Previous speakers 2015 - 2023

2023	Invisibility	UX Copenhagen 2023 “Invisibility”. Don Norman once said something like “Good UX design is invisible, bad UX is everywhere”. Creating “invisible” UX is not an easy feat though! At UX Copenhagen 2023, we’ll be looking at what goes into the development of creating invisible services, processes, and usable products, and at some of the other “invisible” things we do as designers, like using listening skills, methodologies from psychology, and even manipulation. We will look into how to highlight biases among ourselves, how to focus on what’s missing from our designs, and how to pinpoint unintended consequences. There will be talks about the hidden ways in which some parts of the population are systematically overlooked and excluded from the world we live in, highlighting racism, ageism, and gender, and discussing how we can prevent this.
	Angelos Arnis is a strategic designer who builds the structures and conditions for holistic and resilient systems that enable impact, cross-functional collaboration, and intentional change. He is using design to create more equitable conditions for the planet and its people. For the past 15 years, he has been working with product/service companies and startups. He is the co-founder at Joint Frontiers, and a co-host of ‘Human, the designer’. Additionally, Angelos is a community organizer at DesignOps Assembly and IxDA (Helsinki chapters), as well as an alumnus organizer of Joint Futures, UXHel, DSCONF, & Junction Hackathon. In his free time, he enjoys making music and playing computer games.	Our collective futures: There is no planet B In this closing keynote, Angelos Arnis will look at how designers can use their skills and tools to influence a truly green transition and shape a sustainable, equitable, and just future for all. We will talk about how strategic design, sustainable thinking, and systems approaches can help us create solutions that benefit our communities and the world we live in.
	Shir Zalzberg is a Senior UX manager at Salesforce. Previously, she led the design team at OverOps, and has also worked with multiple startups and tech companies. Besides her work, Shir is the founder of Startup Designers, a design community with over 20K members and multiple initiatives. For her work with the community, Shir was recognized as Forbes Israel 30 under 30 2021. She completed her MBA at IE business school and recently relocated to Amsterdam from Israel.	Data visualization to drive change: Learnings from 4 years of UX community surveys Between 2018 and 2022, Shir Zalzberg gathered massive amounts of data, running four surveys with thousands of participants in the UX community she manages. The surveys tackled subjects like salaries, gender gaps, age and experience gaps, the job of UX designers vs. managers, design tools, and more. In the workshop, she’ll cover best practices for data visualization. She’ll teach us what visual changes she has implemented over the years to help drive change, and what lessons she has learned about how data visualization can impact the greater community.
	Jen Blatz is a Lead User Experience Researcher and Designer with expertise that lends itself to any industry. Jen’s path to UX started in journalism and graphic design where she learned the importance of aesthetics, organization, and catering content for the consumer. She has worked in a number of fields including finance, mortgage, cloud storage, security and pet health. Jen loves being active in the UX community to learn and grow while helping others do the same. She is the co-founder and president of the UX Research and Strategy group, a 501c3 organization, with an international presence with thousands of members and followers. She is the organizer of WIAD (World Information Architecture Day) locally, and speaker for several meetup groups and international conferences like UX Australia, Convey UX, IAC (Information Architecture Conference), UX New Zealand, UX Research and Insights Summit and more.	Workshop: Spontaneous Talks Frameworks People love stories. We are told time and time again the value of storytelling when we present our UX work. But this is a workshop about Spontaneous Talks Frameworks (STF for short). These are a bit different from your traditional fairy tale that follows the arc and structure of a story. STF may not have a rising action, a climax, or a resolution. Heck, you might go as far to say that STF are not really stories at all. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks are less about describing a narrative, and more about quickly organizing your thoughts, using a framework. A Spontaneous Talks Framework helps you to organize your thoughts to present UX designs or research findings to your stakeholders. STF can be a fabulous crutch when you need to speak on a topic that you have not prepared for in advance. In this workshop, Jen Blatz will teach you how to organize your thoughts with these easy frameworks. You will learn how to use this thought organization technique to answer anything — and use it to present your UX work. You will: Know how to answer (because you organized your thoughts) Feel confident in speaking (because now you know your answer) And just do it (that is, speak with less anxiety because you organized your thoughts) Sometimes neither you nor your stakeholders have the time for a full presentation. These hacks allow you to present information on a short timeline. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks help you break up your story into smaller, consumable chunks so it’s easier to organize and remember.
	Tobias Christian Jensen is a certified professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), an experienced public speaker, and chair of the Nordic Accessibility Community Group under W3C, promoting inclusive design in the Nordic countries. Working with digital transformation and inclusivity at Siteimprove, he teaches designers, developers, and business leaders on the importance of getting digital accessibility right, and how to do it.	Workshop: The Use of Color in the Dark Ages Each day, we will have 3-4 practical, 1.5 hour workshops to choose from after lunch. Tobias Christian Jensen, Accessibility Expert with Siteimprove, will be the hosting “The Use of Color in the Dark Ages”: “What do medieval sculptors, tiny Pacific Ocean islands, and poorly stuffed lions have in common with digital design? Color plays a quintessential role when we design. Yet we often struggle with using color in a way that makes our intentions clear to everyone and meets the requirements for inclusive design. Through stories and hands-on exercises, we will take a trip through time and travel back to the 12th century and beyond to see what we can learn from those who came before us.”
