# UX Australia 2026 > Australia's longest-running conference on UX, design, and human-centred practice. ## Overview - **Dates**: 2026-08-27 to 2026-08-28 - **Location**: Sydney, Australia - **Speakers**: 24 - **Sessions**: 26 - **Tracks**: ## Session Types - keynote: 4 - talk: 16 - break: 4 - housekeeping: 2 ## Links - Conference website: https://webdirections.org/ux-australia/ - Registration: https://webdirections.org/register/?eventName=uxaustralia26&eventTitle=UX+Australia+2026&selectedTicket=uxaustralia26inperson - Full LLM context: https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/llms-full.txt - All sessions (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/sessions.json - All speakers (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/speakers.json - Schedule grid (JSON): https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/schedule.json - Calendar (iCal): https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/calendar.ics - Semantic embeddings: https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/sessions-embeddings.json - MCP server: https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/mcp ## MCP Tools Agents can connect to the MCP server at `https://data.webdirections.org/ux-australia/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 ### Amanda Pitcher **Practice Lead — Strategy & Design, and Software Engineering, Versent** Type: Speaker A seasoned experience design and digital strategy practitioner, Amanda brings extensive cross-sector expertise spanning finance, government, media, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and insurance. With a foundation in CX/UX and digital production, Amanda has spent nearly 20 years at the intersection of human-centred design, technology, and organisational culture - translating complex customer needs into meaningful digital experiences. Known for building diverse, high-performing teams and fostering the conditions where creative problem-solving thrives, Amanda is a practitioner who believes that great experiences emerge when people, process, and technology move in the same direction. Links: https://linkedin.com/in/amandapitcher ### Amir Ansari **Design leader** Pronouns: He/His Type: Speaker With over 25 years’ experience in the field of design, as a practitioner and leader, he has worked across the private and public sectors, in-house and agency, managing researchers and designers, while delivering digital products and technology. He is passionate about inclusion, leaving long-lasting impact and democratising the craft of design - doing it all with a smile and a hug. Links: https://amiransari.com.au ### Ben Shelton **Senior Manager, User Experience & Business Improvement, The University of Newcastle, Australia** Type: Speaker Dr Ben Shelton is a Human–Computer Interaction researcher specialising in human-centred design and Senior Manager, User Experience & Business Improvement at the University of Newcastle. His work bridges cognitive science and applied UX practice, exploring how Cognitive Load Theory can be used to measure interface effectiveness and reduce digital noise. Ben’s research spans higher education user experience, ubiquitous computing, and workload measurement, with a focus on designing systems that support attention rather than compete for it. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-shelton/ ### Cordelia Prangley **User Experience and Service Design Specialist, University of Newcastle** Pronouns: She/Her Type: Speaker Cordelia Prangley is a Design and Research Specialist at the University of Newcastle, working at the intersection of service design, human-centred design, and complex system improvement. With a background spanning research, teaching, and project delivery, Cordelia is recognised through national design awards and is known for translating insight into practical, scalable solutions that improve real-world experiences. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cordeliaprangley/ ### Cornel Steyn **Principal Consultant: Strategy & Design, Versent** Type: Speaker Cornel is an industrial engineer turned strategic designer, WA strategy and design lead at Versent, and co-founder of UX Camp Australia. He helps teams take action on what matters, while establishing the vision and culture to keep it going. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cornelsteyn/ ### Elise Loeuille **Senior Service Designer, Transport for NSW** Type: Speaker Elise Loeuille is a Senior Service Designer at Transport for NSW with more than 20 years of international experience across France, Russia and Australia. She has worked across retail, education and public transport, helping organisations turn complex challenges into practical, human-centred solutions.​ Passionate about collaboration and mentoring, Elise also teaches design at UNSW, UTS and Academy Xi. ​ Outside work, Elise rescues wildlife with WIRES, so her hobbies involve urgent incidents, incomplete information, and diverse creatures with strong opinions.