# AI by Design Melbourne 2026 > How AI is reshaping design practice — and what designers do about it. ## Overview - **Dates**: 2026-06-03 to 2026-06-03 - **Location**: Melbourne, Australia - **Speakers**: 12 - **Sessions**: 16 - **Tracks**: ## Session Types - social: 2 - housekeeping: 1 - keynote: 2 - talk: 9 - break: 2 ## Links - Conference website: https://webdirections.org/aixdesign/ - Registration: https://webdirections.org/register/?eventName=aixdesign26&eventTitle=ai+×+design+2026&selectedTicket=aixdesign26inperson - Full LLM context: https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/llms-full.txt - All sessions (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/sessions.json - All speakers (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/speakers.json - Schedule grid (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/schedule.json - Calendar (iCal): https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/calendar.ics - Semantic embeddings: https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/sessions-embeddings.json - MCP server: https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/mcp ## MCP Tools Agents can connect to the MCP server at `https://data.webdirections.org/aixdesign/mcp` and use: - `get_conference_info` — conference metadata - `list_sessions` — filter by track, date, type, speaker - `get_session` — full session detail - `list_speakers` — filter by track, employer - `get_speaker` — full speaker profile + their sessions - `get_schedule` — day or full conference schedule - `search_sessions` — semantic search over session content - `search_speakers` — semantic search over speaker bios - `whats_happening_now` — time-aware current/next session ## Build your own All data is free and open. Build your own schedule app, agent, or tool — and share it with us. --- ## All Speakers ### Alex McMahon **Head of Design, LMG** Pronouns: she/her/hers Type: Speaker Alex McMahon designs AI experiences for one of the most regulated industries in Australia. As Head of Design at Loan Market Group (LMG), she leads the AI experience design for MyCRM Intelligence, a suite of AI assistants used by Australian and New Zealand brokers. Before LMG, she worked as Director of Design at Alpaca Markets, shaping the UX across algorithmic trading, crypto, and broker infrastructure platforms globally. With 15+ years across fintech, e-commerce and tech, including Expedia, News Corp and blockchain gaming pioneer ZED RUN, Alex brings a research backed perspective to designing AI products when the stakes are real. She writes and speaks regularly on the ethics and craft of product design with a focus on emerging technologies. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexjmcmahon | https://www.alexmcmahon.com.au ### Amanda Baughan **AI UX Researcher, Maincode** Pronouns: they/them Type: Speaker I’m a UX Researcher turned Product Manager at [Maincode](https://maincode.com/), where I translate cutting-edge AI research into products that fit seamlessly into real-world workflows. My work focuses on advancing human–AI interaction methods and exploring how AI can reshape the way we work. Before joining Maincode, I earned my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where I studied human–computer interaction and social computing at the intersection of design, psychology, and technology. My research explored how technology foregrounds or prevents connection online, and has been featured by the [Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-mindlessly-scrolling-social-media-11660067136), [Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-people-unhappy-and-simple-ways-to-fix-it/), and [NPR](https://www.kuow.org/stories/to-mask-or-not-to-mask-that-is-the-pressing-pandemic-question). I’ve also worked as a UX Researcher at Google Maps and AI2’s Semantic Scholar, improving human–AI interactions in research discovery, and I periodically teach design ethics at the University of Washington Information School. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-baughan/ | https://www.amandabaughan.com ### Boris Divjak **Strategic & Service Design Lead, ANZ** Pronouns: he/him Type: Speaker Boris Divjak is a Strategic & Service Design Lead at ANZ, based in Melbourne. Before relocating to Australia, he worked extensively in London, building his practice across complex commercial and public‑sector environments. He works at the intersection of human‑centred design, systems thinking, and emerging technologies, enabling teams to raise the standard of digital and human interactions with customers. With a strong focus on sense‑making and practical application, Boris is particularly interested in how new technologies like AI can augment, rather than replace, good design practice, supporting better decision‑making and more meaningful outcomes for both customers and organisations. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/borisdivjak/ ### Hilary Cinis **Sociotechnical Digital Strategy Director, Salesforce** Type: Speaker Hilary is Sociotechnical Digital Strategy Director and AI Ethics Specialist (MAICD). She has over 30 years at the intersection of technology, human factors and information design. Currently she is an AI Specialist business consultant at Salesforce. ### Melissa Voderberg **Director of Customer Experience & Innovation, Publicis Sapient** Pronouns: she/her Type: Speaker Melissa Voderberg is a senior design executive with over 20 years leading customer experience and service design transformation programs across education, retail, utilities, health, transportation, hospitality, and government sectors. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissavoderberg/ ### Michel Ferreira **Designer Advocate, Figma** Pronouns: he/him Type: Speaker Michel Ferreira is a Brazilian designer based in Sydney with nearly three decades of experience building products used by millions — at Booking.com, Shopify, and Atlassian — before joining Figma as Designer Advocate for the ANZ/JAPAC region. At Figma, Michel works at the intersection of design, collaboration, and community — helping designers and teams figure out what AI actually changes about how they work, not just what it promises. He's spent the past year running that conversation across the region Links: @multimichel ### Milly Schmidt **Design Manager — Rovo Studio, Atlassian** Pronouns: She/Her Type: Speaker Milly is a design leader with over fifteen years experience in tech, across engineering, product and design roles. She currently leads the design team building Studio, where you can extend your Atlassian software through agents, automations and custom apps. She lives in Melbourne and is a proud union member. Links: none. | millyschmidt.me ### Riley Coleman **Founder, AI Flywheel** Pronouns: They/Them Type: Speaker Riley is a human-centred design veteran, self confessed problem solving junkie and tech nerd. Riley started their career as service designer creating behaviour change programs for marginalised communities in the not-for-profit sector. Resulting in awards by the International Red Cross and the United Nations. Before studying a Masters in Human-Centred Multimedia and transitioning to user experience design. Riley has spent the last 12 years working in design leadership roles, building & scaling design practices in Australia, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden. In early 2024 Riley was sitting in a lecture during a course in London on the Ethics of AI when they had the sickening realisation that, they couldn’t hand-on-heart say, the work they’d done on 4 AI projects in the previous 8 years hadn’t caused harm, hadn’t been bias. **Good people with best intentions can cause systemic harm when designing for AI.** Riley has spent the last two years learning about how to design AI that is highly capable and trustworthy. This moment later turned Riley into “an accidental founder” of [AI Flywheel](https://ai-flywheel.com/). Since then Riley has taught over 312 designers Human-Centred Ethical AI, as well as consulting teams on redesigning their operations for the AI era. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riley-coleman-a185754/ | https://ai-flywheel.com/ ### Sam Keene **Head of UX Engineering, Google Maps** Pronouns: HE/Him Type: Speaker Sam Keene is the Head of UX Engineering at Google Maps. Since 2021, he has led the global UXE team across all surfaces, including Driving, Search, and AR. Most recently, Sam has driven Geo UX's AI transformation through the scaling of vibe prototyping, the redesign of Driving navigation, and the launch of the AI-powered "Ask Maps" experience. A creative technologist at heart, Sam’s passion for blending design and code started in the late 80s programming a Commodore 64. Over his career (including a decade at Google and time at R/GA and Nike in the US) he has helped build game-changing products like the Nike FuelBand, YouTube VR, and Google Maps World-Scale AR. His work has been recognized globally with Cannes Gold Lions, D&AD, and One Show awards. Sam is the author of the Google Daydream VR Cookbook and a former Interactive Media lecturer at RMIT. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samkeene/https://x.com/_SamKeene ### Stefi Peykova Krishnan **Co-founder of the Bulgarian Design Council & Principle Product Designer at eHealth NSW, NSW Health** Pronouns: she/her Type: Speaker Stefi Peykova Krishnan is a co-founder of the Bulgarian Design Council and a Principal Product Designer at eHealth NSW, working inside Australia's largest public health system. Her work sits at the intersection of design, co-creation, systems thinking and responsible AI in complex, high-stakes environments. She previously led the end-to-end design of a precision medicine platform for the Children's Cancer Institute that supported clinical decision-making and was recognised with Best in Class for Service Design at the Australian Good Design Awards. In the age of AI, she is especially interested in how design shapes systems, behaviour, and