	Tiziana has more than 18 years of experience in the industry. She is a senior instructor, teaching interactive design, UX and web front-end at different secondary institutions. She has a background that includes a degree in graphic design, a master’s in Media Psychology and several professional certifications, along with years of design and web development. She is a co-leader of the San Diego chapter of the Interaction Design Foundation. She strives to create the best user experiences that will persuade without manipulation, and strongly believes that ethical design can change the world for the better. She is a member of the Ethical Design Network and maintains its blog.	Workshop: Psychological insights in UX UX psychologist and interaction designer Tiziana d’Agostino will be hosting a workshop at UX Copenhagen 2023, sharing with us the most important psychological insights that will help us create the right product that in turn delivers real value. “Successful products require a deep understanding of people, and to achieve this, we must use psychology. She will also emphasize how we should use psychology ethically to increase customers’ wellbeing, and will offer us practical advice that we can implement in our work immediately.
	Piccia Neri helps agencies, businesses, designers & developers thrive and win on the web by putting their users at the centre of their process. She does this as a UX and accessible design consultant on projects, as a course provider, trainer, coach and workshop leader. She speaks at conferences globally on UX and accessible design. She also organizes the Design for Conversions conference, which focuses on helping agencies design products that convert more, by putting people first.	Visible, Beautiful, Creative, and Accessible! “Accessibility is the death of creativity”; “You can’t be creative and accessible”; “This site may not be accessible or useful, but it’s because it’s creative!” How many times have you heard the above, or a combination thereof? On the modern web, there is a tendency to identify “creativity” with “objects that move very fast on the screen without any apparent reason”. If creativity needed animation, we might as well set fire to most of the world’s museums. There is also a tendency to identify “accessible” with “ugly” and “sacrificing imagination”. Piccia Neri will debunk these myths in her talk, showing how your website – and business – can be visible, beautiful, creative, accessible – and at the same time, extremely profitable.
	Bettina Høiler has a Master’s degree Service Systems Design from the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Hospitality Management from Copenhagen Business Academy. She currently works as a senior UX and Service Designer at the Danish insurance company Alm. Brand Group, where her focus is on designing great customer experiences and employee processes within the claims area. Bettina has experience working with design in all parts of the financial industry (banking, insurance, and pension), as well as in consultancy. Her passion for people and for helping them – for instance by providing great customer experiences – is what led her into the field of UX and Service Design. Fun fact: Her favorite design tool is the Service Blueprint.	Should insurance companies care about the discovery of systemic racism and gender bias in medical devices? “Last year, I went to a UX conference where one of the topics was ‘Discrimination in the healthcare sector’. The problem raised during the talk was the discovery of systemic racism and gender bias in medical devices. The example they gave related to an oximeter, which research suggests works less well for patients with darker skin. Working at an insurance company with many health insurance customers of varying gender and skin color, I began to wonder whether this is something we should care about and take responsibility for. Of course, we are not to blame for the inadequate testing of medical devices on a narrow user segment, however, do we not have a responsibility to ensure that the partners that we collaborate with e.g. to service a health insurance customer such as private hospitals, are made aware of these issues and take notice of them when treating our insurance customers? From a UX perspective, I believe the issue with biased medical devices can jeopardize the customer experience, and the customer relationship altogether. Thus, I would argue that we should care about this invisible and unintended discrimination that becomes the consequence. In the end together with our partners, we are the ones responsible for the customer experience.”
	Rina is a ballerina turned product designer, currently based in Los Angeles. She is one of the founding members at Mooch, a fintech startup in the crypto/defi space with a community of 450,000+ where she leads design and research. In the last 10 years before her career change into tech, she was training and dancing professionally as a ballerina— dancing around Singapore, the U.S, Japan, and Spain. Her notable honors from her ballet career include dancing on stages of the Barcelona Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House, leading second senior prize at the 2017 U.S Ballet Competition, and working directly under world renowned dancers/directors. As a career changer herself, she loves to help empower other career changers whether that be helping craft their personal brand, and identifying their transferable skills. Rina’s story has been featured in press such as Business Insider and Built in, and she’s spoken at non-profits and institutions such as the University of Arizona, Triangirls UK, GirlGenius, CareerFoundry, and Ideate Labs. Currently outside of work, she is one of the 12 chosen mentors for a fellowship program, mentoring first generation WOC in college aspiring to work in tech.	The invisible similarities ballet and design have in common Product designer and Ballerina, Rina Takikawa will be speaking at UX Copenhagen 2023 about her career transition from classical ballet to technology. In this talk, she will also be sharing the invisible similarities ballet and design have in common, and how she navigates her design process through the lessons she has learnt as a ballerina.
