Shift UX 2026

September 23-25, 2026 • New York City + Live Online

Shift UX 2026 is a new two-day, hybrid conference (plus an optional day of workshops) for people who care deeply about how products and services actually w

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About

Shift UX 2026 is a new two-day, hybrid conference (plus an optional day of workshops) for people who care deeply about how products and services actually work in the world.

Hosted by Rosenfeld Media, it brings together professionals who currently work as designers, researchers, product managers, content designers, data scientists, and adjacent practitioners who know UX is more important than ever—even as traditional UX roles blur or disappear.

Videos

September 23, 2026

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Welcome to Shift UX 2026

Louis Rosenfeld • Founder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Abby Covert • Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club

September 24, 2026

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Your Future is Nebulous—and Why That's Good

Catt Small • Staff Product Designer at Dropbox and Author of The Staff Designer

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

From Research to Knowledge

Jemma Ahmed • Advancing Research and Shift UX Curator

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

The edges of things

Brooke Hopper • Sr Principal Designer, Machine Intelligence & New Technology

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Unpacking Uncomfortable Truths

Candi Williams • Coach and Content Design Leader

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Robert Fabricant • Co-Founder & Partner, Dalberg Design

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Live Sensemaking: How might we better metabolize knowledge?

Dan Brown • Co-founder, EightShapes

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Coordinating Human-Centered Organizations in the Post-AI Era

Jon Fukuda • Co-founder, Limina.co

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Architecting Organizational Understanding

Sean McKay • Founder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant, Whole Product Thinking

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Shared Accountability in Enterprise UX

Dr. Jamika Burge • CEO, blackcomputeHER.org

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

The Judgment Layer: Operations After Throughput

Alison Rand • Senior Director, Head of Design Operations at InVision

Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Live Sensemaking: How Might We Move from Operations to Orchestration?

Sophia Prater • UX Strategy Consultant and Coach

September 25, 2026

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Shaping the Tools that Shape Us

Stefanie Hutka • Founder & Head of Design Research at Sendfull, Author of What Your Machines Should Do

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Tuning the Turing Machines

Dan Saffer • Assistant Professor of the Practice, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

What the Floor Buys the Ceiling

Changying (Z) Zheng • Sr. Director, Product Experience Operations, Deel

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

A UX Guide to Floating Above the Forest

Sheryl Cababa • Author of Closing the Loop

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Live Sensemaking: How Might We Shape Tools that Extend Us at Every Level, from Product to Workflow to Community?

Hang Xu • Design Recruiter

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Is the shift greater than the sum of its parts?

Abby Covert • Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Dan Brown • Co-founder, EightShapes
Sophia Prater • UX Strategy Consultant and Coach
Hang Xu • Design Recruiter

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Ready, Steady, Go! Making the Shift to What Comes Next

Jesse James Garrett • Fractional AI Transformation Leader, Intentional Associates

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Shift UX 2026

Louis Rosenfeld • Founder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media
Abby Covert • Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker, The Sensemakers Club
Jon Fukuda • Co-founder, Limina.co
Stefanie Hutka • Founder & Head of Design Research at Sendfull, Author of What Your Machines Should Do
Jemma Ahmed • Advancing Research and Shift UX Curator

Speakers

Research as strategy

Positioning user research as high-value sense-making and leadership, rather than as a cost center that cranks out reports.

Led by Jemma Ahmed.

Operations as orchestration

New demands and new complexity requires an ever greater level of coordination, and DesignOps, ResearchOps, ProductOps, and program management skills are needed to align people, tools, policies, and organizations.

Led by Jon Fukuda.

Human-centered tooling

UX thinking and skills are critical to determining how powerful new technologies make humans more constructively impactful, not just more efficient. Think “AI in the loop,” not humans on the sidelines.

Led by Stefanie Hutka.

Sensemaking

Panning back from the UI to “big picture” thinking and practices—service design, systems thinking, information architecture, knowledge management—that can’t be commodified.

Led by Abby Covert.