Session Description
UX students are trained to do great research, make seamless interactions, and design beautiful interfaces. But where do these live in an Agile system? From Research to Release (and Beyond!) takes students through the Agile process with 3 tools: Miro, JIRA, and Asana. Students will get a bird’s eye view of fast-paced project management as they see how these tools connect.
In the modern workplace, students must know how to work collaboratively and cross-functionally. Tools like JIRA allow UX students to work in tandem with engineers, project managers, and product owners. From ticketing to Kanbans, students will feel prepared entering the workforce with full knowledge of this high-tech jargon. I’ll finally dispel the mystery of what a Scrum Master is (and no, it’s not just a great rugby player!).
We will also explore tools like Miro which allow UX students to brainstorm, create user journeys, and translate insights into recommendations. Paired with the tool Asana, this hands-on workshop will help UX students keep track of their To-Do’s and signal to an Agile Coach that they’re ready for a new challenge.
We’ll end with incorporating stakeholders into the project management process and beyond. This is how work gets done!

About Alastair:
I have deep experience in research, UX research, and consulting. After working at Siebel Center for Design for almost 5 year, I worked as a UX researcher at a healthcare product design consultancy called Nemera Insight Innovation where I travelled across the country conducting observation sessions, moderating focus groups and testing sessions, and prototyping physical products. I also worked at a national nonprofit organization called Design for America as a project manager where I oversaw the development of 90+ HCD projects at +35 institutions of higher education. Through this experience, I honed my skills in Agile project management and workshop presentations.

Session Description:
Design thinking and UX methods have transformed how products are conceived by centering empathy, iteration, and user experience. In healthcare and medical technology, however, designs that feel intuitive or engaging can still lead to misunderstanding, misuse, and harm. This workshop introduces students to human factors as a complementary discipline that extends design thinking with evidence-based methods focused on safe, effective, and reliable use in real-world contexts.
Through hands-on comparison, students will apply both a traditional design thinking approach and human factors approach to the same medical or digital health technology to propose an improved design. Starting with design thinking methods, students will review a persona and create an empathy map, user journey, and 5 pain points to guide proposed design changes. In the next part students will review a hierarchical task analysis to identify those points of greatest risk of use error and severity of harm if an error occurs. Students will propose design changes based on the evidence from the task analysis. The workshop will conclude by comparing the proposed design changes and a discussion of the value of design thinking and human factors approaches to creating safe and effective health technology products.  

The workshop positions human factors as an advanced, systems-oriented extension of UX practice, particularly relevant for those interested in healthcare, medical devices, and digital health—and as a pathway to deeper study and career in this space.

About Tim:
I teach courses in the Department of Health and Kinesiology on the design and evaluation of health and medical technologies. I teach both courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduates come from across campus but many are enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Health, Health Technology concentration. I also teach students enrolled in the one year professional degree program - the MS in Health Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at UIUC, I led a team of UX designers and software developers at the Center for Connected Health, working with staff at Partners Health Care affiliated hospitals and clinics and industry partners. 

Session Description
In this 90-minute, hands-on workshop, students will step into the role of a corporate UX designer and experience what real-world design work actually feels like. Through a role-playing card game, participants will navigate competing stakeholder priorities, shifting constraints, and limited time, just like in professional UX environments.
Students will practice the often-overlooked soft skills of UX, including asking effective questions, facilitating productive team discussions, and prioritizing work under pressure. Rather than focusing on deliverables, this workshop emphasizes how human-centered design supports informed decision-making, collaboration, and justification of trade-offs in complex and ambiguous situations.
By the end of the session, participants will gain practical tools for leading conversations, aligning teams, and making confident design decisions—skills that are essential for internships, early-career roles, and beyond.

About Valerie:
Valerie Villanueva is an immersive experience designer and Lab Producer at Deloitte Greenhouse, where she designs engaging, user-centered workshops for C-suite executives and their teams. A proud alumna of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Industrial Design program, she brings hands-on experience from her internship with the Project Development team at Walt Disney World. While working as a student at the Siebel Center for Design, Valerie strengthened her human-centered design and collaborative problem-solving skills, which she now applies to enhance audience engagement and drive innovation at Deloitte. As a first-generation college graduate, she is passionate about supporting others as they navigate their own career journeys.