decision-making upstream ... before bad assumptions scale and broken models become business as usual. Links: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefka-peykova/ ; Substack: https://substack.com/@designwaves | https://gardenofhumancapability.com (this is personal project site) and in case there's need of portfolio one (https://autotelicbydesign.framer.website - quite old) ### Steve Baty **Founder, UX Australia** Type: MC Steve was the inaugural CEO of the Australian Design Council, co-founder of Meld Studios and co-founder of UX Australia. He is a Director of the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence and served two years as the President of the Interaction Design Association. His practice is centred on improving our public spaces, infrastructure and services. ### Tori Sanderson **Managing Director, Avian** Type: Speaker Tori Sanderson is Managing Director & CEO of Avian, a boutique consultancy specialising in bringing HCD thinking to products, environments and teams. Tori is a sought‑after product and leadership strategist, with 20 + years’ experience spanning government, tech, retail, healthcare and NFP sectors. She’s steered award‑winning digital programmes and guided major brands and organisations through complex transformation and capability‑building. A regular speaker at Web Directions and Women in ICT events, Tori delivers clear, practical insights on digital strategy, design leadership, and building high‑performing teams. Links: torisanderson.com --- ## All Sessions ### Registration **social · 2026-06-03 08:00 · 60 min** Register from 8.30, grab a coffee, connect with fellow attendees, and get ready for a fantastic day. ### Welcome **housekeeping · 2026-06-03 09:00 · 10 min** Speakers: Steve Baty (UX Australia) Steve Baty, your MC for the day gets the day started. ### Most AI Products Aren't Very Good (Yet) **keynote · AI x design · 2026-06-03 09:10 · 40 min** Speakers: Amanda Baughan (Maincode) Let’s be honest. Most of them aren’t that good. They work, but they don’t hold up. They’re usable, but not especially useful. AI has massively scaled our ability to produce output, but it hasn’t scaled the taste that differentiates great products from average ones. Drawing on experience building and designing AI systems, I argue that taste is not a soft skill but a critical one. It is a muscle built when curiosity meets discernment, and exercised through decision-making. As making becomes easier, the challenge shifts to deciding what is good, what matters, and what should exist at all. ### Tell AI to build a ‘Faster Horse’: Why reframing is the last human advantage **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 09:55 · 25 min** Speakers: Stefi Peykova Krishnan (NSW Health) AI is exceptional at optimisation. Give it a goal and it will refine, accelerate, and automate within that frame. It will generate better outputs, faster workflows, cleaner systems. But it cannot decide that the question itself is wrong. That's not a limitation of the technology. That's design's opening. The strategic value of design has never been execution. It's the power of reframing ... dissolving inherited assumptions and asking what actually needs to exist. In the AI era, this difference becomes critical. As optimisation becomes abundant in an era of intelligent systems, the most valuable design capability may be the disciplined courage to ask a different question. AI will give you better horses indefinitely. Your job is to ask why we're still in the stable. ### Real-World Vibe Prototyping at Google Maps **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 10:25 · 25 min** Speakers: Sam Keene (Google Maps) For many designers, "vibe coding" sits in an uncomfortable gap. We see the hype, but the reality often feels like a parlour trick: great for messy experimentation, but unreliable for professional work. It challenges everything we’ve learned about pixel perfection, forcing us into a new, non-deterministic medium where we must "guide" rather than "draw." At Google Maps, we have moved past this disillusionment by treating AI prototyping not as a magic wand, but as a rigorous design discipline. By reviving foundational patterns from computer science and creative coding—such as state machines, parametric design, and recursion—we are moving from generating raw code to intentionally designing behaviour. This session takes you inside the Google Maps UX pipeline to show how we integrate vibe prototyping into workflows that serve billions. We will explore how we use scrappy, AI-driven prototypes to validate the "feel" of dynamic interfaces and complex user flows long before engineering handover. You will leave with a practical framework for professionalizing your own AI prototypes, turning the unpredictable messiness of LLMs into scalable, human-centered experiences. ### Lunch **break · 2026-06-03 11:00 · 60 min** Join your fellow attendees and speakers for a bite to eat, coffee and great conversation. ### Personas You Can Talk To: Turning