	Rachel Gogel (she/her) is a Paris-born, San Francisco-based queer creative director and designer whose skills range from branding, strategy, and design management to art direction, editorial, and product design. She runs her own small consultancy as an independent creative culture officer where her approach is informed by experiences both in-house and agency side. Over the last fifteen years, Rachel has continued to use design as a tool for change — from launching story-driven initiatives at Departures and Godfrey Dadich Partners to building multidisciplinary teams at The New York Times’ award-winning T Brand, GQ, and Meta. In 2022, some of her main projects included supporting internal brand work at Airbnb, advising on Jeff Staple’s new magazine MYLES, and building a brand identity for Jacqueline Novogratz’s latest passion project, Anew. Outside of her studio practice, she is also the Women in Leadership & Design (WILD) Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors and an Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA) where she teaches classes called “Leadership by Design” and “Designing Your Career” for graduate students completing their Master’s in Interaction Design. As a passionate design leader and experienced people manager, Rachel believes in fostering inclusive spaces that unlock human potential.	Dear Boss, you need help. Sending everyone home to work was a catalyst for people to reexamine not only how, when, and where they work, but why, resulting in deep, structural changes to employee expectations. But what drives engagement at work is the same factor now as it was pre-pandemic: an employee’s relationship with their manager. This is why Rachel Gogel believes that good people managers matter more now than ever before. Being forced into remote work exacerbated an underlying issue at many organizations, which is: Most don’t provide the necessary tools to foster great (or even good) people leaders. With hybrid work models becoming the new norm — in which fully in-person and remote work are two ends of a fluid spectrum of options — the role of the “boss” is effectively evolving. While most people associate “the future of work” with the rise of the entrepreneurial generation or the development of emerging “work-from-anywhere” models centered on employee wellness, we’ll explore the inevitable next wave of design leadership. Throughout this talk, Rachel shares some of her research and key findings so that the people leaders of tomorrow can act boldly to reimagine an employee experience that is more purposeful, individualized, and mobile — and prepare them not just for post-pandemic “normalcy” but for the year 2030, when most companies will be decentralized, the majority of the workforce will be self-employed, and the project-based economy will be prevalent.
	David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias, creator and host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, and a twenty-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He has presented at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, An Event Apart, LavaCon, UX Copenhagen (several times now!), Artifact, IA Conference, IxDA, Design and Content Conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and the Wharton Web Conference on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.	The Content Design of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration In the current political climate, it seems like we’ve all but given up on productive, respectful discourse. However, there are simple design and content design choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues. In this session we’ll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and the three rules they share.
	Lisa Talia Moretti is a Digital Sociologist and User Research Principal at AND Digital in the UK. Over the last 15 years she has worked as a researcher and strategist across service design, content and branding. She is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, Cardiff University and Plymouth University, and a Research Fellow at The Governance Lab. Lisa is also the Co-Chair of BIMA’s AI Council and the Sovrin Foundation’s Working Group on Guardianship. In 2020 Lisa was named as one of Britain’s 100 people who are shaping the British digital industry in the category Champion for Change.	Designing for relationships When was the last time you helped someone do something online? Do you have any formal ‘authority’ in place? Perhaps you’re a parent or a guardian or have a power of attorney in place for your mum, dad or a grandparent. Who would help you if you lost mental capacity or were no longer capable of making your own decisions all of the time? For the 55 million people living with dementia and the 10 million more who get diagnosed every year, getting support is not a random thought experiment (WHO, 2022). It’s their day-to-day reality. Informal and formal support are a key feature of human life and as a result, our services should be flexible enough to cope with a supporter-in-tow on the other end of a screen, telephone or paper form. However, despite their everyday occurrence, supported journeys are often treated as outliers in service patterns; they’re not prioritised, poorly understood and under researched. Why do we make it so difficult for people to get the help they need? A lack of supported journeys isn’t just a design flaw. In some instances, their absence becomes outright service failure. In this talk, Lisa Talia Moretti will share lessons of being part of a multidisciplinary team looking to modernise the lasting power of attorney service in the UK. Her biggest insight? We need to design for relationships, not just users.
	Oliver Schöndorfer is a user interface and app designer from Austria. He’s not a UX ninja unicorn rockstar, but he’s hopelessly in love with everything type. He runs a UI design business, and does typographic consulting for international clients.	Unleash the Invisible Power of UI Typography, Workshop Text is an essential part of every user interface. However, many apps seem to neglect that. This results in a lost opportunity for branding at least (looking at you, Roboto), and at worst, bad UX. Typography to the rescue! After this entertaining and inspiring workshop, you will have practical guidelines on how better to choose and use typefaces for your next UI design. With this new knowledge, you can let the uniqueness of your project shine without losing functionality.
	Joachim Blicher is a highly skilled and versatile multidisciplinary designer, specializing in strategic UX design. He is known for his effectiveness in solving problems by utilizing user insights and behavioral design principles to create human-centered designs. Joachim has a talent for simplifying complex information, making it valuable and tangible. For over a decade, he has worked with major companies and national agencies in Denmark, helping them provide seamless digital experiences. With a background in software development, Joachim possesses a strong and natural curiosity for tech and design. He has gained extensive knowledge and hands-on experience, enabling him to design creative solutions using the latest technological possibilities.	Workshop: Solving invisible problems Designing for risk can be hard to test and validate because conventional testing methods aren’t always feasible or accurate. That doesn’t mean you’re limited in your design options though! Our thoughts and decisions are heavily influenced by unconscious biases. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to solve untestable scenarios using persuasive design techniques that leverage psychological biases to drive desired behaviors.