Session Description
Diverse entry points into UX—such as visual design, engineering, content, or research—bring varied areas of expertise that become powerful drivers of perspective, collaboration, and innovation within any design team. In this panel session, members of the Vibes product design team will share how their individual T-shaped strength influences the way they approach design problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and contribute to solutions. Panelists will represent deep specialties in visual design, design system engineering, content strategy, and user research, offering multiple viewpoints on how expertise shapes decision-making and execution. Together, we’ll discuss how we collaborate across disciplines, share knowledge, and create built-in opportunities for cross-training and learning from one another. Attendees will gain practical insights into how embracing diverse design backgrounds strengthens team culture, improves outcomes, and helps small teams build collective design muscle that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

About Jeff:
I’m a Chicago-based UX and product design leader with 25+ years of experience shaping data-driven, user-centered strategies for SaaS platforms and mobile products. At Vibes, our design team crafts intuitive, campaign-driven solutions to help enterprise brands engage their consumers across mobile messaging channels like RCS, SMS, MMS, and push notifications. We partner closely with customers to understand their problems, constraints, and goals—including how they approach AI—and translate those insights into responsible, effective product experiences.

Nikki McConnell, Product Designer at Vibes
Nikki transitioned into product design from a background in UX writing and content strategy. She brings a unique lens shaped by extensive experience crafting clear, human-centered content across SaaS platforms, mobile products, and developer documentation, which informs her thoughtful, empathetic design work.

Nolan Felicidario, Product Designer at Vibes 
Nolan recently joined Vibes as a product designer, bringing deep technical experience that bridges design and front-end development. His entrepreneurial background has shaped his ability to create intuitive user experiences while building interactive, code-driven interfaces and contributing to scalable design systems and engineering workflows.

Session Description
In this talk, an engineer-turned-designer shares the key mindset shifts that make cross-functional collaboration smoother and more effective. Drawing from years of working closely with developers, she offers practical ways to build shared understanding, improve communication, and transform handoffs into co-creation.

About Medhaswi:
Medhaswi Paturu began her career as an engineer before transitioning into design, giving her a unique perspective on how teams create products together. She focuses on bridging the gap between designers and developers through empathy, clear communication, and practical collaboration strategies. In addition, she works closely with Pratt Institute as a Research Consultant to improve design pedagogy and enable designers to work effectively across disciplines. Her work centers on building collaboration, better services, and communicate human-centered design practices across teams.

Session Description
As AI systems move from experimentation into everyday products, their real impact is increasingly shaped not by model performance alone, but by a set of invisible decisions made long before users ever interact with them. Decisions about judgment, boundaries, language, confidence, failure recovery, and human involvement fundamentally influence whether AI systems are trusted, adopted, and used responsibly.
Drawing from applied experience across large-scale conversational AI and computer vision systems deployed in production environments, this talk examines how design, UX research, and leadership choices quietly shape AI behavior and outcomes. Rather than focusing on algorithms or architectures, it surfaces the hidden decisions that determine when AI should act independently, when it should defer, and how it should communicate uncertainty.
Through concrete case patterns from real-world AI systems, the talk illustrates how these invisible decisions affect user trust, decision quality, and organizational accountability. It concludes with a practical framework for identifying and designing these decision layers, offering students and practitioners a way to think beyond models and toward building AI systems that are not only intelligent, but human-aware, resilient, and responsibly led.

About Niketa:
I am a senior UX leader with over two decades of experience designing and leading human-centered systems at the intersection of AI, research, and product strategy. At Amazon, I lead UX and research for large-scale conversational and computer vision–driven AI systems, where design, research, and leadership decisions directly shape trust, adoption, and real-world outcomes. I work closely with engineering, product, and science teams to translate complex AI capabilities into meaningful, responsible experiences. I regularly speak on AI, UX, and leadership at industry and academic forums.

Session Description
The field of UX is broad, fast-changing, and often unclear, especially early in a career. Many designers enter the industry expecting a defined role, only to discover that “UX” means something very different depending on the environment.

This session draws from my experience working across agency, in-house innovation, and institutional settings to explore how those differences shape both the work and the designer. Early in my career, I assumed UX was a clearly defined discipline with a standard way of working, but quickly learned that factors like team size, industry, and the type of product being built fundamentally redefine what a UX role looks like in practice.

I moved through multiple forms of UX without initially knowing what I was drawn to. Experiencing different environments helped UX strategy emerge as a way of thinking, one that gradually began to differentiate my approach to design from others.

Rather than presenting a linear career path, this talk reframes experimentation as a necessary part of finding fit in UX. Attendees will learn how different environments demand different skills, why it’s normal for roles to feel misaligned at first, and how a clear niche often emerges through exposure to real-world UX work.

About Ian:
I am a UX strategist with four years of experience working across agency, innovation, and in-house environments. I spent three and a half years in Chicago, including two years at Razorfish, a large global agency supporting enterprise clients such as Hy-Vee, Ford, and CitiBank on UX and AI strategy. I later worked as a Design Strategist at Relish Works before returning to Peoria, Illinois eight months ago, where I am currently a UX Strategist. 

