AI is full of promise for users, but it introduces risk as well. The two I’ll talk about in this presentation are over-reliance and deskilling. Over-reliance is when users trust an AI’s output too much. Deskilling is when users lose skills they previously had, but handed off to the AI; with implications not just for users but for labor relations as well.

The good news is that you as a designer can do something about each of these. Come hear Christopher Noessel introduce the problems, share examples (including two from pop culture: beloved Australian show Bluey, and Carol Beers from Little Britain), and walk us through the patterns we can implement to help take some of the sting out of AI.

Seb Chan joins Steve Baty for a fireside chat talking about leadership and its intersection with design practice.

Many UX practitioners excel at understanding users but struggle to get strategic buy-in. Our valuable insights often fail to influence key decisions because they aren't framed using the language of business impact. We advocate passionately for the user, but is HCD always the most persuasive approach for executives?

To bridge this gap, this talk focuses on the crucial mindset shift required to become a strategic partner. We'll concentrate on three core skills: building Business Acumen to grasp the bigger business picture, using Storytelling with Data to craft compelling narratives, and developing Proactive Alignment Seeking to pinpoint where user needs fuel business goals.

Through real-world examples, you'll get practical techniques to reframe findings, articulate value persuasively, and find that crucial sweet spot. You’ll leave equipped to increase your influence and strengthen UX's role in helping your organisation succeed.

Inclusive design is lauded as best practice within UX, yet the needs of certain groups in navigating digital products are still not widely known–even though those products may save their lives. People with alcohol and other drug (AOD) challenges are one such group, experiencing a range of mental, emotional, and practical impacts that can affect how they access and use a digital product. Inclusive design methods, which seek to recognise and value our diverse range of differences, are an obvious way to create more equitable digital experiences–so why isn’t it happening already?

Ally will draw on her experiences in designing for this community in two capacities: as a UX designer at a mental health and AOD charity, and as a PhD candidate in inclusive design. Ally’s reflections on approaches to inclusive design may benefit practitioners working in any sector, not just healthcare. She will also encourage attendees to examine the challenges, biases, and barriers in their own practice: how might we work to overcome historical, systemic difficulties in implementing inclusive design?

UX has always been about finding patterns—designing shared experiences that meet the needs of many. But what happens when every experience is tailored, generated, and optimised for one? As AI accelerates hyper-personalisation, the idea of “the user” as a shared archetype starts to dissolve. This talk explores what happens to UX when there’s no shared experience left to design. What does it mean to design when: * Every interface is unique? * Every customer journey is generated on the fly? * Every person engages with an entirely different product? We’ll look at how this shift is already emerging—across content, services, and interfaces—and explore the ethical, strategic, and cultural implications.

If you've ever wondered what we’re still designing when the algorithm does the rest—this talk is for you. This talk is also for designers, researchers, strategists, and product people who are curious (and maybe a little uneasy) about how AI is changing the way we think about users, journeys, and value.

Whether you’re already working with AI tools or just wondering what comes next, this talk will help you reframe your role in a fast-shifting landscape—and consider what it means to design with integrity, creativity, and care in the absence of “the average user.”

Lucas will share some of the unique challenges and opportunities of expanding a design practice within a company built on decades of healthcare software success who are leaning into the critical need for human-centred design in a modern context. Like many organisations going through this transformation, it is not always as simple as creating products with a blank slate. The need to support legacy products while helping users get the benefit of modern technology – in healthcare; moving to the cloud, embracing the web and mobile over classic desktop platforms. The present and future of AI in healthcare will become even more crucial to ensure user needs are understood, met, and supported in a clinically safe way – and to build trust between creator and end user. This talk will cover design systems, building a customer-centric culture from the top down, and ways of strengthening the voice of design when often faced with the "adversity" of legacy attitudes and ways of working.

As globalisation presents new challenges, what insights can we gain from designing for smaller, close-knit communities? Kiri James reflects on her experiences as a business designer living in Margaret River, exploring how community helps shape organisational accountability.

