anxiety lives.
Over the past year, Terry has run AI and product design community events in Stockholm, bringing together around 300 people to experiment with how designers learn in a field that won’t sit still. In this talk, she shares what worked, what didn’t, and what she found: tools can be learned alone, but judgment grows best together. And to shape a sustainable future with AI, we first need to understand it well enough to question it.
What you’ll learn:
- Why “learning AI” means different things to different people, and how to clarify it for yourself and your team
- A breadth-to-depth approach that anchors learning in real problems, not tools
- Honest lessons from running a community through three stages, and lightweight formats to bring back to work
Tommy MarshallHead of UX and design @ VASS
Tommy Marshall is head of UX & Design at VASS Sweden and the organiser of STHLM Xperience Conference. With extensive experience in UX, digital services and design leadership, he is particularly interested in how AI is changing product development, design organisations and what design needs to continue owning when more people can build.
Panel discussion: The Future of Experience: What Changes, and What Must Remain Human?
When AI can generate interfaces, prototypes and working products in minutes, the role of design begins to change.
What should designers stop doing? What must design continue to own? How do we protect craft, judgement and human responsibility when production becomes increasingly automated? And how will future designers learn when AI performs many of the tasks that once helped people develop their skills?
This panel brings together different perspectives from design, leadership and business for an open discussion about the future of experience. Not to predict exactly what will happen, but to explore the choices we need to make now.
Workshops
Ally WaringAssociate Psychosexual Therapist & CX Consultant @ Allied Strategy
Ally is an independent CX strategy consultant with experience shaping some of the world's biggest brands, including Formula 1, PayPal, and Coca-Cola.
Following a life-changing chronic illness diagnosis, she discovered an unexpected parallel between sex therapy and customer strategy.
Today, alongside teaching at University of the Arts London, she is completing aCOSRT-accredited qualifying diploma in psychosexual therapy.
Ally writes her Substack, 'Vulgar Thoughts', on the intersections between creativity, discomfort, curiosity, pleasure, and the beautiful friction they can bring to human-centered design.
Workshop: We Can All Ask Better Questions
A brief lands on your desk, and states a presenting issue. But it is almost always wrong about what the problem is. In sex therapy, it is the same: erectile dysfunction, low desire or vulvodynia, the real issue lies deeper.
My session shares a three-part diagnostic framework inspired by psychosexual assessment to change how we challenge client briefs, ditch lazy templates and over-automated solutions, in exchange for rigorous, human-centred diagnosis.
You'll come away from this session with at least one brave question you can ask when you're next briefed on a project.
Jennifer ChadwickProgram Director
Jennifer Chadwick, CPACC was a UX Design Lead for 10 years before usability testing with people with disabilities turned her into an Accessibility and Inclusive Design advocate. Since 2012 she's collaborated with UX and Visual Designers through co-design sessions, assistive technology demos and prototype reviews (Figma, Claude code) to design products that are both beautiful and accessible for everyone. Jennifer co-created the W3C Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) resource for WCAG 2.2.
Workshop: Task Planning for Accessibility and Inclusive Design
We know that users with disabilities are simply end users too. Some use hardware and software every day to interact with your designs (think screen reader, keyboard, zoom magnification, etc.). Once you learn about how diverse human experience is, it becomes an exciting opportunity to innovate and grow your skills. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) as can be overwhelming, where you don't know where to start, or you feel you might get it wrong! I'm a former UX Designer turned inclusive design advocate for 15+ years. In this workshop, I'll share:
- real user stories of what people with disabilities need
- examples of beautiful and elegant designs that are also accessible and meet global standards (WCAG, EN 301 549, etc.)
- a fun, easy framework to apply when you're designing products (W3C Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM))
- a team exercise called the "Decision Tree" for identifying the shared responsibility for each WCAG requirement (UX or Visual Designers, Developers, Content Authors).
Sophie AlbrechtConsultant for anything data-related @ Just Data
Sophie is a Data & Insights leader with a background in psychology and experience spanning product, gaming, user research, experimentation and analytics. She has spent her career helping teams make better decisions by combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, working at the intersection of design, research and data. Sophie consults with product and game teams, currently at Mojang, and is passionate about building products that balance strong conviction with a willingness to learn from users and data.
