Meet the curators for Shift UX 2026

If you’re thinking about what it means to practice UX in a moment when roles, tools, and titles are all in flux, Shift 2026 is the place to work through those questions. Taking place September 23-25, 2026 in New York City and live online, our curators bring together practitioners who are actively redefining what UX work looks like, not just theorizing about it.

Together, we will explore:

• How UX practitioners are stepping up as champions of ethics inside their organizations, not just their designs.
• The human side of the work — the people skills that matter as much as any framework or tool.
• What happens as digital and physical design increasingly merge into a single practice.
• First-hand accounts of navigating blurring roles, and what that means for how teams actually get work done.
• Honest reflections on doing good UX work inside complex, distributed organizations — and what still gets in the way.

Our curators include Abby Covert on systems-level thinking, Jemma Ahmed on research as strategy, Stefanie Hutka on human-centered tooling, and Jon Fukuda on operations as orchestration.