Research Into Persona Agents **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 12:00 · 25 min** Speakers: Boris Divjak (ANZ) Personas are traditionally static artefacts: a poster, a slide, a section in a report. They can be useful, but easy to ignore once the project moves on. Persona agents change that relationship by turning a persona into an interactive interface; you can ask the persona questions, follow up to dive into details, and retrieve insight conversationally rather than hunting through repositories. In this session I’ll show how persona agents can make research more present in everyday design work, and what becomes newly possible when teams can interact with a persona as dialogue rather than documentation. I will share practical lessons from building AI persona agents grounded in anonymised qualitative research. I will show how to improve their usefulness through curated verbatims, a coherent persona narrative and instructions that ground responses in evidence. You’ll leave with a lightweight blueprint you can adapt: a simple researchtoagent pipeline, prompt patterns that encourage sensible grounding, and an ethical framing that will help you position persona agents for adoption in your organisation as a way to democratise research, rather than a replacement for ongoing discovery. ### Dispatches from the frontline: building AI with AI at Atlassian **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 12:30 · 25 min** Speakers: Milly Schmidt (Atlassian) Atlassian is rapidly pivoting into an AI-forward strategy, both in our features and our tools. I'm not going to get on stage and tell you AI is a magic technology that can do anything and everything; instead, I'll share some of the lessons already learned as we have gone down this road —not just about the technology itself, but also about how our customers are thinking about it, how you can upskill designers at scale and how to reconcile the problematic parts with the potential for real transformative value. ### Why Designers Are Accidentally Breaking Customers' Trust in AI **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 13:00 · 25 min** Speakers: Riley Coleman (AI Flywheel) For thirty years, we've been designing one-way USER experiences. Now we are designing two-way Human+AI experiences. We had established principles we designed 1 user experiences with - consistency, hierarchy and removing friction. We got very good at it. And now, quietly, that mastery may be the most dangerous thing we bring to AI design. Because friction, it turns out, is precisely how humans calibrate trust. That moment of slight resistance before accepting a recommendation. The pause that lets a person feel they have agency. The explanation that slows things down but makes them feel seen. We've been trained our entire careers to sand those moments away when the experience is based on consistency, but doing so, we'll be building AI experiences that feel effortless, but remove users agency and but cannot be trusted. This talk began not with research, but with regret; recognising my own work in a case study of AI harm during an ethics lecture at the London School of Economics. That discomfort became two years of asking other designers whether they recognised it too. Most did. Drawing on 240 interviews and eight frameworks built from that listening, this session invites designers to examine the most confronting possibility in their current practice. ### Fast ≠ good **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 13:30 · 25 min** Speakers: Michel Ferreira (Figma) Everyone in design right now is being sold the same vision: generate faster, explore more, ship sooner. And the tools genuinely deliver on that. But somewhere in the rush, a quieter question is getting lost — are we building the right thing? For the right person? And does anyone actually own that answer? This presentation takes an unexpected route to that question. It brings together a group of designers, thinkers and builders who never wrote a prompt, never ran a sprint, never opened Figma — and makes the case that they already solved for this moment. Through Dieter Rams on the danger of endless addition, Ray Eames on what 'working good' really means, and a 1979 IBM training slide that reads like it was written last week, fast ≠ good argues that the principles that made great design great haven't changed — they've just become more urgent. Come for the dead designers. Leave with three things you can use on Monday. ### Afternoon break **break · 2026-06-03 14:00 · 60 min** Recharge before the final session with great food, coffee, and more. ### Designing AI Experiences for High Stakes Industries **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 15:00 · 25 min** Speakers: Alex McMahon (LMG) AI experiences can look flawless in a prototype. The real risk starts after you ship the feature, when real users, facing real consequences, start pushing your model into use cases you didn’t plan for. This session draws on direct experience