Session Description
In this session, we’ll explore current AI usage patterns and emerging trends across enterprise software—and what they mean for UX designers working in complex, high-stakes environments. Using real examples from the Vibes mobile engagement platform, we’ll share how our team has integrated generative AI, contextual insights, and workflow automation to help users create better messaging, surface meaningful data at the right moments, and simplify time-consuming tasks in their mission to deliver the perfect message to their consumers. You’ll learn how we identify the right moments for AI assistance, design for trust and transparency, and transform complex campaign operations into intuitive, efficient experiences that drive measurable ROI. Attendees will leave with practical guidance for designing AI-driven systems in flux—and strategies for continuing to learn and evolve alongside this rapidly changing technology.

About Jeff:
I’m a Chicago-based UX and product design leader with 25+ years of experience shaping data-driven, user-centered strategies for SaaS platforms and mobile products. At Vibes, our design team crafts intuitive, campaign-driven solutions to help enterprise brands engage their consumers across mobile messaging channels like RCS, SMS, MMS, and push notifications. We partner closely with customers to understand their problems, constraints, and goals—including how they approach AI—and translate those insights into responsible, effective product experiences.

Session Description
The last decade has seen the rapid proliferation of technologies for sharing health and medical information with patients. Current approaches to health literacy, however, need revision to account for such shifts. As a result, health literacy today involves addressing patient communication needs in terms of usability – specifically, can patients effectively 

• Use related technologies to access needed medical and health information
• Act on – or apply – such information to achieve a desired healthcare outcome 

Accordingly, individuals in health and medical communication have advocated expanding health literacy practices to include usability – or creating materials patients can use in different healthcare situations. 
This presentation would introduce an approach for expanding health literacy practices to include usability into the creation of communication materials for patients. Known as context-of-care mapping, this approach has been used by individuals to create usable health content – and address the varying health literacy expectations of patients – in different healthcare contexts. The presenter would

• Discuss how a usability focus can help address modern health literacy dynamics 
• Review how mental (cognitive) models shape patient communication/literacy expectations
• Present a method for identifying and addressing such usability and literacy expectations

Attendees will learn how to identify and address patent usability expectations in order to create effective communication materials for patients. They will also learn how to integrate such approaches into current health literacy practices.

About Kirk:
 Kirk St.Amant is a Professor and the Eunice C. Williamson Chair in Technical Communication at Louisiana Tech University where he serves as the Director of Louisiana Tech’s Center for Health and Medical Communication (CHMC) and oversees the Center's heal experience design usability lab. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Health and Medical Communication with the University of Limerick in Ireland and a Research Fellow in User Experience Design with the University of Strasbourg in France. His research focuses on usability in international health and medical contexts, global health literacy, and developing health and medical products patients in different cultures can use easily and effectively.  

Session Description
In the design community, constraints are often seen as creativity’s enemy. A cage that stifles imagination and expression. But what if this common belief is exactly backward? This talk challenges the myth that “unbounded creativity” leads to better user experiences.

Drawing on Karl Duncker’s famous Candle Problem and the global sensation of MacGyver, we’ll explore the cognitive bias known as functional fixedness. How our minds get stuck seeing things only one way, limiting innovation. By embracing constraints, from user needs and product requirements to brand guidelines and technical boundaries, we unlock a richer, more focused kind of creativity.

This talk argues for mastering the resources and rules you are given to solve problems effectively within the box. Design systems aren’t meant to fight creativity; they are the scaffolding that helps teams support consistent, user-centered solutions while delivering a package of thoughtful design expressions.

About Donnie:
I’m a Design Systems Architect with a passion for making design and code work beautifully together. With a background in user-experience design, front-end engineering, and higher education, I build systems that aren’t just component libraries—they’re strategic frameworks that help teams move faster and smarter.

Session Description
In this session, we present the design journey behind America’s largest air monitoring network, an innovation led by UIUC in partnership with UIC and the City of Chicago. Moving beyond standard weather apps, this project visualizes a dense sensor grid that provides hyper-local readings (one every less than a mile away) to empower Chicago. We will unpack the unique UX challenges of civic tech: from sensor site selection with community input to adapting the City of Chicago Design System with our own ideas.

Attendees will learn how our team navigated real-world constraints such as bypassing any-fidelity wireframing to prototype immediately in high-fidelity, a necessary adaptation even in a high-stakes infrastructure project with government involvement. Finally, we will demonstrate how we elevated this tool by integrating "Context Layers" such as overlaying age, heat, and economic hardship on real-time air quality maps, to reveal the human story behind the data. Join us to see how we translated millions of sensor readings into a unified tool for everyday Chicagoans.