Test Like You’re Wrong
Too many teams treat user research and A/B testing as competing methodologies — one for the qualitative believers, one for the data people. But conviction and evidence aren’t opposites. Good research earns you the confidence to make a strong design call, and strong hypotheses make for better tests. In this session, we’ll explore how user research and A/B testing work best as a loop — not a debate — and why the teams that ship the best products aren’t the ones who test everything to death, but the ones who know when to back their instincts and when to let the data speak.
Key takeaways
- Why designing with conviction produces better tests — and better outcomes
- How to use research to build hypotheses, not just validate assumptions
- Where A/B testing alone goes wrong — and what research catches that data can’t
- How to run the research → design → test → learn loop in practice
- When to trust your instincts, and when to let the numbers win
Workshop: Test Like You're Wrong: From Assumption to Evidence
Bring a real UX problem or goal. You'll unpack the assumptions inside it, weigh the evidence you already have and turn a belief into a hypothesis that could actually be proven wrong - then map out the cheapest test/s that could kill it.
You'll leave with one testable hypothesis and a first test you could run this week.
Lorraine Omari-Asor / Laura DalrympleUX Research Manager / Lead User Researcher
Lorraine is a Lead UX Researcher and strategic problem solver with over a decade of experience helping organisations design better services and products through evidence-based decision making. She specialises in uncovering user needs, translating complex insights into clear storytelling, and helping teams make smarter product and policy decisions.Lorraine has led research across government, healthcare, and technology sectors, working on large-scale digital transformation programmes that improve services for millions of users. She currently manages a team of UX researchers while leading research within government exploring how AI capabilities can be introduced responsibly to improve efficiencies in ways of working and support complex workflows.Alongside her research work, Lorraine is passionate about mentoring and empowering women in tech, supporting professionals to grow their confidence, communication skills, and career direction.
Laura is a Lead User Researcher at NTT Data/Tangity specialising in Government clients. Prior to this she supported large scale transformation projects at the Bank of England as their first permanent senior user researcher; winning a central Banking award in 2025 for the UCD work she and her team carried out. Laura has also worked consultancy side with SPARCK/CGI delivering NHS digital COVID initiatives.
With a background in Psychology and Mental Health Nursing, Laura’s experience covers research in variety of areas such as: biotech, psychoeducation (teaching mental health management), pharmaceuticals, complex data sets and financial regulation.
Laura has gained a wealth of experience working across the public sector and has been at the forefront of building Tangity's/ NTT Datas User Research approach to AI to realise real sustainable change.
Workshop: From "Busy Work" to Influential Strategy: Practical Strategies for UX Professionals
Today’s UX researchers are expected to wear more hats than ever before. Beyond conducting research, they are often asked to influence strategy, manage stakeholders, mentor others, adopt AI tools, and deliver impact at increasing speed.
In this interactive masterclass, two experienced UX research leaders share practical lessons from their careers across government, finance, healthcare and digital transformation. Participants will explore the hidden cost of context switching, experience first-hand how multitasking affects performance, and reflect on the skills that help researchers create influence and impact in complex organisations.
Through facilitated discussion, reflection exercises and peer learning activities, attendees will leave with practical approaches for protecting focus, navigating organisational dynamics, leveraging AI effectively, building confidence, and increasing the strategic value of research.
Key Takeaways
- Understand the impact of multitasking and context switching on research quality and effectiveness
- Learn practical strategies for increasing influence and stakeholder engagement• Explore how AI can support research workflows while preserving human judgement and empathy
- Reflect on approaches to mentoring, career growth and building confidence as a senior practitioner
- Develop a personal action plan to improve effectiveness and impact within their organisation
Emilia Forrest / Tintin Torin / Fintan CollierUX Accessibility Specialist / UX Accessibility Specialist / Product Design Lead @ Valtech
Emilia Forrest is a CPACC-certified Service Designer and Accessibility Specialist co-leading Valtech Stockholm's Nordic practice. A former H&M Home designer, she treats accessibility as strategy, using AI daily to build practical tools and inclusive digital experiences that actually work.
Tintin Torin is a CPACC-certified UX Designer, focused on dismantling digital barriers. Armed with accessibility certification, Tintin specializes in technical audits and empathy workshops, moving teams past checklist compliance to build interfaces that support universal design by default.