This session of the Auslanism Workshop focuses on Auslan and access, exploring the barriers and solutions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals in Australia. The discussion covers key topics such as: The importance of Auslan as a primary language for many Deaf Australian UX users. Challenges in accessing interpreters, captioning, and other communication supports. NDIS funding and limitations for Auslan-related services. The responsibilities of businesses and institutions to provide Deaf-friendly access in UX space. Strategies for self-advocacy and improving accessibility in workplaces, education, and public services. The workshop encourages open discussion and knowledge sharing, allowing participants to ask questions, share experiences, and learn how to advocate for better access and inclusion relating to Deaf/Auslan UX access.

There are incredibly effective principles and patterns for government service and content design. However, complex services like statutory planning have historically resisted these same principles, patterns (and hard work) that have made other digitised services feel simple.

At myLot, we’ve made headway by using large-language models (LLMs) to deal with the immense number of variables that come with a seemingly straightforward question like “can I build a shed in my backyard?”, but it’s brought with it a host of new design challenges and nuanced trade-offs.

What about statutory planning justifies the use of LLMs? How do we make the affordances of LLM interactions clear, while still leveraging government service design patterns that we know to work? How do we design good content when it’s all generated by an LLM? And how do we make sure that content is not only clear, but also accurate?

This talk explores how UX research can draw inspiration from futures design practices to transform insights into narrative-driven stories that engage and inspire both stakeholders and team members. Through examples from global case studies and Designit's own work, this session addresses the common challenge many researchers face - ensuring their insights don't get disregarded. By leveraging practices like design fiction, speculative prototyping and visual storytelling, research findings can become powerful catalysts that foster empathy, drive innovation, and spark meaningful change.

How do we think about belonging as a structural issue in modern society? How do we better design experiences, services, and our own lives to increase belonging? We'll explore worldwide trends as well as three big ideas that came out of Hinterland's design research project that has been mentioned in the NYTimes, Atlantic and WSJ.

Designing for Every Australian: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Digital Experiences

Session Overview

Australia ranks among the highest in youth bullying within OECD nations, profoundly affecting mental health, particularly in rural and remote communities. This session explores how trauma-informed design can bridge the gap between standard accessibility guidelines and the complex realities faced by Australians dealing with bullying, addiction, and mental health challenges.

What You’ll Learn

Drawing from real-world work with a leading Australian charity focused on youth mental health and anti-bullying, and remote user research conducted across communities in Western Australia and Queensland, this session demonstrates how embedding empathy, trauma awareness, and cognitive accessibility into digital experiences can lead to transformative outcomes for vulnerable users.

You’ll gain:

- Frameworks for translating trauma awareness into actionable design decisions

Techniques for building cognitively accessible interfaces that reduce overwhelm

Strategies for mobile-first, offline-capable design in low-connectivity environments

Methods for safeguarding your team’s emotional wellbeing when working with sensitive topics

Why Attend

Traditional accessibility standards like WCAG don’t address how trauma impacts the way people absorb, process, and respond to information. When triggered, users may struggle to concentrate, make decisions, or engage meaningfully. This session moves beyond compliance to explore how we can design truly inclusive, supportive, and emotionally aware experiences for communities that need it most.

Who Should Attend

UX designers and researchers working with vulnerable or underserved populations

Product managers building digital services for rural and regional communities

Design leaders seeking to embed trauma-informed principles into their practice

Anyone interested in the intersection of mental health, accessibility, and digital experience

What if the users you’re designing for are volunteers and you can’t offer pay or performance reviews? In this session, I’ll explore what happens when you apply UX principles to designing organisational culture, using my experience as a Board Director leading culture change in a state-wide volunteer organisation. Volunteers don’t comply out of obligation, they show up (or don’t) because of trust, shared values, and lived experience. I’ll share a co-design approach to shift culture and start to build bridges between historically divided groups. We can open it up to some Q&A about Service Design in practice if that format is suitable for the session.