About Shubham:
Shubham Kumar is a Sr. Product Designer at the Healthy Regions and Policies Lab, where he leads design strategy for geo-spatial health equity tools. He uses design to break down complex concepts, visualize information in meaningful ways, and ultimately encourage broader engagement in discussions about health and society. He has a Master’s degree in Information Management from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science from PES University, India. In his leisure time, Shubham volunteers as a Product Lead at Greenstand, a non-profit addressing climate change through technology. Before his current role, Shubham was a UI/UX Designer at Rolls-Royce and a Full Stack Designer at PwC.

Session Description
When you click “Contact Us” or track a delivery, you’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lies a complex ecosystem of backstage systems - call center interfaces, logistics tools, and scheduling platforms that power everyday experiences.
As design students, you're most familiar with consumer-facing products, but some of the most challenging and impactful work happens backstage. This talk will reveal the hidden world of internal application design through real projects, including a mobile app for clinicians delivering healthcare in the field and the systems powering our nation's healthcare benefits.
We’ll explore principles that distinguish backstage design and talk about considering job opportunities, what skills matter most for back stage users, and why this work offers unique creative challenges and meaningful career impact.

About Susan:
A UX writer turned UX architect turned UX leader, Susan Thome brings more than two decades of enterprise experience to her role as Lead Director of Experience Design and Research at Signify Health. She champions a team-first leadership style, rooted in the belief that an inclusive culture is the foundation for research-informed, customer-centric design. She loves untangling complex information "messes" to deliver experiences that drive meaningful business outcomes. A proud Illini mom, Susan is embracing her daughter's passions around astronomy and data science at UIUC (and not UX).

About Rachel:
Rachel Young is a Lead Director of Experience Design at CVS Health with over 25 years of experience in human-centered design across telecommunications, insurance, and healthcare. Rachel leads with empathy, believing that deep user understanding of humans and their experiences drive the most impactful solutions. A University of Illinois alumnus with degrees in Experimental Psychology and Human Factors, Rachel lives in suburban Chicago with her family and enjoys spending time outdoors. She is also a proud mom of an Illini.

Session Description:
As designers, better user experiences have been long equated with better interaction. With the presence of AI and products becoming more complex, interaction itself can become an increasing source of friction. My session will introduce a new mindset and approach to the “Low-touch/ No-touch” UX approach - a shift from designing interfaces to designing systems that reduce the need for interaction altogether. AI acts as a key enabler in this shift, allowing products to anticipate intent, automate routines, and surface the right outcomes without demanding user input.

The session will challenge UXers to think beyond optimising flows and screens, focus on intelligent defaults, pattern recognition, and adaptive systems that quietly do the work on the user’s behalf. Drawing from real world product examples, the talk explores where interaction still adds value and where automation and AI intelligence can responsibly remove it. 

About Aakreit:
I am a design leader working at the intersection of UX, product strategy, and AI at enterprise scale. I lead experience design and strategy for a global platform used by thousands of organizations, focusing on reducing complexity, risk, and effort. Beyond my day to day, I explore ways on how design can move beyond interaction to deliver measurable business outcomes.

Session Description
Microcopy plays a critical role in how users move through digital systems, especially at moments of friction, uncertainty, and decision-making. Yet it is often treated as an afterthought, squeezed in at the end of the design process or reduced to “just button text.”
In this 50-minute session, we’ll explore microcopy as a core system component that shapes trust, clarity, and accessibility across user experiences. Attendees will learn a practical, repeatable framework for identifying high-impact microcopy and drafting language that guides users with confidence. Through real-world examples, we’ll examine common microcopy pain points in forms, onboarding flows, error states, and more. Participants will practice evaluating and rewriting microcopy with an emphasis on clarity, tone, accessibility, and intent, and leave with tools they can immediately apply to their own products.
This session is for aspiring designers, content strategists, UX writers, product managers, and developers who want to create more thoughtful, human-centered systems.

About Megan:
While I currently work in communications at SCD, my professional background spans UX Design, content strategy, and frontend development. Prior to this role, I worked at a consulting company where I led site redesign projects for brands including Converse and Reformation, collaborating closely with UX teams throughout the design and build process. That experience shaped how I approach microcopy as a bridge between system logic, design intent, and user understanding.

Session Description
How can design and technology solutions shape the way people prepare for, interact with, and respond to increasingly extreme weather events—here in St. Louis and across the globe? How can we create tools, devices, and interfaces that enable communities not just to survive, but to adapt and thrive in an evolving climate environment?

The May 16, 2025, tornado that touched down near Washington University before devastating neighborhoods in North St. Louis underscores the urgency of these questions. At the WashU Sam Fox School, the new Master of Design (MDes) in Human-Computer Interaction and Emerging Technology is taking up this challenge directly through its 2025–2027 research theme: Interactions with Extreme Weather. Students are collaborating with experts in public health, urban design, geospatial science, engineering, and social work to design digital tools, systems, and experiences that address vulnerabilities and build resilience through emerging technology.