	Dr Linda Sheard is a Senior Cloud Solution Architect for Data & AI at Microsoft. She helps Microsoft’s customers to build end-to-end AI and analytics solutions on the Azure Cloud, and is passionate about designing for responsible use of AI, never more so than now, after Microsoft has launched an Azure OpenAI service for general availability. Linda first started working with AI in the context of some of the earliest IBM Watson solutions for natural language understanding, working in close collaboration with the IBM Design Studio, who taught her respect for the UX and visual design professions and turned her into a strong proponent of Design Thinking. She is also active as a technical coach and panel judge for the Microsoft AI4Good programme.	ChatGPT, OpenAI, Dall-E – collaborators, competitors, or tools for UX designers? Stories of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Dall-E are dominating the news these days. But what does it mean for the UX design profession? What happens when an AI starts taking initiative of where to direct a user conversation or journey? How can designers and content creators leverage the generative capabilities of these models safely? And what is the responsibility of UX designers with respect to the guardrails that we need to design into solutions that leverage human interaction with generative models?
	Rachael Edwards is a content designer from Manchester, United Kingdom. Combining a lifelong love of writing and a passion for accessibility and user-centred design, Rachael is on a mission to simplify as much complex content as she can get her hands on.	Workshop: Unlock the hidden power of inclusive content Your words matter. In this content design-focused workshop, you’ll learn how to write for real people and create better user journeys though the hidden power of inclusive language. The workshop is presented to you by Rachael Edwards and Demi Daniels of Auto Trader UK.
	Demi Daniels is a teacher-turned-content designer, originally from the United States. She is living in Manchester, United Kingdom and working at Auto Trader UK. She believes her experiences of hospitality work, teaching, and living overseas help shaped her empathetic mindset, allowing her to put users at the front of her mind.	(Same as above)
	Debbie Levitt, MBA is the CXO of Delta CX, and has been a CX and UX strategist, researcher, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. She’s a change agent focused on helping companies of all sizes transform towards customer-centricity while using principles of Agile and Lean.	Don’t democratize UX Research – and governance for those doing it Democratization is something few of us would choose if we had alternatives. We would want budget and headcount to grow the UX Research department. A team stretched thin is told not only to let anybody do some or all of their jobs, but that they will need to train and oversee this work. This actionable session dives into many of the pro-democratization reasons and arguments and offers critical thinking and counter-arguments for all of them. For those who want to democratize – or are being forced to – we’ll work with my governance model, and you’ll learn how to closely monitor having non-specialists do specialized work, and being able to know when it’s successful or failing.
	David de Léon is a designer with 25 years of academic and industry experience. You can tell by his hair and beard that he has been doing it for a while. At the start of his industry career, David worked a decade for Sony Ericsson with design and innovation of mobile phone interfaces. Towards the end of his tenure at Sony, he would review all the design output produced each week by the UX teams in Sweden, Japan and China. It was then that he became deeply interested in the factors that contribute to effective and impactful design feedback. Since then, he has worked at inUse, one of Sweden’s premiere design consultancies, as a Director of UX Design, supporting clients with strategy, research and innovation, and coaching his colleagues across the company. He has recently ventured out into the world as a freelance designer, researcher, strategist and educator.	The Gentle Art of Design Feedback One of the quickest ways of levelling up as a designer is to become a master at asking for and making use of feedback. To be able to do so, we have to lower our defences and lean into the process. In this talk, David will teach the audience a number of Jedi mind tricks for how to get the most out of feedback, without bruising your ego, and whilst having fun in the process. At the end of the talk, he promises that you will be at least 10% better as a designer. Not a bad way to spend 30 minutes!
	As the founder of Unconform, Mansi Gupta partners with organisations to help them incorporate a women-centric design lens across products, programs and processes. She is the creator of Design for Women–a methodology focused on intentionally and actively designing for women; the author of Unconforming, a newsletter advancing dialogue at the intersection of women and design; and the curator of Design for Women Conversations, a monthly event series bringing together gender and design practitioners. Mansi has 10+ years of experience applying behavioural research & design strategy in social impact. Previously, she led projects at Women’s World Banking to increase financial inclusion among lower-income women in developing nations. Prior to that, she designed games to research reproductive healthcare in rural India as a designer for Final Mile Consulting. Mansi holds a BA in Computer Science & Economics from Bryn Mawr College, and an MFA in Products of Design from the School of Visual Arts. She grew up in India, and is now based in Amsterdam.	Reducing Unintended Consequences Created by the Gender-Neutrality Guise to Design for the Invisible Half Uber rolled out SOS functionality only after there were sexual harassment cases reported on their rides, originally overlooking safety (which often matters more to women). Yoga apps, even with an overwhelmingly female audience, fail to acknowledge menstruation. Pension funds, failing to acknowledge that women live longer have contributed to gender financial gaps. Our products and services continue to overlook women’s key needs and create unintended consequences for them. Chances are that most of us are not only using products and services that overlook key needs of women, we are also creating them. Research shows that our current design methodologies are biased—that under the guise of being “genderless” or “gender-neutral,” they continue to produce one-size-fits-men outcomes. Businesses have failed to design for and create impact for women–and women continue to remain invisible and overlooked in a world traditionally designed for men.