Fintan Collier is dedicated to shaping impactful, user-centric digital products. He specializes in bridging creative strategy with technical execution, leading cross-functional teams to deliver scalable design systems and intuitive interfaces that solve complex business challenges through storytelling.
Workshop: How Accessible Design Powers AI & Product Growth
Whether you're a designer, developer, or strategist, we've all been there: advocating for inclusive design only to hear, "It's not on the roadmap yet." Being the lone voice trying to ensure intelligent technologies respect human dignity is exhausting, especially when ethical, accessible design is treated as a "nice-to-have" or a task delayed for the next sprint.
That lack of buy-in carries real risk. With the EAA in full force since June 2025, and AI scaling at unprecedented speeds, a "fix it later" strategy is a bigger gamble than ever. Without a shared framework to build ethical technology, we risk designing an unsustainable future that excludes the very diverse communities we aim to uplift while rendering our products invisible to modern AI search agents.
When you build clear semantic hierarchies for screen readers, you are natively optimizing your content and code for Large Language Models. Aligning accessibility with AI optimization creates a massive growth engine: our client’s AI traffic grew nearly three times faster after implementing our framework.
This year, you're invited to the Contrast Clinic, an immersive experience that bridges the gap between human creativity and intelligent technology. Together, we will prove that ethical accessibility isn't a checklist or a roadblock, but a powerful catalyst for AI visibility, innovation, and our ultimate competitive edge.
Michael StrixConversational AI Designer @ Boulder/Länsförsäkringar
Michael is a senior UX Writer and Conversational Designer with a background in advertising, and acting. He has designed the tone, behaviour and conversational experience of Länsförsäkringar’s new LLM-based chatbot, working at the intersection of language, UX and AI. Before moving into UX, Michael worked as an advertising director and actor at Sweden’s national stage, Dramaten.
Workshop: Designing a Chatbot People Actually Want to Use
Too many chatbots make people want to escape to a human. But the problem isn’t always the technology — it’s often the design.
In this workshop, Michael shares practical techniques from designing Länsförsäkringar’s new LLM-based chatbot, showing how tone, behaviour, language and conversational structure can transform the user experience.
You’ll get five hands-on techniques you can use to design conversations that feel clearer, more helpful and more human — and make your chatbot worth talking to.
Moderator
Jane RuffinoUX Architect
Jane Ruffino is a UX architect, contemporary archaeologist, and writer. As a designer, she cares deeply about the sensemaking part of design work, and about language as the infrastructure of products and experiences. She believes that great design can and should be driven by a theory of change.
She’s also committed to helping others make sense of the world around us, which is why her research and writing on the submarine cable network argues that we must understand the material and physical world, as well as pay attention to the humans who build and maintain it. If we want innovation and progress, we need to collectively appreciate how it’s enabled by technologies that move at the speed of people.
Jane has more than 20 years of experience teaching, designing learning experiences, and organizing and hosting events. She lives in Stockholm with her partner, their 6-year-old daughter, and a perfectly crusty little rescue dog. She is both a PhD student at Södertörn University and UX architect at the Internet Society. Jane spoke at STHLM Xperience in 2019, moderated in 2023, and is delighted to be returning as moderator.
Introduction
Welcome to the conference!
Panel discussion: The Future of Experience: What Changes, and What Must Remain Human?
When AI can generate interfaces, prototypes and working products in minutes, the role of design begins to change.
What should designers stop doing? What must design continue to own? How do we protect craft, judgement and human responsibility when production becomes increasingly automated? And how will future designers learn when AI performs many of the tasks that once helped people develop their skills?
This panel brings together different perspectives from design, leadership and business for an open discussion about the future of experience. Not to predict exactly what will happen, but to explore the choices we need to make now.
Conference wrap up
Lets round up the conference with some final words.
Digital Moderator
Richard LiljaSenior Designer and Frontend Developer @ VASS Sweden
Richard is a Senior Designer and Frontend Developer who enjoys spending time in spaces where humans and technology come together in meaningful ways. He’s curious about all things design and a champion of user-centered design and research. We’re delighted to have Richard back as our Digital Moderator for SXC2026. His enthusiasm for design, technology, and human experiences makes him a natural guide for our digital audience throughout the conference.
Introduction
Welcome to the conference!
Digital break: My Design Persona
Describe your design persona using a template, introduce yourself to the other participants.