In this talk, Associate Professor and MDes Chair Jonathan Hanahan will share how the program is positioning design as a driver of innovation and impact in St. Louis and beyond. He will highlight current student projects and outline opportunities for the broader design community to contribute to shaping more resilient and preferable futures.

About Johnathan:
Jonathan Hanahan is a researcher, critical designer, and educator exploring the complex relationship between humans and technology. His work harnesses technology to critique its own impact through speculative, sensory, and cultural inquiry. Hanahan founded the Sensory and Ambient Interfaces Lab (SAIL) to design alternatives to screen-based interaction, envisioning ambient and non-visual interfaces that harmonize with daily life. An Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he also serves as Founding Chair of the Master of Design in HCI and Emerging Technology program.

Session Description
Startups move fast, sometimes faster than design processes can keep up. Ambiguous requirements, shifting priorities, incomplete data, and limited resources aren’t exceptions… they’re the environment. So how do designers not only survive but thrive in that kind of flux?

In this talk, David Burns, a veteran design leader who has built and led UX teams across multiple high-growth organizations, shares essential habits that set successful startup designers apart. These are practical, hard-won lessons that rarely appear in design courses but make all the difference in the real world: working confidently with incomplete information, validating assumptions early and often, earning trust from engineers and founders, aligning design with business outcomes, advocating for users without slowing momentum, and building a culture of evidence-based decision-making.

Attendees will walk away with a startup survival kit they can immediately apply to internships, early-career roles, or their own entrepreneurial ventures. This session empowers designers to embrace uncertainty, create clarity where none exists, and become a catalyst for impact in constantly evolving teams.

About David:
I am a seasoned product design leader with 30 years of experience building and scaling UX teams across fast-moving startups and high-growth tech organizations. I’ve led design at companies like Grammarly, Grubhub, IBM, and multiple early-stage ventures, where I’ve developed processes and scrappy practices that help designers succeed in environments of constant change. I teach graduate courses in Human-Computer Interaction at DePaul University, helping students bridge the gap between academic design skills and real-world expectations. My work focuses on empowering designers to create clarity, drive business impact, and champion user-centered design even when resources are limited and paths are ambiguous.

Session Description
This session will cover the steps and strategy involved with identifying the best people to learn from to support your early-stage research and design work. It will cover the tension between designing for a large audience while using a small sample size, and why niche perspectives can unlock breakthrough products and services with mass appeal. This session will cover some theory and a few case studies before jumping into an activity where attendees will create recruiting profiles for invented design challenges. Finally we will touch on how AI-led products are attempting to disrupt this space, including a facilitated conversation with attendees. 

About Will:
I'm a mixed methods Design Researcher, with a background in the Social Sciences and Business Strategy. I've worked in consumer and b2b contexts in both an agency setting at IDEO and in-house at Resy, a part of American Express' Global Dining Business.
I've presented my work at industry conferences including EPIC and UX Days (!), podcasts, and have a passion for helping prepare students for a career in design whether as a mentor for students, a guest lecturer (Mendoza, Notre Dame; Booth, UofC), or as an adjunct professor in the Division of Social Sciences at University of Chicago. 

Session Description
As AI systems become increasingly embedded in everyday products and services, designers are often asked to create experiences around technologies that are probabilistic, opaque, and constantly evolving. In these conditions, traditional UX goals like clarity and predictability are no longer sufficient. Instead, designers are tasked with shaping something more complex: trust.

This session explores how designers can design for trust in uncertain systems by focusing not only on usability and transparency, but on meaning, feeling, and care—and the value users derive from knowing that human intention is still present. Drawing from real-world experience designing AI-powered platforms in high-stakes contexts, the talk examines how trust is formed emotionally as much as cognitively—and how designers can help users feel grounded, informed, and respected even when systems cannot provide definitive answers.

Beyond trust, the session introduces craftsmanship and imperfection as signals of value in AI-mediated experiences. Rather than making AI feel human, designers can intentionally design AI as a supporting tool—one that preserves human judgment, creativity, and connection. Moments of restraint, transparency, and even friction can communicate care, authorship, and accountability, reinforcing that humans are still in relationship with one another through the system.

Attendees will learn how to navigate ambiguity as a core design condition, rethink explainability as a felt experience rather than a purely technical one, and apply human-centered principles to AI systems where uncertainty is unavoidable. The session offers practical design considerations alongside a mindset shift: seeing designers not just as problem-solvers, but as sense-makers and craftspeople responsible for shaping how people experience value, care, and connection in an AI-driven world.

