"Clients started asking, what is IBM’s approach to sustainability in our products and services?"

"Adoption is crucial — it’s a social system, so start by building community around the problem."

"Design is a rhetorical statement, an argument for living your life a certain way."

"Hopefulness is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism."

"When someone meets with a financial advisor, they often vet the advice with their own community."

"Accessibility research is really just a part of usability research and doesn’t need to be treated very differently."

"Choose your language carefully; sometimes not using 'sustainability' gets better traction."

"Responsible AI practices and legal reviews at Microsoft saved us from launching dangerous ambiguous features."

"LLMs are always confident, even when they are wrong, making it hard to tell the difference."

"Failure is only the beginning."

"The whole point of trauma-informed work is you don’t have to tell me, so you don’t have to express it the same way I do."

"Sentient designs are collaborative, active, and proactive partners in a journey."

"The first and last parts of research projects—the brief and the synthesis—should be 80 to 90% collaborative."

"The stakes are really high, from disrupting critical infrastructure to AI acting on our behalf."

"White supremacy is the belief system of the superiority of whiteness that can embed itself in algorithms."

"People aren’t thinking about grid intensity during their regular workflows, but we can design to bring awareness."

"The interface becomes a radically adaptive surface, an intelligent canvas that responds to your needs in context."

"Thinking styles are not horoscopes or Myers-Briggs, they’re context-specific patterns within a frame of intent or purpose."

"Engineers don’t like writing more code, so extra work for experimentation can meet resistance unless they see clear learning outcomes."

"This kind of issue—different hospital IT systems not talking—is happening almost every day to patients and doctors."

"We decided with the COP to view our budget as a moral document."

"Redemption means buying back or restoring something to its rightful place, transforming adversity into hope."

"We often forget the systems within ourselves that limit our perspective, even with the best intentions."

"We want to make this humanizing from first principles, not just stuff the humanity back in."

"Contracting officers face severe consequences for deviating from policy, including life in prison, increasing operational risk."

"If services aren’t designed well for temporary disability, people won’t come back when they are well."

"Having service design in your job title is not necessarily an advantage, at least not globally."

"If you asked our partners what service design is, they’d say, I’m not totally sure, but I know that we need it."

"Critical architectural decisions are often made in engineering meetings without service designers; collaboration gaps need closing."

"Complexity is not a barrier to accessibility – even the most complicated games have been made accessible."

"Product teams have done excellent work in their own silos but struggle to sell bundled services."

"Everyone goes through an application process to join the community, which builds trust and ensures a good match."

"Instead of grinding to make those dots connect for the teams, we should focus on creating conditions for connections to happen naturally."

"We moved from designing each application type one at a time to creating a platform for planning experts to build new types themselves."

"Sometimes you have to make something wrong on purpose to learn and improve it with others’ help."

"Participating in key meetings not led by design is the secret sauce to build influence."

"The risk with LLMs is that they invent new categories or start writing Reddit posts instead of just categorizing."

"Calm yourself first; you can’t calm the other person until you’re calm."

"Key Experience Indicators gave us rigor to bring into engineering conversations to make design less vague or fluffy."

"Am I the right person to conduct this research in this culture? That’s a question many companies don’t even ask."

"Community is critical; solo practitioners must seek or create it to thrive and avoid isolation."

"Power framed as possibility opens up what happens when researchers share resources with participants."

"We may have caused some long-term harm—design sprints became a scapegoat for anything that could go wrong."

"Designers deserve support and infrastructure so they can really excel in their work. - Lou Rosenfeld"

"Change is mysterious. We’re stepping into the unknown and need latitude to fail and learn along the way."

"Large companies won’t let AI break the brand they’ve spent billions on."

"Believe people’s lived experiences and actually listen to what people tell us and believe them."

"If you are not participating in our Slack discussions, you're missing out on a huge part of the conference content."

"If you go too quickly changing what you measure, you could be forever missing the important information that tells the story."

"It is overly simple to say designers are scared of AI; the real choice is governance, not fear."

"What does it mean to be a design ops person? We need to keep that question alive."