	For the past 25 years, Dan Maccarone has been helping startups and corporations shape their online product strategy, including Foursquare, Stocktwits, Rent The Runway, The Skimm, Blade and The Block. His experience also includes television, music and print media, and he has worked with The New York Times, CNN, Deutsche Bank, GE, Booking.com, Saturday Night Live, Universal Music and The Wall Street Journal. One of his most noted projects was creating the original strategy and user experience for Hulu. Dan is the CEO of the product design studio, Charming Robot, and was the co-founder the design agency Hard Candy Shell. He is the host of the podcast Story in a Bottle and the author of Audible Original book The Barstool MBA. Dan received his Master’s Degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and his Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in English and Performing Arts.	The Efficacy of the Peripheral: Adventures in the Life of a Fractional CPO As the profession of product design has evolved over the past couple decades, the best practices of product design and process have evolved quite a bit. And they continue to do so. Many large and burgeoning companies usually go one of two routes: hiring a full time person to run their product (often at the C- or VP-level) or they outsource product design to an agency where they become one of many clients, who can easily become yes-people for client requests. But there is a third option that gives you the best of both worlds: the fractional leader. This is happening outside of product as well – with CEOs, CTOs, and in marketing as well. So, why not product? In this talk, Dan Maccarone will explore the success he has seen in factional product leadership, the art of building multiple internal teams at once, and how having a head of product who’s able to keep a peripheral view of what’s going on outside your company can keep you from getting too mired in the weeds and able to leverage experience that you may not otherwise have been aware of.
	Catherine Hills has been in design, research, UX, CX, strategy, product and service experience, engineering and change for over two decades. She has more than 15 years of experience leading teams in practice and management, and almost 7 years in delivering design education (including General Assembly, RMIT School of Design #1 in APAC, #15 in the world for Art and Design). Her current positions are Director of Product Design at Pluralsight, Sessional Academic at RMIT University (UX Expertise), PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne (School of Engineering and IT – Information Systems, Design).	The problematic intersection of UX design with organizational design: Is your organization ready and willing to change? In the field of UX design, we are often asked to do something, but that thing may have more potential effects than we can predict. How might we respond, or create credible recommendations, when the impact of what we are asked to deliver is beyond what was expected – or the reality of our findings are beyond organizational readiness for listening, receptiveness, or action?

2022	Creating a culture change	UX Copenhagen 2022 “Creating a Culture Change”. We will be bringing forward subjects like employee experience, governance, change management, and empowerment. We’ll be discussing how different “isms” and biases have a huge effect on the internal culture of a company – and how this ties into UX and design, and what we can do to change this. We keep hearing that designers don’t have a seat at the table when it comes to decision-making. Why is that still the case? UX has been around for over a decade now, maybe even closer to two, and the tools and methodologies have certainly developed to help “prove” the value of UX and design. Why, then, are we still fighting for governance? And what other aspects of a (company) culture can be improved on with “UX” or with using user-centric methods? Does your product convey to the world what your company culture is really like? Other important issues that we really need to start talking more loudly about are isms, biases, and privilege. Ageism, for example, is a huge issue, and one that is rarely talked about. The fact is that the average living age for humans is growing, and there is going to be a huge percentage of “older” people in the near future. Oftentimes, we’re not even designing for them!
	Martina Gobec is an experienced strategic designer, creative leadership coach, advisor and educator. Through her 20-year journey in innovation, she worked as a designer at Sony Design Center Europe and Kontrapunkt, and as a design director at ustwo and Vertical Strategy (later Bain & Company). She is also a certified coach from the Co-Active Training Institute.	Feedback Culture and the Importance of Change In her closing keynote, Martina will talk about the importance of feedback in creating honest cultures and learning organizations. She will cover why feedback is a fundamental tool for learning, share core principles for building a strong feedback culture and tips to get started with the change.
	Jane Ruffino is a a content designer, UX content strategist, and UX writer based in Stockholm, Sweden. She has a background in content strategy, UX writing, marketing, journalism, documentary, research, and archaeology, all different ways of connecting the human-behavior dots. She loves doing things with words that help people do things better!	A Form is a Problem, Not a Solution In this talk, content designer Jane Ruffino will argue that no matter who is responsible for the form design process (OK, it should be content designers), it’s hard to make forms better because forms aren’t about input fields, error messages, or progress bars, forms are about power.
	Winnie Mulli has a love for intuitive design and teaching how to design products with mental health in mind. Winnie studied Pre-med in England, and uses the learnings from her studies to bring a fresh perspective to UX Design	Mental Health Centered UX Design Senior UI/UX Designer Winnie Mulli has a love for intuitive design and teaching how to design products with mental health in mind. Her talk will be about the role of UX/UI in Mental Health centered Human Interaction Design.