About Mariana:
I’m a Senior Designer at PwC, where I work across industries including healthcare, retail, hospitality, and enterprise technology, often designing AI-powered platforms and complex digital systems. My work sits at the intersection of systems thinking and human experience, with a focus on trust, meaning, and care in environments shaped by uncertainty.

An alum of the University of Illinois, I’ve also taught an Honors course called Designing Your Phygital World, exploring how design shapes the way we live, work, and relate to technology. I’m especially interested in how designers navigate ambiguity, preserve human value in automated systems, and create experiences that feel thoughtful, ethical, and deeply human.

Outside of work, I’m inspired by movement, creativity, and connection—whether that’s running with friends, wandering through art galleries, reading and journaling, or exploring New York City’s ever-changing energy. I’m usually accompanied by my German Shepherd and grounded by the people I love most.

Session Description:
During this session, I draw from my career experiences to share lessons on empathizing with stakeholders, translating requests into successful solutions, and clearly communicating design decisions.
The talk explores how designers can increase their impact by doing the same groundwork for stakeholders that we do for users during the “empathize” phase of design thinking. This includes asking questions, analyzing team dynamics, and understanding our teammates' motivation.
We will dive into common product team scenarios, including how to address feedback, build trust, and push innovative solutions forward with minimal friction. Designers will learn why their product team is often their first user, and how the ability to explain design decisions clearly will directly influence product outcomes and team culture.
Audience members will leave with actionable steps to better empathize with cross-functional stakeholders and articulate design rationale with confidence. These steps will help designers reduce team friction, gain buy-in, and drive successful design solutions.

About David:
I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2022 with a Bachelor of Science in Information Sciences and currently work as an experience designer at BP. Over the past two years, I stepped into a lead designer role for the first time, navigating new pressures and responsibilities while learning to work effectively across cross-functional teams. These experiences taught me how to empathize with stakeholders, translate requests into successful solutions, and communicate design decisions clearly. In this session, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned about influencing outcomes, building trust, and driving impactful design within complex team dynamics.

Session Description
Our society continues to redefine itself on the backs of systemic change and intelligent systems, causing UX designers to hone their practice to consider not only analyze who they design for, but how their innate perspectives reshape the user experience. Embracing The Err delves into the intersection of lived experience, personal bias, and design thinking. The talk will analyze how our own experiences give us as UX designers a competitive advantage over large language models and other emerging technologies. Embracing the theme of “Systems in Flux: Designing What Comes After,” we will look at how different emerging tools and technology disrupt traditional UX practices, challenge assumptions, and reimagine different forms of collaboration between humanity and artificial intelligence.  

Participants will explore how we are influenced by our unexamined biases in problem framing, user research methodology, and solution ideation, which can perpetuate inequity in design problem solving. Utilizing case studies, design theory, and reflective methods, this session highlights the use of strategies to identify and leverage one's bias for optimal design solutions, rather than a blind spot in their design practice. Harnessing this experience gives young UX practitioners different perspectives and insights large language models struggle to solve for. Through cultivating a greater self-understanding, designers can more effectively interrogate the systems that mold the user experience, resulting in a more adaptive, equitable, and human centered design to stand out in an AI augmented world. 

About Nolan:
Nolan Havig is a UX professional, educator, and design leader with over eight years of experience in digital media and user experience. He currently serves as a Multimedia Design Manager, specializing in accessibility, interaction design, and inclusive digital systems. Nolan also teaches at Cerro Coso College and serves as Marketing Director for AIGA Los Angeles, where he contributes to shaping conversations around design and community impact.

His career bridges professional practice and education, allowing him to translate real-world design challenges into meaningful learning experiences. Passionate about inclusive and equitable design, Nolan advocates for practical, human-centered solutions that create measurable impact. Through both teaching and practice, he brings a thoughtful and applied perspective to the evolving field of UX.

Session Description:
This session will first explore the UX considerations for virtual reality (VR) titles for users of all ability levels before delving into some of the specific needs and preferences of individuals with disabilities. A brief overview of academic research in this area and the issue of barrier-focused research will be addressed. I will introduce my own study and how prior research and my lived experience as a wheelchair-user guided the development of the testing software; the need for focus testing by others and adapting my design based on their experiences will be addressed. Preliminary results of volunteer testing will be shared alongside discussion of future research directions.
Attendees will walk away with a greater understanding of UX elements in VR software and how needs diverge from those in conventional 2D and 3D titles. They would understand some of the best practices for developing software for and/or conducting (video game/VR) research with users with disabilities.

About Brian:
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate here at UIUC with experience creating 3D/VR and 2D titles in Unity and Godot. Existing research on virtual reality titles for users with disabilities, a niche topic at present, is overwhelmingly focused on barriers and fails to capture the experience of these individuals; being a wheelchair-user myself, I feel it is important that my research centers on the UX of individuals with disabilities in-line with principles of human-centered design. My study is presently in the recruiting phase, but we will have preliminary data to share by the time of the conference.