"It’s about reframing those discussions, adapting to feedback, and rolling out innovations in a way that gets buy-in from our stakeholders."

"The career path is a weighted system where roles emphasize different categories like craft or client."

"David Nicholson is our house scribe, a senior UX designer who brings business analysis skills to UX design."

"Most creative teams are always teetering on the edge of greatness."

"As the delivery driver, my role was connecting the dots, getting briefs, and sometimes saying no to lofty requests."

"Scaling means you move from updating Kanban tickets to doing executive-level status updates and managing portfolio priorities."

"Visibility is the most vital thing for UX leaders to be focused on."

"Measuring impact in design ops has always been a little stormy."

"Working with these tools requires developing different workflows and questioning how we’ve always done things."

"Business intelligence exists in many functions, but design intelligence is often missing."

"Just being transparent when you fear that you lack knowledge and reminding users you’re there to learn helps empower their voice."

"Non-researchers running research can bring their own biases, so support and education are vital to improve research quality."

"The future of AI in design is less reactionary, more data-driven, and contributes to defining business objectives."

"No more time-sucking, energy-depleting time estimation game; we use data-driven models for reliable results."

"I submitted 710 applications and only 7% led to interviews."

"The bigger the impact, the higher the title the message should come from."

"Toxic stress is experiencing too much too fast for too long without healing."

"Job shares can allow two people to share one role, often used when people return from parental leave."

"The arc of the day reflects inspiring stories all the way through ways we can improve our practice based on what we’ve learned."

"Context switching across eight initiatives made my brain explode; prioritization was a huge problem to solve."

"Researchers struggle when tools are frustrating to use that sometimes they accept poor analysis rather than finding better solutions."

"The conversation doesn’t end today. Let’s keep helping each other for weeks, months, maybe even years to come."

"Share everything, own nothing but credit everyone."

"Use prep times and async options in workshops so introverts can think and contribute on their own terms."

"Ask participants about what they need—not about their disability."

"The IT team has been phenomenal in giving us visibility into what the entire tooling ecosystem looks like."

"I often lock a process against changes for one to two months unless a major issue arises."

"Progress, not perfection, is the best approach when learning and implementing accessibility."

"Who was involved in the process, who benefited, and who was harmed—these are critical questions from design justice."

"Every job has to be a climate job, no matter what role you have in a company."

"Interviews are incredible for exploring unknown spaces but watching people at work reveals unseen opportunities."

"Being a gracious host means addressing power differentials and making the space safe for all voices."

"There’s no perfect regenerative business right now, but it’s about if they’re going in the right direction to improve."

"The biggest weapon I bring to work is helping people regulate their emotions so they can listen."

"The AI parses a complicated request, makes a plan, and orchestrates which specialized agents handle the steps."

"Design systems in automotive are some of the coolest I’ve seen because they have to align both the marketing and the in-vehicle user experience."

"If my experiment made front-page news tomorrow, what would the headline be? Would my mother be proud?"

"Democratization is not research anarchy where anybody can talk to any customer for any reason with no oversight."

"AI is both a threat and an opportunity; it’s not really new but it's coming for some of our roles."

"Sustainability is multi-attribute, continuous, temporal, and geographic — it’s not a simple yes or no."

"We distinguish between agents doing internal system tasks and assistants interacting directly with users."

"Sometimes people ignore prior test results and test again, and occasionally they find a positive result."

"Your priorities don’t tell you what to do; your judgment points you in the direction of how to allocate resources and make decisions."

"One of the most profoundly impactful experiments was simply opening links in new tabs to keep users anchored."

"A very large percentage of the project should be focused on evaluation, sometimes 30 to 50 percent of time and budget."

"You can have more than one priority at a time because they might have very different value and urgency profiles."

"Anchoring climate initiatives to established frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals can create organizational momentum."

"This approach is adaptable — the execute step could rewrite markdown or update WordPress or Drupal via APIs."

"We should think of AI as our ancestor encountered fire: managed well it’s a force for good, deployed recklessly it will burn us."