​ ### Emily Smith **Peer Work Manager, ReachOut Australia** Type: Speaker Emily is a Peer Work Manager at leading digital youth mental health organisation, ReachOut Australia. In her role, she heads up a team of peer workers who use their lived and living experience of mental health challenges to support young people. She was instrumental in the development of ReachOut's one-to-one service, PeerChat. Links: https://au.linkedin.com/in/emily-smith-b57239198 | https://au.linkedin.com/in/emily-smith-b57239198 ### Emma Buckland **Lead Mobile UX Designer, Independent** Type: Speaker Emma Buckland is an award-winning Lead Designer specialising in mobile-first UX. With over 15 years of experience across large, highly regulated financial services organisations - including CommBank, ANZ, and AustralianSuper - she has a rare ability to translate legislative and operational complexity into experiences that drive real customer behaviour - not just better interfaces. At AustralianSuper - Australia's largest super fund - Emma shaped product strategy and UX across its native iOS and Android app, growing interactions from 300,000 to over 7.6 million and reaching more than one million members. The AustralianSuper mobile app took Gold at the Better Future Design Awards (Australia, 2025) and Silver at the World awards (2026). Emma designs at the intersection of behavioural psychology, product thinking, and design systems — and when she's not at her screen, she exhibits her visual art across Melbourne. She believes the hardest design problem is always making the complex feel effortless. Links: https://www.ejbuckland.info/ ### Fatemeh Aminpour **Researcher & Sessional Academic, UNSW Sydney** Type: Keynote Dr Fatemeh Aminpour is an environment–behaviour researcher and design practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of architecture, urban design and lived experience. She is one of Australia's leading voices on neuroinclusive design in public space, and lead author of Towards Neuroinclusive Public Open Spaces (UNSW City Futures, 2026), one of the first Australian studies to systematically examine how neurodivergent people experience and navigate urban environments. Fatemeh is a researcher and sessional academic at the University of Sydney and UNSW, and an Associate of the UNSW Disability Innovation Institute and the Australian Human Rights Institute. ### Jess Witt **Lead Consultant: Strategy & Design, Versent** Type: Speaker Jess is a strategic product and service designer who bridges creativity and complexity. She helps medium to large organisations map, design, and evolve the systems people interact with every day, to make the complicated feel simple. ### Jessie Pahng **Design leader, Independent** Type: Speaker Jessie Pahng is a design leader dedicated to making technology deeply human. She transforms complexity into clarity, helping organizations build intelligent ecosystems that empower people while creating lasting value for businesses. At Actian, Jessie transformed fragmented products into a unified ecosystem, embedding intelligent experiences into workflows to simplify enterprise complexity and improve decision-making. At Google, she led UX strategy for Google Cloud Storage, helping organizations unlock the full potential of their data at global scale. As a founding member and Strategy Director at the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM), she developed a human-centered approach to helping people understand information more effectively, make better decisions, and navigate complexity with confidence. Today, she focuses on helping organizations design ecosystems that simplify complexity, amplify human potential, and responsibly apply AI to help people make better decisions and create meaningful experiences. Links: linkedin.com/in/jessiepahng/ ### Josephine Abbatangelo **Senior Product Designer, Movember** Pronouns: she/her Type: Speaker Josephine is a Senior Product Designer at Movember, where she designs digital experiences that support men's mental health and wellbeing. With over 10 years experience across banking, nonprofit, and digital product environments, she brings a research-grounded, end-to-end design practice to complex problems. She is known for translating insight into clear design direction, building alignment across teams, and keeping focus on what matters most to users and the organisation. At UX Australia 2026, she is speaking about the hidden cost that workplace products place on people with invisible disabilities and the practical design decisions that can reduce it. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephineabbatangelo/ ### Maria Sereno **Accessibility & inclusive design specialist** Pronouns: she/her Type: Speaker Maria (she/her) is a product designer tackling complex problems with intention and purpose: centring the people we're building for and the impact of our work on their lives. As a principal designer at National Australia Bank, she guided a design practice of 200+ on designing for greater inclusion and accessibility, developed frameworks for inclusive research and impact assessment; collaborated with product, engineering, and governance teams to embed inclusive design considerations into core processes across the enterprise. Maria's approach to design interrogates large-scale patterns in complex systems without losing the meaning in detail. She examines product ecosystems and business and social contexts, but she also relishes going granular, to the level of component micro-interactions and token nomenclature. In addition to the broad skillset she developed operating in tech startups (Linktree, modo, TeamForm) and her background in public policy and economics, Maria also draws from her communities' lived experience of disability, queerness, and being Othered. She continues to advocate for tech that is data-informed, trauma-responsive, designed from the margins, and driven by moving the "arc of the moral universe" towards justice. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariasereno/ | https://msereno.net ### MC Monsalve **ABC** Type: Speaker ### Mina Giang **Co-founder, Head of Product & Experiences, Oexa** Type: Speaker Mina Giang is a digital health advocate, UX leader, and co-founder of Oexa – a connected care ecosystem connecting providers, pharmacies, and health consumers to Australia's digital health infrastructure. She champions interoperability, consumer rights, and designs that work for real people navigating a fragmented system. Mina has launched multiple digital health products including Scripty, a free consumer eScript app, Light, a clinical platform for pharmacies trusted by TerryWhite Chemmart, and Managed Intermediary, the gateway to Australia's national prescription infrastructure. She also serves as CPO of Mibowork, a psychosocial risk platform with clients including Royal Flying Doctor Service, QBE, and Foxtel. An active contributor to the Australian Digital Health Agency ePrescribing Working Group, HL7 Australia, and Sparked AU, Mina is a published voice on healthcare UX and interoperability – writing from experience, with a bit of humour, because the system needs honest conversation as much as it needs good technology. She is also a patient. Recently diagnosed, through major surgery, with more to come – she is building the system she needs to exist. Links: www.linkedin.com/in/minagiang ### Nadine Raydan **Senior Product Manager, ReachOut Australia** Pronouns: she/her Type: Speaker Nadine Raydan is a senior product manager, researcher and advocate for responsible and impact-driven digital design. At ReachOut Australia, she leads the PeerChat On Demand service and referral partnerships that connect young people to additional support. ### Nathan Shedroff **Full Professor, California College of the Arts** Pronouns: He/Him Type: Keynote Nathan Shedroff is a serial entrepreneur in various technology and strategic sectors, including blockchain, conversational interfaces, software services, media, and new tools. He led the Foodicons.org project to develop an extensive visual language to unite the food systems around the world. He is a design pioneer turned entrepreneur and an international educator, speaker, and consultant. His new company plans to disrupt the strategic consulting industry with a new strategic model, tool, and services. Nathan was the founder and chair of the ground-breaking Design MBA programs at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA, where he has taught since 2000. He is currently a full professor teaching in the MDes in Interaction Design program. He also teaches internationally at KaosPilot in Aarhus, Denmark and ELISAVA in Barcelona. He is a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design, and Information Design, is a serial entrepreneur, and researches, speaks and teaches internationally about meaning, strategic innovation, business value, and science fiction interfaces. He’s authored more than 10 books, including the new A Whole New Strategy, as well as Blindspot, Design is the Solution, Design Strategy in Action, Make It So, and Experience Design 1.1. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry. Links: https://www.nathan.com | linkedin.com/in/nathanshedroff ### Nila Rezaei **Co-founder & Design Director, RK Collective** Pronouns: She/Her Type: Keynote Nila Rezaei is working towards a design culture that builds dignity, one in which communities are active co-authors of the objects, spaces, and systems that shape their lives, and where design accounts for people, place, and planet together. She is Co-Founder and Design Director of RK Collective, a Sydney-based product design and innovation studio working at the intersection of circular design, material storytelling, and social impact. She is interested in the political, cultural, and ecological dimensions of materials and products, treating co-design as a form of authorship, and making as a form of activism. Nila has over ten years of commercial experience spanning material innovation, consumer products, packaging, furniture and homewares, electronics, mobility, spatial design and public art installations, where she uses design as a tool to restore connection, resilience, and dignity in a rapidly changing world. Her flagship project Crafted Liberation, which transforms Iranian Women’s donated headscarves and reclaimed textiles into public seating using waste resources, has been recognised with the 2024 Good Design Award for Social Impact, the 2025 Seoul Design Award, and selected as a 2026 Doha Design Prize finalist. With a background that bridges commercial design and critical practice, Nila is a Good Design Australia Ambassador. She chairs the Design Institute of Australia NSW Council, co-founded Industrial Design Xchange Sydney (IDX SYD), and teaches at UNSW Art & Design. Passionate about sharing knowledge and nurturing future generations, Nila regularly speaks and exhibits work at national and international forums on sustainability, material innovation, and social design, inspiring others to see design as a powerful agent of cultural and systemic change. Links: @nila.rezaei | https://www.rk-collective.com/ ### Patima Tantiprasut **CEO & Managing Director, PetRescue** Pronouns: She/Her Type: Speaker Patima is the Managing Director and CEO at PetRescue, a progressive Australian tech charity that’s working towards a future where every pet is safe, respected and loved. She leads a nationally distributed team who look after Australia’s most visited charity website alongside running multiple programs and initiatives helping to save lives and bring happiness... every day. Patima has shared her knowledge at multiple Australian conferences and also on international stages, speaking on topics such as tech for good, inclusive design, product roadmaps, fostering positive and healthy workplace cultures, and building communities. Over