Session Description
Contrary to popular belief, introverts can actually be very good at networking - and given our age of AI and the current job market, soft skills like networking are increasingly important. Yet there are relatively few opportunities to tangibly learn or practice these critical skills. In this session, we'll walk through the importance of networking, counter myths frequently faced by introverts (I get it, as an introvert too!), and learn concrete tactics to employ to get a new job/opportunity or even make a new friend. We'll also practice these skills live (and I promise, it'll be fun). 

About Faith:
Faith Harron is an award-winning writer, speaker, and founder of Esper Collective, a soft skills upskilling consultancy helping teams, companies and schools build critical durable skills. Her constellation of experience ranges from work as a BCG consultant creating AI upskilling programs for Fortune 500 companies to launching novel student learning programs at Stanford’s Center for Teaching & Learning as the Strategy & Operations Director, to reporting at The Bismarck Tribune and working as an engineer in industry. Harron graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and B.A.H in Slavic Languages & Literatures and has spoken for organizations and at conferences like Stanford Treehacks, FFA, CoCreate Design, Science Olympiad, Summerfest Tech, Stanford SWE & SUME, the University of Miami, and more. Her book on the college to career transition is forthcoming fall 2026. 

Session Description
Advertising faculty often lack the tailored resources and support needed to teach inclusive, ethical, and legally compliant practices—leaving students unprepared for industry realities. This session introduces Create with Compliance, a UX-informed suite of tools (website, workbook, textbook) co-designed with educators to make complex regulations accessible and actionable within advertising curricula. By applying user-centered design and behavior-based persuasion strategies, these adaptable resources help faculty integrate compliance seamlessly while enhancing student engagement and learning outcomes. Discover how UX principles can drive systemic curriculum change, enabling ethical creativity that meets both public good and industry standards. 

About Marisa:
Marisa Peacock is the founder and chief strategist of The Strategic Peacock, helping organizations implement effective social media strategies. As a senior lecturer, she teaches the Sandage Project, digital content and social media management and AI and Advertising. She also leads the Social Media Lab, where advertising students gain hands-on experience, build portfolios, and connect with employers—benefiting both businesses and emerging talent. My MFA DRI research explores the integration of compliance into advertising education, identifying challenges and opportunities for preparing students to create culturally sensitive, inclusive, and impactful campaigns. www.createwithcompliance.com

Session Description
AI brings a new medium of experience delivery that refocuses us on our old toolkit: user interviews, storyboarding, and journey mapping. It forces us to step away from "standard patterns" and to re-think what it means to apply metaphorical thinking to technical interfaces. In this session, I'll present a framework for thinking more deeply about designing for AI, by discussing the real world challenges and processes that we use for crafting AI experiences today. I'll also discuss a new vocabulary for "ethics" in design so we can be more nuanced about these discussions in an AI powered world. 

About Kyle:
I've worked in the industry for about 15 years for frog design a couple of times (Austin, Shanghai), in house in banks, and as an individual consultant. I've done research in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The past few years, I've done a lot of work in blockchain and with AI clients. For one of my main clients for the past 18+ months—Rebind.AI—we've been exploring what it really means to shape AI experiences for deeply learning complex texts. How does AI help people think in deeper, less shallow ways?

Session Description
Generating Value in the Age of AI: The UX Designer’s Role explores how UX designers create meaningful impact as AI continues to reshape how work gets done. Drawing from real-world experience designing enterprise AI tools in a corporate environment, this session focuses on the different ways value is created—through people, through AI, and through the combination of both. Students will learn how trust, relationships, and strong communication enable high-performing teams, while AI drives efficiency, accelerates workflows, and supports decision-making in the design process.

By the end of the session, students will walk away with concrete, actionable techniques they can immediately apply—such as how to build trust at work, communicate clearly across teams, and intentionally integrate AI into their UX practice—along with a clearer understanding of how human judgment and AI capabilities together shape the future of UX careers.

About Jenna:
Jenna Yoo is a UX Design Delivery Lead at AbbVie, where she designs AI-powered tools used by operations teams across manufacturing, quality, supply chain and more. In her role, she works closely with data scientists, developers, project managers, stakeholders and end users to understand real workplace challenges and turn them into meaningful design solutions. Drawing from her own transition from university to corporate, Jenna shares honest lessons about building relationships, navigating team dynamics, and working with AI in professional settings. Her perspective emphasizes that while tools and technologies evolve, strong human relationships remain at the core of impactful UX.