Digital break: To Prompt or Not to Prompt
Let's try a framework which can be used to decide if you should prompt or not for a given task. We work two by two and then present for the whole group.
Digital break: Best of SXC and Contact
Present your top 2 moments of SXC, and if you want to keep the discussion going, paste your LinkedIn-url to the Miro board so the other participants can connect with you.
Digital workshops
Kalina TyrkielSenior Content Designer
UX writer by trade and psychologist by training, now Senior Content Designer working on AI experiences at Zendesk. Experienced trainer, lecturer, and consultant in UX writing; creator of Poland's first AI in UX writing course. After hours: Instagram foodie, local culinary evangelist, fueled by hot sauce and filter coffee.
Designing around AI: the psychology of new design patterns
Traditional design patterns assume a predictable system – but while generative AI is built on predictions, it is anything but predictable. As a psychologist and a designer working in Zendesk, an AI-first company and one of OpenAI’s top 30 customers, I’ll walk you through some of the most important new design patterns around AI. We’ll cover disclosing AI outputs to users, optimal levels of AI anthropomorphism, managing expectations, as well as ethical and psychological aspects, including common biases. Expect real-life use cases and fresh points of view.
Digital Workshop: Creating UX copy with AI (the right way)
Learn how to use AI to make UX writing more efficient, consistent, and scalable – without generating AI slop. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore how to build AI skills and agents that can review UX copy, apply content guidelines, identify inconsistencies, and support better writing decisions. Learn from an industry practitioner, try new skills as you learn, and leave with actionable takeaways.
Sanni NyströmDesign Area Manager @ Fortnox
Sanni Nyström is a design leader at Fortnox, a Swedish business and accounting platform, where she works with the designers and products within Spend Management. Before Fortnox she worked in design at SJ, SEB, and consultancies Vass and Cartina, untangling complex flows and finding the user value buried in business rules and legacy systems. Based in Stockholm, she spends her spare time staying in motion, anything from road cycling to yoga, and doing DIY projects like flipping furniture and crocheting blankets. She is always yearning to ski down mountains covered in powder.
Digital workshop: When AI can build anything, what should you build?
AI has made producing solutions almost free. The constraint is no longer "can we build it?" but "should we?". Building the wrong thing faster isn't innovation, it's a waste of resources, team energy, and our users' trust.
This workshop is a hands-on introduction to the Opportunity Solution Tree, Teresa Torres' method for anchoring product decisions in real customer evidence before a single prompt is written. You'll try the method on a concrete case and leave with:
- An understanding of the tree's structure: outcome → opportunities → solutions → assumption tests
- A feel for the hardest part in practice: telling genuine customer opportunities from solution ideas in disguise
- The confidence to sketch a rough tree with your own team, and know what to read when you get stuck
Brian GreeneFractional UX Leader and Founder @ aikidsclub.org
Brian is a UX leader who shipped products for hundreds of millions of users at places like Etsy, Bumble and StreamYard, currently leading research for AI products at Pleo. He studied creative writing and computer science, which felt like an identity crisis until LLMs made it a superpower. He's taught product discovery to hundreds of practitioners and founded aikidsclub.org, where he teaches kids to think and build with AI.
Digital workshop: Build it like you: getting started with Claude Code
Building with AI takes what good product people already have: a vision, a plan, and the taste and judgement to steer. In this hands-on hour you'll put yours into an AGENTS.md, the file Claude Code reads before it builds, so what you make comes out like you and not AI slop.
You'll leave with:
- a working prototype, built in the session and shaped by your AGENTS.md
- your own AGENTS.md to keep, use and adapt on your next project
- a method that lasts as the tools change
For UX and product people who have used Claude to build or design and want to go further. You'll need a paid Claude plan (Pro or Max); setup steps arrive before the workshop.
Venue
SXC2026 takes place at 7A Posthuset, right in the heart of Stockholm.
The venue is located inside the historic Central Post Office building, just a few steps from Stockholm Central Station. Which means you can step off the train, grab a coffee and walk straight into a full day of design, tech and thoughtful conversations.
7A Posthuset combines modern conference spaces with beautiful architecture, great acoustics and room to breathe. It’s a place made for ideas, discussions and the occasional quiet moment when your brain needs to catch up.
Address
7A Posthuset
Vasagatan 28
Stockholm, Sweden