the past 20 years in the tech industry, Patima has held various roles including being the Head of Product and Design, a Creative Director, Digital Strategist, Co-Founder, Studio Manager, Designer, Front End Developer and even Tech Support! In her spare time, she's been a huge champion for the creative tech community with a passion for bringing people together. She was a co-organiser for Mixin Conf, created a memorable national roadshow and hosted several tech meetups including Localhost and Product of PER. Today, she is a community manager for the Aussie Designers slack community group, a friendly space for 1,000+ Australian Designers to connect and discuss all things design. Links: @the_patima | https://www.petrescue.com.au ### Peter Barber **Staff Product Designer, Airwallex** Pronouns: He/him Type: Speaker Peter Barber is a Staff Product Designer at Airwallex, where he works on identity and security products. He has spent his career scaling complex product ecosystems across Afterpay, Square, Cash App, and early-stage AI research, and speaks and writes on the intersection of design and AI infrastructure. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterrobertbarber ### Rachael Wilson **Lead, Digital Content and User Experience, Deakin University** Pronouns: She/her Type: Speaker I lead and support user experience research, digital content strategy and experience design initiatives that improve how people engage with academic library services and systems. My work combines evidence-based research, content design and digital governance to create accessible, inclusive and user-centred experiences for students, researchers, academics and community users. I’m passionate about translating complexity into clarity and helping libraries design services that are genuinely useful, usable and equitable. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-wilson-297192276/ ### Sakib Jalil **Casual Academic: Design & IT, UTS: University of Technology Sydney | University of Sydney | Central Queensland University** Pronouns: He/Him Type: Speaker Sakib Jalil's career and life are a **meaningful mess**: consulting, research, teaching, cultures, cities, students, clients, and questions that kept pulling him in different directions, until he realised these are connected by one question: **what is design missing when it serves efficiency but forgets ethics, affection, connection, and joy?** He is a **designer, consultant, researcher, and educator** whose career has grown through two streams: consulting and academic teaching. As a consultant, Sakib has worked in Australia since 2018 across user experience, service design, product strategy, digital transformation, and design-led discovery and delivery. His work has included roles with Telstra Purple and NCS Australia, as well as being part of cross-consulting teams with Deloitte and IBM. He has worked across telecommunications, digital health, government, education, and enterprise technology in product management, strategy, and service design. As a researcher and educator, Dr Jalil holds a **PhD in Human-Computer Interaction**. Across research, teaching, and consulting, he has drawn on cognitive science, decision science, implementation science, qualitative research, ethnography, and emerging technologies to deliver practical outcomes. His work has consistently examined how people think, decide, feel, connect, and find meaning with technology. Some courses he teaches now are advanced interaction design, experience-centred design, ethics, and morals. Long before today’s AI boom, he explored interoperability between AI agents in 2010. This is now part of a longer concern with how technology becomes meaningful and humane for humankind, as individual and collective wellbeing need different perspectives. His academic path has taken him through Thailand, Barcelona, Aalborg, California, and Australia, where he learned to **read design in everyday movement**: train stations, streets, classrooms, workplaces, and public spaces. Watching how people chose direction, hesitated, followed, adapted, and found their way showed him how deeply design can shape behaviour, emotion, and possibility. **Design is not a neutral profession; and it must be practised with great care.** Sakib has had the opportunity to teach approximately **4,100 students**. He sees education as a symbiotic process: teaching students, and also learning from their questions, joys, life experiences, doubts, and ways of seeing the world. For him, these are **4,100 conversations** about technology, people, society, evidence, ethics, design, and the futures each generation wants to build. Across consulting and academia, Sakib’s work returns to the same question: **what if design was judged not only by how efficiently it works, but by whether it acts ethically, understands its moral responsibilities, creates connection, and leaves room for joy?** Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sakibjalil/ | https://www.drsakibjalil.com/ ### Sam Alderton-Johnson **Founder & Director, Impact Policy** Type: Keynote Sam Alderton-Johnson is the Founder and Director of Impact Policy, a social policy consulting firm working at the intersection of co-design, systems reform, and lived experience. His work focuses on redesigning complex public systems including child protection, justice, health, and community services through approaches grounded in power-sharing and relational accountability. A childhood survivor of forced child removal and foster care systems, Sam brings lived experience into spaces where policy and design decisions are made. His work interrogates how power operates within institutions and challenges designers to move beyond consultation toward structural change. Sam’s River System co-design model reframes co-design as a decolonising practice — one that recognises sovereignty, redistributes decision-making authority, and centres communities who have historically been designed for rather than with. At UX Australia, Sam argues that if co-design does not shift power, it is not co-design, and challenges the design community to reckon with its role in either maintaining or dismantling inequity. Links: https://www.impactpolicy.com.au ### Sarah Fennelly **Visual Design Lead, Deakin University** Pronouns: She/her Type: Speaker I’m a visual designer, animator, and UI/UX designer based in Geelong, Australia, with 18 years’ experience in the design industry, including 13 years at Deakin University Library. I’m passionate about creating purposeful, accessible design that supports learning, particularly when it helps people engage with complex content or empowers staff without a design background to create quality work. My practice spans UI/UX, animation, design systems, and digital and print projects, and I love collaborating with learning designers, developers, UX and accessibility specialists to create solutions that truly work for our users. Links: https://www.sarahfennelly.com/ --- ## All Sessions ### How Do We Design Vibrant Communities? **keynote · 2026-08-27 09:00** Speakers: Nila Rezaei (RK Collective) As designers, We have never had more tools, more methods, more frameworks, And yet the feeling of collective life, of shared prosperity, of genuine community, has been slowly slipping. The feeling of collective prosperity, of participation, of belonging, has narrowed, and is almost fading. This keynote begins by asking what a vibrant community actually is: not as an aspiration, but as something with real characteristics that can be named, protected, and designed toward. Drawing on community-led projects built through reclaimed materials, participatory storytelling, and shared cultural memory, Nila argues that designers carry more agency in this moment, so how can we use that agency? A call to return design to its original purpose: creating the conditions for people to feel prosperous, connected, and part of something larger than themselves. ### Design Shapes Context, Context Shapes Design **talk · 2026-08-27 10:00** Speakers: Cornel Steyn (Versent), Jess Witt (Versent) Over five years of working together across multiple projects, we've accumulated real, practical learnings about what it means to bring genuine context awareness into your design process, and this talk is the distillation of that. Through working case studies drawn from our own practice, we walk through the five dimensions of context, showing not just the theory but how we actually apply it day to day. People love to see how others work, and we pull back the curtain on that in a way that's honest, practical, and immediately useful. It's a technical design talk at heart, but it leaves you with something more: a redefinition of the designer's role in a world increasingly shaped by AI. You'll leave with tools you can use tomorrow, a renewed sense of purpose, and a completely ruined relationship with pesto. ### Re-architecting PeerChat for on-demand mental health support **talk · 2026-08-27 10:30** Speakers: Nadine Raydan (ReachOut Australia), Emily Smith (ReachOut Australia) Young people’s expectations of the services they engage with are shaped by their experiences of the broader digital world. In an era defined by hyper-personalised and near-instant online experiences, mental health services are evolving to be just as responsive. ReachOut Australia intentionally redesigned its PeerChat service model and product to better support changing help-seeking behaviours and address the high-friction entry-point that failed to meet users at their peak moment of need. PeerChat is a text-based one-to-one support service in which young people aged 16–25 can connect with a trained peer worker who has lived experience of mental health challenges. The service was designed to provide an evidence-based offering to young people who lack connection and want to feel heard and understood by someone who can relate. By transitioning PeerChat from a traditional booked model to an on-demand service, the interdisciplinary team removed the barriers of ‘scheduled support’ in favour of ‘in-the-moment’ connection. Join ReachOut’s Senior Product Manager, Nadine Raydan and Emily Smith, Peer Work Manager, as they discuss PeerChat’s strategic pivot and transition from a booked service to an on-demand model and share the impact of these changes. They’ll share insights from the end-to-end journey of this transition, detailing the initial drivers for change, co-creating with frontline mental health workers and young people, and the outcomes and lessons from the first year of service. ### Brunch **break · 2026-08-27 11:00 · 60 min** ### How to lead in a time of seismic change **talk · 2026-08-27 12:00** Speakers: MC Monsalve (ABC) MC’s talk is about how she is approaching the change curve being introduced by AI. Talking through how her team is approaching it, and then showing two use cases of where is has been helpful. ### Why most Mobile UX increases risk — and how to reduce it **talk · 2026-08-27 12:30** Speakers: Emma Buckland (Independent) Mobile UX is obsessed with speed. Fewer steps. One-tap actions. Flows so smooth you barely notice them. The problem is that mobile design inherited desktop assumptions and disguised them as mobile-first. We design for focus, continuity