Session Description
In enterprise environments, designers often make decisions that affect users they may never meet and systems that outlive their involvement. Over time, I learned that the hardest part of enterprise UX is not interface design, but making decisions understandable to people who were not in the room.
Working on large-scale enterprise systems changed my understanding of “good UX” from visual polish to designing tools people use 40 hours a week. When products are used daily at scale, novelty fades quickly, but ambiguity compounds—turning small design gaps into long-term friction.
This session focuses on clarity as a design responsibility rather than a communication style. I’ll share practical lessons on designing for downstream users, documenting intent, and creating decision frameworks that survive handoffs, team changes, and time. Attendees will leave with concrete ways to think beyond individual screens and toward decisions that remain usable and understandable long after launch.

About Frances:
Frances Sun is a Taiwanese UX designer with 15+ years at Lenovo, Dell, and Disney, designing consumer and enterprise products used daily at scale and also teaching UX shaped by real-world constraints for global teams!!

Session Description
In this presentation, the audience will be guided through how design has lost it's way and design education is not preparing students for a world that is changing rapidly and will continue to rapidly change. It's about the lack of experience and understanding who the user is. The design profession and design education are at a nexus point-a moment of flux-a perfect storm. It's as if both are standing at the edge or the cliff and looking nostalgically backwards. We need to understand the educational experience in the same way we think about the climate crisis. Institutions can easily become institutionalized because they are cannot think differently about projected and longterm low student enrollment, continued and systemic tuition increases, and not changing the educational experience.

Can design embrace the possible futures and run forward into and define experiences. Can we embrace and shape a world where design politic is real and that embraces and creates positive and enriching experiences where everyone has an equal seat at the table. Can design education accept the importance of developing a first year experience today for where 14 year-olds are today. So, when the 14 year-old is college bound their educational experience will meet them where they are and not where they are not.

The presentation will include modules, mind maps and case studies to support multiple ways to experience design and connect to multiple and different users

About Bernard:
Investigative research on community engagement/social impact/innovation and innovative methodologies/design futures/future of design education

Session Description
Traditional accessibility guidelines address physical or sensory impairments, but many UX systems still overlook cognitive diversity: users with ADHD, dyslexia, autism spectrum conditions, or other neurodivergent experiences. This session explores how designers can create interfaces and workflows that accommodate a range of cognitive styles, fostering inclusivity, comprehension, and engagement for all users.

Attendees will learn practical strategies for designing flexible layouts, adaptable information hierarchies, and user flows that respect attention differences, working memory limits, and varied processing preferences. We will examine real-world case studies that highlight both successes and pitfalls in neurodiverse UX design, illustrating how small design decisions can significantly impact usability and satisfaction.

By reframing neurodiversity as a core design consideration rather than a niche concern, participants will gain tools to build experiences that are not only usable but genuinely empowering. The session emphasizes reflective design practices, encouraging attendees to question assumptions about “typical” user behavior and consider how their designs perform across a spectrum of cognitive experiences.

About Shubham:
Nolan Havig is a UX professional, educator, and design leader with over eight years of experience in digital media and user experience. He currently serves as a Multimedia Design Manager, specializing in accessibility, interaction design, and inclusive digital systems. Nolan also teaches at Cerro Coso College and serves as Marketing Director for AIGA Los Angeles, where he contributes to shaping conversations around design and community impact.

His career bridges professional practice and education, allowing him to translate real-world design challenges into meaningful learning experiences. Passionate about inclusive and equitable design, Nolan advocates for practical, human-centered solutions that create measurable impact. Through both teaching and practice, he brings a thoughtful and applied perspective to the evolving field of UX.

Session Description
This session explores biofeedback sensors as the next critical input for UX design and how understanding the body can help us design more meaningful, adaptive experiences. Today, UX relies heavily on observable behaviors like clicks, taps, and navigation patterns. Biofeedback introduces a deeper layer by capturing internal states such as attention, stress, calm, and cognitive load through signals like brainwaves, heart rate, and breath.
Drawing from my master’s thesis and large scale interactive installations, I will share how physiological data can be translated into real time visual, sonic, and spatial feedback. The session bridges biosensors and UX fundamentals, showing how designers can move from reactive interfaces to empathetic systems that respond to how users feel, not just what they do. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for thinking about biofeedback as a design material and a glimpse into the future of human centered experiences.

About Sana:
I am a UX design leader and senior product designer with over ten years of experience shaping digital experiences across e-commerce, fintech, and interactive installations. I lead design teams at Amazon, working on collaborative experiences with partners like Samsung and Adidas, and I am also a Professor of UX Design at New York University. My work explores the intersection of technology and the body, including biofeedback-driven installations and research from my master’s thesis. I am passionate about translating physiological data into adaptive, human-centered design experiences.