UX Connect 26 Program

in Aarhus on June 9 - 10

The conference is tailored for everyone working with design and sustainability, from beginners to experts, and features 2 packed days with a carefully curated mixture of talks, workshops, activities and world class facilitators, thought-provokers, speakers and session leads.

Below you can find the current conference program - improvements will happen

Program

Monday, June 8
17.30 - 21:00 Social event at Aarhus Street Food
Everyone who is in town is invited to join us for an informal dinner

Tuesday, June 9
8:30 - 9:30: Breakfast and registration
9:30 - 9:45: Welcome & Opening
by our host Jens Hofman, Vertica and our moderator Janus Boye, Boye & Co

A moderated design leadership Q&A

UX in 2026 is messy and important.

AI is now part of the product. Content, data, and design decisions shape behaviour across systems, not just screens. Expectations are rising, while pressure to move faster keeps increasing.

Designers are being pulled into new territory: balancing speed with responsibility, making sense of opaque AI systems, working with content as infrastructure, and navigating growing demands around trust, governance, and real-world impact.

In this opening conversation, Kristina Larsen from VIA University College sits down with Thorsten Jonas to explore the big UX topics shaping our work right now.

Thorsten, founder of the Sustainable UX Network, brings a perspective grounded in both design practice and sustainability. Together, they will cut through the noise and focus on what actually matters: where UX needs to step up, what teams are getting wrong, and how the role of UX is changing.

This session sets the stage for UX Connect 26: the tensions, trade-offs, and questions that make this moment both challenging and worth paying attention to.

When AI systems increasingly mirror and reinforce our existing beliefs, they risk narrowing how we see the world and what we imagine is possible. This creates a subtle but powerful constraint on design: futures begin to look like extensions of the present, rather than alternatives to it.

This session explores how empathy can counterbalance that tendency. Not as a soft skill, but as a critical capability for understanding perspectives beyond our own and making sense of complexity, contradiction, and change.

Through a short framing and shared reflection, we’ll explore how empathy helps us question dominant narratives, design for a broader range of experiences, and imagine more diverse and resilient futures in an AI-shaped world.

10.50 - 11:20 Coffee & networking

I built one of the most complex AI systems in the world. It bridges the digital and physical world, has five autonomous agents with distinct specialisms, a diagnostic engine, a real-time sensor network, and a parliamentary debating chamber where two AI systems with opposing philosophies argue about what to do when the data is ambiguous.

What surprised me though wasn't the technology. It was that every hard problem turned out to be a design problem. How often should a system interrupt your day? What does trust look like when a system is wrong in confident, articulate ways? What happens when you give humans a conversation and they start treating it as a relationship? What does a user actually do with "confidence: 72%"?

This talk draws real, tested answers to these questions from a system that's been running for months - answers that apply whether you're designing the future for financial services, for healthcare, for consumer products, or for anything where a user has to decide whether to trust what a machine is telling them.

Many teams generate more insights, stories, and outputs than ever before. Yet something essential is often missing: real understanding, lasting memory, and meaningful action.

This session explores how immersion becomes a critical design capability when insight alone is not enough. Drawing on anthropological practice and hands-on work with organisations, Louise shows how storytelling, lived experience, and shared moments help people truly grasp what matters and act on it.

As AI accelerates the production of insight, immersion becomes the differentiator. What matters is not what we show, but what people truly experience and carry forward.

12:30 - 13.30 Lunch

more details coming soon

14.30 - 15.00 Coffee & networking

more details coming soon

more details coming soon

16.30 - 17.00 Coffee & networking

17.00 - 18.00 A unique Aarhus design experience

Join us for a brief walk to see something special….more details coming soon

18.30 - 22:00 Social event

Everyone is invited to join us for an informal dinner at MARAIS bistro.bar on Guldsmedgade

Wednesday, June 10

6:30 Morning Run

We meet in front of Vertica for a relaxed 25 minute run

8:30 - 9:30 Breakfast and networking

9:30 - 9.45: Morning welcome - what did we learn yesterday? Plans for today

Let us talk about professional identity, responsibility, and judgment in uncertain times.

Many UX professionals are working in an environment where expectations shift faster than roles can adapt. AI, organisational pressure, and ongoing uncertainty make it harder to rely on established answers, familiar methods, or accepted best practices.

Rather than attempting to predict the future of UX, this session looks at what happens to professional roles when clarity disappears. When there are fewer clear answers, judgment, responsibility, and sense-making become central to the work.

The session begins with a short framing input, followed by facilitated reflection and conversation. Participants will be invited to explore their own experiences, compare perspectives with peers, and reflect on how they navigate uncertainty in their daily work.

The aim is not to provide answers, tools, or frameworks, but to create space for shared reflection. Participants should leave with a stronger sense of orientation and confidence in their professional judgment.

10.30 - 11.00 Coffee & networking

UX education gives us principles, methods, and a clear sense of what “good” looks like. Then practice complicates everything.

This short talk reflects on the gap between how UX is taught and how it unfolds inside large organisations with complex products, legacy systems, and competing priorities. Where education offers clarity, real-world work often requires negotiation, compromise, and judgment in messy situations.

The aim is not to critique education, but to surface the realities we all encounter and rarely articulate: how decisions actually get made, where user-centred thinking gets challenged, and how experience reshapes our understanding of the craft.

Framed as a brief input to spark conversation, this session invites participants to share their own gaps, tensions, and lessons learned across different contexts and stages of their careers.

What happens to our design decisions when the interface is no longer visual?

In this session, a blind UX practitioner shares first-hand experiences of navigating digital products that were never truly designed for non-visual use. Through concrete examples, we’ll uncover how common design patterns, workflows, and assumptions break down when interaction depends on screen readers, structure, and semantics rather than sight.

A short framing talk will surface the gaps between intention and reality in accessible design. From there, the session shifts into small-group reflection: Where do our own products rely on invisible assumptions? What would actually need to change in how we design, test, and collaborate?

Expect an honest, practical conversation grounded in lived experience. The goal is not just awareness, but to leave with clearer signals of what to look for, question, and do differently in your own work.

12.30 - 13.30 Lunch

Designing today means working alongside tools that can generate flows, interfaces, and ideas in seconds. Solutions appear before we’ve fully understood the problem. This doesn’t just change how we work, but how we think, decide, and take responsibility as designers.

This closing session reflects on what it actually feels like to grow as a UX designer in this context. When speed increases, what happens to depth? When ideas are easy to generate, how do we stay critical? And when working on real products, where users, constraints, and consequences are tangible, what role does AI realistically play?

Grounded in hands-on experience from designing a gamified financial solution for young users, Giulia explores where AI supports the design process, where it falls short, and where human judgement becomes essential.

A closing conversation about judgement, responsibility, and the kind of designers we are becoming.

Key lessons learned, big questions and what happens next

2.45 - 3:00 Goodbyes and see you next year!