and attention. Yet mobile exists in a world of interruption, distraction and fragmented attention. What if mobile isn’t a smaller desktop at all? What if it requires its own design principles? Drawing on years of mobile design experience—and leading UX for one of Australia’s most-used financial apps—Emma Buckland explores why many of the patterns we celebrate in mobile design can increase risk, and what changes when we start designing for the reality of mobile use. ### Enjoyment as a Design Principle and Metric **talk · 2026-08-27 13:00** Speakers: Sakib Jalil (UTS: University of Technology Sydney | University of Sydney | Central Queensland University) For years digital design has focused on efficiency. Faster systems. Leaner services. Tighter workflows. Organisations measure success through reduced clicks, task completion rates, and time saved. These measures are useful, but they do not always explain why people value an experience. On the other hand, some of the most meaningful moments in human life are inefficient when viewed through a purely operational lens. Long conversations, shared meals, slow rituals, provide richer experience. Research in psychology and behavioural science shows that these are the moments people remember. Yet design practice continues to optimise primarily for efficiency. This talk explores what happens when we look at digital experiences through a different lens -- the lens of enjoyment. Drawing on work in Human Computer Interaction, behavioural science, and real design research projects from consulting, it shows how experiences that intentionally introduce meaning can increase trust, engagement, and perceived value. The talk will introduce an approach for making enjoyment measurable via indicators that can complement traditional numeric efficiency metrics. ### Beyond Designers: Building a Culture of UX Through a Playbook **talk · 2026-08-27 13:30** Speakers: Sarah Fennelly (Deakin University), Rachael Wilson (Deakin University) Our proposed talk will discuss our journey developing a central UX and design resource to support library staff in developing user-centered experiences. Our resource, the Library Design Playbook, offers a scaffolded approach to understanding and applying UX concepts, with tangible examples and tools to build confidence and capability in applying the double diamond approach. By reframing UX as a shared responsibility across all roles, the Playbook promotes a culture where every staff member contributes to improving user experiences. It also highlights the value of specialist design expertise working alongside librarians to elevate library services through collaborative, evidence-based design. ### Afternoon Tea **break · 2026-08-27 14:00 · 50 min** ### Designing for disappointment **talk · 2026-08-27 14:50** Speakers: Patima Tantiprasut (PetRescue) Most digital journeys are designed with an end destination in mind. Search, discover, decide, convert - done. The experience is considered complete the moment someone gets what they came for. At PetRescue, that destination is a rescue pet finding a loving home. For a long time, that's where our efforts focused. When we examined what actually happens across that journey, we discovered that the most consequential design moment wasn't only the search or finding a match. It was what happened next. Given that a pet can only be united with one household, something easily neglected was the journey for the unsuccessful applicant. Someone wanting to adopt a pet is emotionally invested and has imagined this pet as a loving companion in their life. With 100 applications for a single rescue pet not being uncommon, the unsuccessful 99 people who inevitably miss out are faced with a decision on what to do next, while feeling heightened emotions often including a form of grief and deep disappointment. This disappointment can be compounding and lead to a pathway of turning to backyard and unsafe sources - methods which face less barriers - the exact opposite outcome of what the rescue sector exists to prevent. Emotion doesn't stop when a journey ends. It fuels whatever comes next. This presentation is about how PetRescue is deliberately designing for disappointment - to hold and support people through it, keep them encouraged on the journey, and protect the decision that follows. It's also an acknowledgement to a continued work in progress (it's not completely solved yet!), and an invitation to look at your own products differently: not just at the moment someone succeeds, but at what you've designed (or haven't) for everyone who doesn't. ### The Masking Tax: How Workplace Products Charge an Invisible Cost on Disabled Employees **talk · 2026-08-27 15:25** Speakers: Josephine Abbatangelo (Movember) Invisible disabilities affect 1 in 5 people, yet most UX research processes, workplace tools, and design systems are built as if they don't exist. As a product designer at Movember living with an invisible disability, I've experienced the gap between how products are designed and how people like me actually use them. This talk explores what happens when the designer is the underrepresented user. I'll share how my lived experience has reshaped the way I conduct discovery and design, challenge "standard" assumptions, and identify the patterns that consistently fail people with invisible disabilities. Are we designing for everyone, or just the users we can see? ### In conversation **keynote · 2026-08-27 16:00 · 50 min** Speakers: Sam Alderton-Johnson (Impact Policy) Sam Alderton-Johnson joins Steve Baty for a fireside chat talking about his work reframing co-design as a decolonising