	Over several years, Ivy Ndungi has formed a love for understanding the root of human behaviour as she conducted research for social services and digital products. She leads with empathy, collaboration and curiosity at the core of translating information into meaningful insights.	Making your silent users heard: UX research in low digital literacy contexts Designing for users that are very different from what you’re used to presents a series of challenges that are particularly unique, and require a creative approach to user research.
	With a background in communication studies and interaction design, Claudel Rheault is a user experience researcher focused on human-AI interactions. Her research areas include human in the loop systems, trust building with AI tools and human-centered product development.	(Same as above)
	Maggie Jandová is a UX designer who loves to motivate and inspire others to think differently. Coming from the graphic design field.	Workshop: Maggie Jandová “The Innovation Lab game”. In the workshop, Maggie will talk about creativity, how the hiring process can be fun and will give a demo of the Innovation Lab game. The workshop is intended for anyone looking for ways to spark creativity, improve their problem-solving skills and do things differently.
	Thorsten Jonas, strategic UX Consultant and founder of the Sustainable UX Playbook	Sustainable UX Last year at the UX Copenhagen conference, we launched the idea of Sustainable UX and held a huge workshop on creating a toolset for a “Sustainable UX Playbook”. A lot has happened since, and we are super happy to have Thorsten back again in 2022 to talk about what has been going on in this important project.
	Matt Homewood is an award-winning food waste campaigner on a mission to end supermarket food waste in Denmark and beyond. His Urban Harvesting exploits and blogging can be followed on his website and Instagram @anurbanharvester	Fighting for Systemic Change With 40% of all food produced is wasted, food waste campaigner Matt Homewood will uncover this global food waste farce and review the impacts. Most importantly, technological and legislative solutions will be explored so that we can forge an exit plan..
	Dr. Sorcha MacLeod is an Associate Professor and Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellow in the Centre for Private Governance (CEPRI) in the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.	Let’s Talk About Sexism in Tech. In the Danish welfare society, which supports equal access to education, healthcare, and social services, we like to think that we have an environment that is respectful and inclusive, that gender is never a limiting factor, and that, when issues arise, people feel at ease to talk about them. Reality, however, shows a very different picture.
	Cancan Wang is an associate professor in Enterprise Systems and IT Governance in the Department of Business IT at the IT University of Copenhagen.	Co-design Change Through the Digital: Governance and Culture of Organizations Governance and culture are two common approaches for organizations to initiate and adapt to digital changes. What is the relationship between the two, and how can co-design be used as an approach to steer practices of both?
	Dean Schuster is owner of the UX firm truematter in the USA	What the Soviet Space Program Taught Me About Digital Product Design UX professionals have long argued for organizational culture change when it comes to the role of UX, especially in the development process and in decision-making circles. This will be a visually powerful talk that challenges UX professionals to change organizational culture from within.
	Eva Høyer Nielsen is Head of Experience Design & Digital Commercialization at Nordea.	Employee Experience What happens in our experience as employees today, and what alternative perspectives can we start to embed within our own organizations – and even within ourselves?
	Bethany Sonefeld is a designer that specializes in systems thinking, detail oriented design, and scalable enterprise solutions. Bethany has spent her career leading grass-roots efforts, consistently innovating and changing the way product organizations build products. She co-led the Carbon Design System team at IBM, who built and maintained the design system for IBM Cloud. At Cloudflare, she was the first designer on Cloudflare for Teams, building that product from the ground up before hiring a team of four. Currently, Bethany is working as a Senior Product Designer at Duo Security while also building Create with Conscience, a space dedicated to educating and committing to designing healthier technology.	“Create with conscience: healthier tech for a digitally distracted world”During this talk, Bethany Sonefeld will discuss the ways technology is controlling our time, emotions, and attention. She will outline the tools and techniques companies use to keep us hooked and engaged. Then, she’ll discuss the ways in which we can commit to and build healthier technology—for ourselves and our end users. “Dark patterns, bottomless feeds, and manipulative software—we are surrounded by addictive and toxic technology. As creators, we have a tremendous responsibility to build tech that respects our users time, mental space, and well-being. As consumers, we must begin to build balance with the technology in our own lives. It’s time we create with conscience.”
	Ashley Morgan is a Senior Product Designer at Haven Servicing, an early startup. Before Haven, she worked for Rocket Mortgage, the largest mortgage lender in America.	Embracing the Workshop Culture: How to instill a workshop culture in your organization to avoid common pitfalls. They will equip leaders and practitioners with tactical steps to move their organization away from traditional design critiques. They will discuss shifting towards a culture where everyone’s voice is equally considered, and stakeholders and cross-functional teams are engaged early and often in building the future experiences around the user’s needs.
	As a multi-disciplinary designer, Aurora Melchor is passionate about the capabilities of design to help solve problems in the space of climate change and sustainability. She has worked as a UX designer and front-end developer for companies such as Amnesty International and ThoughtWorks, where she focused on building digital products and services. Recently, she’s trying her hand as an Employee Experience designer, and applying her toolset of user-entered design methods for solving the internal challenges of growing a young company.	A Case Study on Culture and Values At UX Copenhagen, Aurora will be speaking about what happens to a company’s culture and values when they experience sudden and massive growth.