What if we saw ethnography not just as another tool in the design toolkit but as a way of thinking that could fundamentally reshape how we approach design and strategy? Ethnography is often treated as just a research method, but at its core, it is much more than that. It is about immersion in the innate setting, a focus on the lived experiences of individuals and communities, and a holistic perspective on social and cultural phenomena - grounded in exploration, interpretation, and contextual understanding.

This session will explore how embracing an ethnographic mindset rooted in deep curiosity, empathy, and critical reflection can help designers and strategists move beyond surface-level insights to truly understand people in context. Ethnographic thinking encourages us to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and embrace the nuance of what it means to be human at a given moment. Drawing on real-world examples from design and service strategy, we will show how this mindset can lead to more innovative, inclusive, and human-centred solutions and transform how we design systems, products, and policies. Whether you are a seasoned researcher, a strategist, or just ethno-curious, this talk will offer practical ways to bring deeper thinking into your everyday work.

Emerging technology is rapidly transforming the way we work, bringing both new challenges and exciting opportunities. This talks provides a practical exploration of how AI is shaping research practices, the checks and balances required to maintain quality, and how the role we play in research will change.

How often do you consider disabilities, language, culture, age, and different experiences in your design thinking process?

In this presentation, I’ll demonstrate how easy it is to incorporate inclusive design practices into your everyday work—even if accessibility isn't a primary focus for your organisation.

We’ll focus on simple, actionable changes that can make a significant impact for users with disabilities and diverse needs, showing how small adjustments can lead to a more inclusive design approach.

I’ll share valuable insights from my experience researching and designing for users with disabilities, low tech-savviness, and non-native English speakers. I’ll also explore common design patterns that may not be fully accessible and offer alternative solutions you can implement to improve inclusivity in your designs.

Research isn’t neutral — especially when you’re working with people harmed by the very systems you're trying to improve. In this talk, I’ll explore what it means to do respectful, trauma-aware research with communities who’ve experienced violence, exclusion, or failure from government and services. This isn’t just about “inclusive recruitment” or better sampling — it’s about rebuilding trust, communicating safety, and showing up differently as a researcher.

I’ll share lessons from work with people with disability, survivors, and others often left out of policy conversations, including what not to do, how to avoid taking more than you give, and what real co-design looks like when power and history are in the room. This is for anyone working in social policy, services, or government — and anyone who believes research should be a tool for healing, not just insight.

Continuous Discovery, like generative UX research, uses customer research to find new opportunities. Unlike upfront strategic research, it involves frequent, small research activities throughout product development – essentially and agile approach to product research. While praised by some product practitioners, UX researchers worry it could lead to less rigorous research by PMs, devaluing their expertise. Even proponents have concerns about the time and budget needed for consistent research and proper implementation. This talk critically evaluates Continuous Discovery, comparing it to traditional UX(R) practices. It shares practical learnings from a pilot with considerations of whether this method is right for you, your team, and your product with reflections on whether UX(R) should reclaim or co-own discovery.

A year after the launch of the Apple Vision Pro we are seeing an amazing range of enterprise and consumer applications explore new ways of combining the physical and digital worlds through spatial computing. Oliver will talk through key design guidelines, highlighting great examples from Australia and around the world.

He'll walk through the way Contxtual approached designing and developing their app, Day Ahead, for the launch day of the Apple Vision Pro, and their vision for the future of everyday spatial computing experiences.

Care is often seen as a personal value or a soft add-on—but what if it’s actually the missing infrastructure in how we design systems? From digital services to frontline delivery, many systems fail not because they’re broken, but because they were never built to hold the full weight of human need. In this talk, Lena introduces Soft Power—a way of seeing care not as sentiment, but as infrastructure: an invisible layer that shapes how people experience safety, trust, and belonging.

Drawing from her work across tech, government, and social sectors—as well as her own lived experience as a carer—she’ll explore why care is central to sustainable design, and how we can make it visible and intentional. The talk will introduce a framework for designing the Infrastructure of Care across four dimensions—relational, temporal, boundary, and integrative—and show how these can be embedded into services, experiences, and systems at every level.. You’ll walk away with a fresh lens for diagnosing service breakdowns, language to make care strategic, and tools to design more human, resilient systems.