practice–one that recognises sovereignty, redistributes decision-making authority, and centres communities who have historically been designed for rather than with. ### Close **housekeeping · 2026-08-27 17:00** ### The city as interface: What neurodivergent experiences can teach us about designing for every mind **keynote · 2026-08-28 09:00 · 50 min** Speakers: Fatemeh Aminpour (UNSW Sydney) What does a cluttered footpath have in common with a confusing navigation menu? Drawing on in-depth walking interviews with neurodivergent adults navigating Sydney's public spaces, this keynote reframes neuroinclusion as a design systems challenge. The talk explores how predictability, sensory clarity, legibility and opportunities for recovery shape people's ability to participate in everyday life, and what these experiences can teach us about designing more inclusive environments, interfaces and systems for every mind. ### You're Not Designing the Experience. You're Inheriting It **talk · 2026-08-28 10:00** Speakers: Mina Giang (Oexa) Most of what shapes a healthcare experience was decided before you were in the room – by legislation, conformance requirements, and the data models beneath the interface. If you don't understand what sits there, you're not practising healthcare UX. *You're decorating risk.* The Active Script List was designed to give Australians control over their own prescription data – portable, accessible, theirs. But not every risk was visible in the conformance requirements. And when the experience falls short, nobody blames the infrastructure. **They blame the product.** In healthcare, a form is never just a form. It is a decision-making tool whose data flows into clinical decisions, funding models. dispensing systems, and records stored for years. The wrong simplification doesn't just lose data – *it loses clinical meaning.* The most important UX decisions in healthcare are made upstream, before design even begins. The designers who make the biggest impact are the ones willing to go there – and **ask to be in the room where those decisions are made.** ### Building your inclusive design toolkit **talk · 2026-08-28 10:30** Speakers: Maria Sereno Designing inclusively is more crucial now than ever. Given the current state of tech -- the increasing pressure to speed up delivery, do more with data, harness more powerful tools, solve just about any problem with AI -- UX practitioners are poised to make impact on an immense scale. Reaching massive audiences more rapidly than ever, we can craft experiences that are simple, clear, usable. We can also contribute to harming our users by not designing for their needs. And so we absolutely must account for the full breadth of human experience. It can be daunting to think of expanding our scope from accessibility, which primarily accounts for disability, to consider other aspects of human diversity. With so many aspects to consider -- gender, sexuality, race, cultural heritage, language, geography, socioeconomics, literacy, trauma, and so much more -- where do we even begin? In this talk, I'll cover foundations and tools to embed inclusive design into your work. I'll discuss key concepts like intersectionality and lived experience, share what approaches have worked for me, and get real about working within limited constraints. The aim is not to get you thinking about taking an inclusive design course "sometime next year" or to give you a few books to add to your to-be-read list. The aim is to get you started on your toolkit now: with concrete actions and tools you can use in your current project, learning and iterating as you develop your own inclusive design practice. We don't have to do everything all at once. But we must start now. ### Brunch **break · 2026-08-28 11:00 · 60 min** ### The Human Margin **talk · 2026-08-28 12:00** Speakers: Peter Barber (Airwallex) Designing for the Human Margin is a talk about the precise, mappable territory AI cannot take from design — and why our discipline has been quietly giving it away for twenty years. ### From reactive systems to proactive intelligence **talk · 2026-08-28 12:30** Speakers: Jessie Pahng (Independent) For decades, we've designed technology to help people react. An alert appears. A dashboard turns red. Teams investigate, triage, and resolve problems after they've already happened. But what if technology could help us understand what matters sooner? As technology becomes more intelligent and the pace of building accelerates, UX is undergoing a fundamental shift. We have new opportunities to simplify complex systems, reduce cognitive load, and help people make better decisions. In this talk, I'll share lessons from designing complex enterprise experiences and explore what this shift means for how we design, how we work, and the role designers can play as technology becomes increasingly capable. ### Designing for the Mind: Using Cognitive Load to Measure UX Effectiveness **talk · 2026-08-28 13:00** Speakers: Ben Shelton (The University of Newcastle, Australia), Cordelia Prangley (University of Newcastle) User experience design often focuses on usability, accessibility, and task success. But even when users complete a task successfully, an interface may still be demanding unnecessary mental effort. Every extra decision, notification, unclear hierarchy, or fragmented workflow adds to the cognitive load users must manage. These costs are rarely visible in traditional usability metrics, yet they directly affect attention, performance, and user satisfaction. Cognitive Load Theory offers a way to make this invisible cost visible. In this talk, Dr Ben Shelton