	Silvia Podestá is an experienced strategic designer and UX specialist with a mixed-bag professional background.	Design will never matter (unless we uproot these four major sins) This talk is about a company trying to give power back to the everyday user by protecting user privacy, fighting back against the surveillance economy, and rewarding web content creators at the same time.
	Miriam Lerkenfeld, CEO of Hard Work, Mind & Magic	Tools for Change Miriam Lerkenfeld focuses on employee involvement, prototyping and open innovation. In this talk, Miriam will talk about how and why UX should become an important part of the foundation for implementing change.
	Brigette Metzler, ResearchOps Lead at the Australian government Department of Agriculture, Water, and Environment.	Change, Threads, Distaves, and Ordering Principles Using her own change story, Brigette will give you some guiding principles to spot the flows of agency, authority, and autonomy to help you in your own change work.

2021	Commoning	We’re stepping up the subject of co-design with the theme for 2021 by calling it “Commoning” (deriving from the term “Commons”), because co-design doesn’t fully describe the subjects we’ll be discussing. Circular, or Shared Economy don’t quite work either; there will be talks focusing on community driven design, sustainable UX, futurism, design-driven social initiatives, democratizing design, celebrating intersectionality and differences, and a lot more.
	Gretchen Anderson author, design leader, and independent designer and coach	Secrets of Successful Collaboration This talk will focus on practical, tangible ways to make working together less painful and more productive.
	Lauren Isaacson, independent marketing and UX research consultant	Inclusive Research Why we should make our research inclusive, and how to best make our research accessible to people with disabilities.
	Scot Westwater of Pragmatic Digital	Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences Susan and Scot will be speaking about the newest trend in UX: Voice strategy and Voice UI – and how to use these.
	Susan Westwater of Pragmatic Digital	(Same as above)
	Beant Kaur, independent Senior Usability and UX Research Consultant	Level Up Your Listening Skills Beant is an independent senior Usability & UX Research Consultant. Our relationship with sound is primal and ancient. We survive, grow, and thrive by listening. Yet listening is endangered because we are constantly distracted. This workshop brings together learning from psychology, neuroscience, FBI negotiation techniques, social psychology to level up your listening skills.
	Lone Ørum, senior UX and Design Thinking expert	Fake Door – a PREtotyping Technique This talk is about using “Fake Door” pretotyping techniques to get as close to the users/customers as possible, and at the same time keeping costs low. It’s all about failing fast and getting REAL user/costumer experiences.
	Angelina Ngunje, creative designer and CEO of Unicorn Valley Technologies	The Cascading Mentorship Model Angelina’s talk will focus on how the cascading mentorship model can help create an alternative means of income for young girls.
	Tina Klemmensen, serial entrepreneur, puppeteer, and founder of the Repair Cafe in Kolding, Denmark	Using Commoning to Engage and Empower the Common Citizen Tina is a self-employed designer, and in her company she runs hands-on workshops using stop motion animation as a tool to improve communication. She calls this process “Tangible Telling”. In her “spare time”, Tina is founder of the “Repair Cafe” initiative – a place people can go to learn new skills, help repair broken things, and to meet people.
	Adam Smith, founder and co-director of the global company The Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP)	Revolutionizing the Disposal of Food Waste The Real Junk Food Project was set up in December 2013 to distribute edible surplus food to individuals, cafes, schools and community groups. The project’s aim was to revolutionize the disposal of avoidable food waste into landfill, the pioneering movement’s manifesto being to: feed bellies, not bins.
	Lisa Welchman, author and independent advocate for digital creators	A fireside chat about Designing for Safety
	Andy Vitale, VP of Product Design and Content at Quicken Loans	(Same as above)
	Hany Rizk, CEO of the “No BS” Innovation Studio in Berlin	Originally from Lebanon, Hany Rizk runs a design and innovation studio in Berlin where he works as a Mentor and Experience Strategist, and facilitates design sprints for companies in food tech, for the UN, and a lot of startups like nitehero.Originally from Lebanon, Hany Rizk runs a design and innovation studio in Berlin where he works as a Mentor and Experience Strategist, and facilitates design sprints for companies in food tech, for the UN, and a lot of startups like nitehero. He is also Adobe XD design expert, and facilitates workshops like this one to show how XD can be used in a variety of ways.
	Thorsten Jonas	The UX of Burnout Thorsten’s talk is about his personal journey through a burnout, what his creativity had to do with the burnout, and how his creative toolset helped him through it.
	Nisha Shetty, Technical Lead at HCL Technologies	Green UX for a Green World Nisha will be speaking about sustainability and how designers can inculcate Green UX practices in their day-to-day life.12:33 – 13:15Thorsten Jonas at UX Copenhagen 2021
	Idun Aune	Turn Climate Anxiety into Climate Action In this talk, Erin and Idun, two ambassadors of The Hive Initiative, a group dedicated to growing and supporting a global climate action workforce, will introduce the initiative and then give examples of how planet-centric design and cross-company collaboration have changed the places they work to become engines of climate action.