designing AI assistants for Australia's financial services sector to explore how to design for accuracy, accountability, and the inevitable moments when the model gets it wrong. You'll leave with 3 actionable frameworks: how to design human in the loop checkpoints that keep users genuinely in control without killing productivity; how to build a design pattern language for AI behaviour, covering how AI acts differently from deterministic systems and what that means for the patterns you design around it; and how to build a research practice that tests the model before it tests your users, covering accuracy, edge case simulation, and how to know when it's ready for real users. ### Accessibility walked so AI could crawl **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 15:30 · 25 min** Speakers: Tori Sanderson (Avian) AI search, LLM retrieval, and automated agents all consume your content the same way assistive technology does — by reading structure, not pixels. They don't see your hero image. They don't care about your animation. They parse your headings, your alt text, your semantic markup, and your metadata. And if those things are missing or broken, the model builds an incomplete picture of your brand — and serves that incomplete picture to millions of people. Which means somewhere in your organisation right now, someone is writing a six-figure "AI-readiness strategy" that recommends clean markup, logical heading hierarchy, structured content, and real text alternatives. Your accessibility team has been asking for the same things since 2019. They were told it wasn't a priority. This is the AI strategy your accessibility team already wrote. They just didn't have the budget line to prove it. Tori has spent years building content architecture for Australian Government digital services — environments where accessibility isn't optional and where a missing heading level means real people can't access critical information. This talk takes that experience and reframes it for the AI moment: what actually matters in your structure, what's just theatre, and how to finally get accessibility funded by walking into the budget meeting and pointing at the AI line item. This is not a talk about adding AI features. It's about recognising that the most effective AI strategy most organisations can adopt is finishing the accessibility work they quietly shelved three years ago. Takeaways A dual-audience audit framework you can run against your own products on Monday Why the most impactful "AI optimisation" is boring, structural, and already in WCAG How to hijack the AI-readiness budget for the accessibility work that actually needed doing ### Humans in the Loop…But Where? Lessons from AI in Education, Retail, Financial Services, Utilities, Government, and Health **talk · AI x design · 2026-06-03 16:00 · 25 min** Speakers: Melissa Voderberg (Publicis Sapient) As AI becomes embedded in decision-making, design, service delivery and operations, the question is no longer simply whether humans remain ’in the loop’, but which loops genuinely require human judgement, empathy and accountability. Building on ideas first explored by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, this session explores how technology reshapes human agency, how mediation between people and intelligent systems evolves, and where the tension between automation and perception becomes most critical. What is uniquely human at work today and how do organisations ensure those capabilities are preserved where they matter most? Drawing on practical AI case studies across education, retail, financial services, utilities, government, and health, this talk contrasts scenarios where human–AI collaboration delivers measurable value with those where misplaced automation introduces risk, bias, or diminished customer experience. These examples highlight alternative futures, emerging governance patterns, and pragmatic frameworks for deciding where humans should lead, guide or simply oversee AI systems. Attendees will leave with grounded insights, transferable lessons and tangible signals for recognising when humans are positioned in the right loops, and when they are not. ### Beyond Algorithms: Trust and Culture in the Age of AI **keynote · AI x design · 2026-06-03 16:30 · 30 min** Speakers: Hilary Cinis (Salesforce) While technology choices are critical, culture is an invisible force that holds power over the success or failure of AI integration. This session moves beyond the technology and solutions to explore how organisational culture affects AI safety, trust and ultimately adoption. We will examine the role of HCD, systems thinking and ethics in designing for AI and agent augmented futures. Join us for a session designed to sharpen the questions you might ask of your leaders, ensuring your organization’s AI journey is both innovative and accountable. ### Happy hour **social · 2026-06-03 17:00 · 90 min** Join fellow attendees and speakers For our happy hour (and a half) right here at the Novotel.