UX Connect Aarhus 2022

Let’s explore sustainable design together

The conference featured 2 packed days with a carefully curated mixture of talks, workshops, activities and world class facilitators, thought-provokers, speakers and session leads.

Program

Tuesday, June 14

8:30 - 9:30: Breakfast and registration

9:30 - 9:45: Welcome & Opening

by our host Jens Hofman, Vertica and our moderator Janus Boye, Boye & Co

The Sustainable Web Manifesto calls for an internet that is clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient. However, today’s internet embodies few of these principles. How can UX designers effectively incorporate ethics, responsibility, and sustainability principles into their day-to-day practices to design a better internet?

In this session, Tim Frick, author of Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services, will explore a handful of principles that designers can use to guide digital product and service design processes. Specific topics include:

• Core digital responsibility principles

• How to discuss digital sustainability with clients

• Responsible design leadership

• Onboarding team members

• Measuring success

• Looking ahead: supporting responsible tech legislation

This session will also cover tools and resources that you can use to incorporate these principles into common UX design practices.

10.30 - 11:00 Coffee & networking

At Arla we take sustainability quite seriously. From the cows poop used as biofuel, to heating up farmers houses by leading the heat from the ‘cooling down milk process’ back as energy, reduced layers of the milk cartons and much, much more.

But what about all our digital solutions? What about some of our poorly designed solutions or ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions that not only create frustration among our end users but also generates an absurd amount of data.

We – the UX team have a suggestion to what we can do to (at least) start talking about this. In this session I will share our thoughts with you, my hope is that you will help me with some sparring, push back and inspiration on how to mature our ideas even more. And hey! Maybe you will find it inspiring too.

Thinking about sustainability in the context of UX, we often talk about design ethics, social responsibility and designing for the good and wellbeing of our users.

In this session, Janne will showcase LEGO® Life and demonstrate how LEGO created an experience for kids with kids wellbeing in mind, but also the dilemmas we went thought in the journey to create a safe and inclusive platform.

12:30 - 13.30 Lunch

In a post-pandemic era, the role of ecomm has never been more clear. But commerce can only thrive in the long term if our planet thrives, too.

With nearly 2 million merchants now operating on our platform, Shopify’s commitments to sustainability span from offsetting order delivery emissions to supporting climate entrepreneurship. 

While these tangible, eco-centric activities are enabling a more sustainable future on a macro level, our daily decisions across product also have a meaningful impact on our planet. Things like performance, accessibility, and usability are top of mind across design and development in the solutions we create.

In this talk, Katie will share how Shopify considers sustainability, from large scale initiatives to mission-driven products. She’ll also walk through some of the UX considerations that help individual contributors deliver energy-efficient digital products. She’ll share some top-of-mind challenges, too, and open it up for a discussion on how we can be more proactive about facilitating sustainable decisions from our users.

14.30 - 15.00 Coffee & networking

In 2020, Coop Denmark launched the feature Your Climate Footprint in their loyalty app. That made Coop one of the first in the Danish retail market to give their customers insight into the carbon footprint of their actual purchasing habits. Two years have passed since the first launch, and oh, my, have we learned!

Together with you, we want to share, reflect and discuss; what we have discovered, what our challenges are, where we go from here and much more.

Be ready to take a deep dive into a real case and help us shed light on how we can use digital to make purchasing habits more digital.

As UX designers we put the user into the center of our work. This is how we define our job: creating outstanding experiences for the users, but, in these times we have to take responsibility for more than just the users.

As the great polar explorer Robert Swan once said:

„The biggest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.“

But what can we as UX Designers do to drive sustainability and make our work more sustainable? What does Sustainable UX even mean?

To answer these questions a group of designers created the non-profit initiative „SUX - The Sustainable UX Playbook“. SUX is a community with more than 1000 designers from all over the world sharing ideas as well as an active workshop space with more than 100 people actively working on ideas how to drive sustainability. Thorsten will give you an overview about Sustainable UX and the aspects of Sustainability in UX. And he will end with an overview about our initiative SUX, where we are at and where we are going.

16.30 - 17.00 Coffee & networking

17.00 - 18.00 Sustainability Idol 2022

Help crown the “2022 Sustainability Idol” in a fast-paced, entertaining set of competitive demos. Selected contestants will present 6-minute demos showing how they achieve sustainability. If you prefer succinct, comparative presentations to long-winded demonstrations, this is the session for you. An expert panel of judges will offer pithy commentary, but the best part is: you vote for the winner!

Contestants:
* Grace de Athayde, Sr. Manager Digital Product Design at LEGO
* Henning Nielsen, Senior UX Consultant at Vertica
* Karina Kvamm, User Experience Designers at LOBYCO
* James Cannings, Chief Sustainability Officer at MSQ
* Tim Frick, CEO of Mightybytes
* Troels Heiberg Frandsen, Plotterista-in-Chief at Plotteriet

Judges:
* Cecilie Steentoft, Senior Consultant - Digital Strategy and User Experience at Novicell
* Kristina Larsen, User Experience Specialist at VIA University College
* Thorsten Jonas, founder of the The Sustainable UX Playbook

18.30 - 22:00 Social event

Wednesday, June 15

6:30 Morning Run

We meet in front of Vertica for a relaxed 25 minute run

8:30 - 9:30 Breakfast and networking

9:30 - 9.45: Morning welcome

Sustainability is on everyone's lips - and that includes the travel industry where the transition to a more conscious behavior and operation reveals many paradoxes and challenges.

During this session, Stine will be giving a general introduction to the rapidly changing tourism landscape, what sustainability means for tourism, and how a Visit-organisation like Visit Greenland can nudge both tourists, tourism companies, and locals into a more sustainable behavior.

10.45 - 11.00 Coffee & networking

As designers, we are skilled at making ideas come alive in tangible solutions that solve problems and meet people’s need. With a looming climate crises and growing global inequality, it is time that we broaden our human-centred design toolbox and start using a humanity-centred design approach. We need to design solutions that don’t just meet the needs of narrow target groups here and now - but also take the needs of the wider society, future generations, ecosystems and climate into account.

This workshop offers insight and hands-on exercises for designing for sustainability, using elements from systems thinking and behavioural design. You’ll be able to bring the tools straight into your current design project to infuse a sustainability perspective - or let them inspire you to use your design superpowers to develop new ideas and solutions, that help shape a future that works for all.

12.30 - 13.30 Lunch

The internet has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry and it’s rising fast. But with 4.5 billion people making trillions of interactions, no one company’s digital footprint is likely to be a huge component of their total footprint. So why would anyone bother to focus on it?

In this session James will take us through the core benefits for developing lower carbon digital solutions and marketing campaigns as well as presenting some of the tools that teams need to simplify the process of measuring digital footprints, and the skills you need to help your teams to reduce them.

14.30 - 14.45 A small coffee break

14.45 - 15.30: Wrap-up: What did we learn? Next steps…

15:30: Goodbyes and see you next year!