	Erin Gallup	(Same as above)
	Sanna Marttila is an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and service designer. Sanna works in the field of interaction design and service design, and carries design research projects in real-world settings applying participatory design, co-design and open design methodologies.	Designing Commons and Commoning Design Commoning is not a new buzzword. It comes with an interesting history and well established meaning. During this “fireside chat”, we will bring some terminological clarifications for the term “commoning” by linking its roots in the concept of “commons” and by summarizing what it has come to mean in/for design. We will also bring examples of commoning, suggest how designers can learn from commoners, and ideate on pluriversal commoning.
	Joanna Saad-Sulonen is an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen where she teaches service design. Her research interest lies at the intersection of design, digitalization, and participation. She has fifteen years experience in participatory design and is interested in how participatory design relates to commons and commoning. Together with colleagues worldwide she has co-organised numerous seminars and workshops on design and commoning.
	Giacomo Poderi is an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He teaches courses on digital culture and users in context at Bachelor and Master levels. Broadly, his research interests concern the interplay between society and Information Technology through the lenses of co-construction processes and commoning practices. Furthermore, he has done research around the meaning of participation and the role it plays in mediating use, design, and development aspects of IT.	(Same as above)

2020	Influence & Designing for Good	UX Copenhagen 2020 “Influence & Designing for Good”. The conference will be held on March 30-31 in Copenhagen. We will be focusing on what Influence means in the field of UX, and talking about subjects like privilege, tech for social good, sustainability, and maybe even rocket science!
	Helle Jensen, Experience Director at Valtech	The Good, the Bad, and the Commoning In this talk, Helle will give examples of good, bad, and of unexpected angles on commoning in a digital context. Helle will discuss whether commercial commoning is actually commoning, or just a fancy loyalty scheme and if psychological commoning is a trick or a treat.10:00 – 11:00Professors Sanna Marttila, Joanna Saad-Sulunen and Giacomo Poderi of the IT University of Copenhagen
	Jose Coronado, VP of Global Design Operations at JP Morgan in New York	“To the Future Together” Jose Coronado As design practitioners and leaders, we must prepare ourselves to face the challenges that are presented to us in an evolving interactive landscape. We must be proactive in an increasingly connected, revolutionized and changing world. As influencers and leaders, we must reflect, adapt and evolve to go to the future together.
	Doug Collins, senior UX Researcher at CACI, Inc. in Denver	Design Heroes: Design for Good in Action Doug Collins This talk will explore the stories of remarkable designers around the world finding problems within their community – and taking actions that change lives. Why do some of these heroes succeed, and how can we as designers replicate this success – starting today?Coffee and networking
	Karen Liu, Sr. Product Designer at Brave in San Francisco	Can’t be Evil: Setting an Example With Brave Karen Liu This talk is about a company trying to give power back to the everyday user by protecting user privacy, fighting back against the surveillance economy, and rewarding web content creators at the same time.
	Per Axbom, Freelance Digital Designer, Coach and Teacher from Stockholm. Per desires to make tech safe and compassionate through reflective reasoning, human-considerate design, coaching and teaching. He has been working with national health-related services since 2011, as a professional with digital design since 1996, and as a human with computers since 1982. His drive for ethics made him write the Digital Compassion handbook.	“First, Design No Harm (What Design Can Learn From Medical Ethics)” During his work with the handbook “Digital Compassion”, and related workshops that he hosts, Per has often come across misconceptions about how an ethical mindset constrains innovation and creativity. But he has found that on the contrary, even medical ethics encourages risk-taking, and innovation in the field is booming. What design can learn from medical ethics relates to: Not treating all users the same Taking risks with the expressed consent of the users Allowing the autonomy of people to make conscious, bad decisions (!) Being transparent about the unknown Understanding the difference between avoiding harm and contributing to well-being Setting up the process and mechanisms that allow specialists from different fields to weigh in on choosing a path that is ethically sound, even when that path carries a risk of failure The field of medical ethics has evolved for thousands of years. Per’s talk will take all of these (and more) aspects into account, and show how digital design can keep innovating in unison with ethics, instead of assuming a conflict with innovation that is more imagined than real.
	Debbie Levitt, CEO of Delta UX in Sardinia
	Trevor Swart, Founder and Director of UX & Product at AUX Studo in Cape Town	Waste is something that every single one of us creates but very few of us really understand and that has led to a plethora of environmental issues (plastic pollution, illegal exports, open dumping and burning, pollution of waterways, inefficient resource use to name a few). Many people make bad decisions, even illegal decisions, around their waste and it’s not surprising when waste management is complex and the supply chains opaque. At Dsposal we believe that if we want people to do the right thing with their waste, we need to make it easy for them. How can we use design and UX to change behaviour and make waste something that anyone can understand and engage with? This talk will explore ways in which we have tried to do that in the UK and highlight some examples of good and bad practice from around the world from a non-designer perspective.

2022 Speaker

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