and Cordelia Prangley introduce how cognitive load can be used as a practical lens for evaluating interface effectiveness. Drawing on research from educational psychology and calm technology, the session explores how mental workload influences user performance, decision-making, and attention. Attendees will learn: - How cognitive load affects user performance and decision quality - The relationship between perceptual load, attention, and interface complexity - Practical techniques for identifying cognitive overload in real products - How cognitive load insights can lead to calmer, more effective digital experiences If we want technology to feel effortless, we need to understand the demands it places on the human mind. ### Unplanned Disruption: Mind the Gaps **talk · 2026-08-28 13:30** Speakers: Elise Loeuille (Transport for NSW) Unplanned disruption is where complex systems are most exposed. In transport, it brings together multiple modes, fragmented systems, and teams making decisions quickly with incomplete information. The result is not just operational pressure, but visible gaps in governance, processes, tools, and communication that directly impact the customer experience. At the same time, it creates challenges for both customers and employees, with frustration often building between teams that are each working within different constraints and realities. This session explores how human-centred design was used to make those gaps visible and actionable. Drawing on practical work across cross-agency collaboration, standardised processes, and shared tools, it shows how mapping the disruption ecosystem, visualising customer and staff journeys, and establishing a shared definition of disruption can support clearer governance, more consistent decision-making, and better coordination in real-time. This program of work helps stakeholders see the broader system they are operating within and reveal the experiences of others across it. This created empathy across teams, reduced some of the frustration that had built up between functions, and gave people a clearer sense of why their work mattered in the bigger picture. Attendees will leave with practical approaches for mapping complex systems, aligning cross-functional teams, and improving decision-making in high-pressure, real-time environments. ### Afternoon Tea **break · 2026-08-28 14:00 · 45 min** ### Getting comfortable with the unknown **talk · 2026-08-28 14:45** Speakers: Amanda Pitcher (Versent) Every UX-er knows the feeling: You've landed in a new project, a new role, or a new organisation, and the brief is vague, the stakeholders have assumptions baked in, and nobody seems to agree on what the actual problem is. The instinct is to trust the process - but what if the process is the problem? This talk flips the script on how we navigate ambiguity, offering eight practical, immediately applicable tools for getting comfortable in the grey zone of not-knowing. Drawing on experience design, cognitive science, and the humbling realities of working in complex organisations, you'll leave with a concrete framework for naming your unknowns, challenging your assumptions, and making better decisions even when the path ahead isn't clear. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or fresh in your career, comfort with uncertainty isn't a personality trait - it's a skill. And this talk will help you build it. ### Leadership that lasts **talk · 2026-08-28 15:15** Speakers: Amir Ansari Attributes and conversations about UX and Product Design leadership often centre on scale and efficiency: growing headcount, enabling company growth, introducing streamlined practices and systems, refining operating models, and driving transformation. Across 25+ years of leading design in startups, agencies, enterprises, and government, I’ve done all of that. I’ve taken on those roles believing I could create meaningful, lasting impact — leaving each organisation stronger than when I joined. But in environments shaped by restructures, mergers and acquisitions, pivots, and strategy resets, many of those visible markers of leadership prove to be fragile and short-lived. Over time, I’ve come to realise that only one aspect of leadership truly endures beyond tenure. In this talk, I’ll reflect on both the successes and missteps from my journey as a design leader and share what I believe is the one ingredient that outlasts growth strategies, frameworks, and org charts — and what leaders should focus on if they want their impact to genuinely travel beyond them. ### Your Strategic Future **keynote · 2026-08-28 16:00** Speakers: Nathan Shedroff (California College of the Arts) All of the most important decisions about a project or company's customers, value, requirements, performance, intent, and impact are made before it's ever given to designers and engineers. That puts developers at a disadvantage of improving outcomes, making change, and accomplishing their goals. In order to have the impact you want to have, you need to move up the decision chain and become involved with strategy. Designers, in particular, have all of the skills and perspectives needed to become superior strategist, whether they stay at the development level or move into an organization's leadership. However, in order to be effective, they must learn why the traditional approach to strategy is the problem and what new approaches will replace it and give them the influence they desire. This talk will cover what is wrong with strategy, how to fix it, and how to upskill into more impactful (and, often lucrative) careers. ### Close **housekeeping · 2026-08-28 17:00**