What Will the Future of UX Actually Look Like? An Interview with Shift UX Curator, Stefanie Hutka

Stefanie Hutka is a design researcher, educator at UC Berkeley, and one of the curators behind Shift UX 2026, where she’s leading the human-centered tooling pillar. She’s also the author of an upcoming book with Rosenfeld Media, What Your Machines Should Do: The Science and Strategy of Human-Centered Automation. We sat down with her to ask this conference is needed now — and what’s actually at stake if the field doesn’t get the shift right.

Why does UX need a conference like this right now?

AI is rewriting the product development playbook, and that leaves UX practitioners facing questions the field hasn’t had to answer before. How do you design for systems that aren’t deterministic? What does it mean to move from playing one instrument in the orchestra to conducting it, as more of the artifacts we used to create by hand get delegated to AI? And as the lines between product, engineering, and design keep blurring, what’s left that’s distinctly ours?

Shift UX exists to help practitioners work through exactly that — to author their own chapter in this new playbook, and to steer these powerful systems in ways that extend human capability instead of replacing it.

Is UX actually dead?

No, but a lot of our old titles might be. The foundational skills UX practitioners bring — framing and reframing problems, prototyping, research — are more important now than ever. What’s shifting is the shape of the roles built around those skills. The healthier question isn’t “will the title UX researcher still exist in two years,” it’s “what are the underlying skills, and how do we adapt them for what’s coming.”

What’s your pillar about, and why does it matter right now?

My pillar is human-centered tooling, and it really has two sides. There’s the tooling we use to do UX work (our design and research tools) and the tooling we help build for others. Either way, the tools we use are inseparable from craft. What we choose to delegate to a machine shapes what skills we actually keep practicing.

On the build side, the challenge is designing tools that help people express their intent — and expand their thinking and judgment, rather than erode it. That’s the exact territory my upcoming book digs into. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as a design researcher building creative tools, so I’ve lived both sides of this pillar myself.

Who should attend, even if their title has nothing to do with UX?

Anyone whose job involves helping build products people love. Product designers and researchers are the obvious fit, but this is just as relevant for product managers, engineers, product marketers, salespeople, and anyone thinking about what makes an experience good and how that translates into value for customers.

There’s also a whole other audience I think about a lot as an educator: I teach UX at UC Berkeley, mostly to professional master’s students headed into industry. Anyone with a stake in the future of design education (academic directors, instructors, professors) should find real value here too.

Do you have a story that captures why the work matters more than the title?

My own career, honestly. I’ve always operated with a kind of UX Swiss army knife skill set, living in the liminal space between academic and applied research. That background let me play in a lot of spaces that weren’t technically in my job description — some days research, some days product strategy or prototyping. In my consulting work today, I’ve effectively moonlighted as a product marketer and a business development specialist, depending on the client. The underlying skill set stays the same; it just adapts to whatever the application calls for.

I see the same pattern in my Berkeley classroom. My Introduction to UX Design course reliably pulls in a mix of product managers, designers, and researchers — different backgrounds, all converging on UX as the unifying thread. The titles vary. The underlying skills don’t.

What worries you if the field doesn’t make this shift well?

A few things. First, I think we’ll keep seeing tools designed to invite cognitive offloading rather than cognitive expansion — the kind of metacognitive support that helps you think about your own thinking, make new connections, generate real knowledge. Right now, a lot of knowledge work happens through a plain prompt box, which is a strangely dated interface for what these systems can do, and it nudges people to treat generative AI as an oracle rather than a collaborator. If the people with the skills to elevate that interaction aren’t empowered to do so, I think we risk an erosion of critical thinking at a societal scale — more “thought-shaped objects” than anything genuinely original.

Second, I worry about efficiency getting prioritized over effectiveness. UX as a discipline has traditionally been the one asking “is this actually a good experience,” not just “is this fast.” If we don’t navigate this shift deliberately, that focus on effectiveness could get swept aside.

Third — and this is a bit further out — I think a lot of us are focused on agentic workflows and generative AI, but physical AI and robotics are coming up fast behind them. A robot that isn’t designed to fit into someone’s actual context, their home, their routines, isn’t automatically a good product just because it’s capable. Do we want a humanoid robot standing in the corner of the living room with its arms crossed when it’s not in use? Or something that actually integrates into the environment — the way Frog’s robot gnome concept reads more like a friendly coat rack than a machine. Getting this right means thinking in systems: not just LLMs, but models of governance, of integration, of how information moves through people’s lives.

That’s really the case for Shift UX. The shift is coming either way. The question is whether the people best equipped to shape it well are the ones doing the shaping.

Stef Hutka is curating the human-centered tooling pillar at Shift UX 2026, taking place September 23–25 in New York City and live online. Learn more and register.