The DesignUp26 Schedule

Most productivity systems assume we're rational — that if we plan well, we'll follow through. But creative work is emotional and identity-linked; execution is shaped less by time than by resistance, overwhelm, self-doubt, and pressure. This workshop explores why traditional time management falls short, why we avoid certain tasks, and how to move through emotional resistance to actually get more done — through exercises that decode the layers behind our tasks, identify patterns of avoidance, and build small, consistent follow-through loops, including a gentle start ritual to overcome inertia.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• Deeper self-awareness around your own productivity patterns
• Practical "what to do when…" tools for overwhelm and overload
• A start ritual to build momentum and reconnect daily work with long-term goals

Careers are rarely linear anymore. Titles blur, paths zigzag, pauses happen — yet we still describe growth as tidy timelines and ladders. Cartography offers an alternative: a method for making complex realities readable, by selecting, abstracting, prioritising, and deciding what to leave out. In this hands-on session, participants apply cartographic principles to their own careers, using illustration, text, and diagramming to build a personal career map — literal or abstract — treating detours and pauses as terrain, not deviations. Analogue materials are provided; digital devices welcome.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A framework — cartography — for making sense of a nonlinear career
• Hands-on practice turning experience into a visual map
• A shared space to reflect on how different maps tell different stories

This is your opportunity to break through from 2D to 3D, to leverage natural interaction techniques, and prepare yourself for the future of design. Moving beyond the flat glass rectangle means designing for a world where we interact with our eyes, our hands, and our voice — without the constraints of current computing devices. Screens can take different shapes and sizes, live in different spaces around us, and 3D objects can enhance embodied learning. This roughly three-hour workshop leads participants through activities to understand the capabilities of spatial computing devices and best-practice examples for designing within them.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• An understanding of the capabilities of spatial computing devices
• Best-practice examples for designing natural, embodied interactions
• Ways to solve customer needs and behaviours in new, spatial ways

Play is the state where humans are most open, most creative, most willing to take the risks that produce something genuinely new — which is everything design thinking asks of us. So why is play restricted to a single ideation session, instead of running through every step of the process? This workshop introduces Play Thinking: a structured way to build play into design thinking end to end, not treat it as a warm-up exercise.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A new perspective on design thinking, built around play
• Practical tools for introducing play into every stage of the process
• Real-world examples of Play Thinking applied inside organisations

AI has collapsed the cost of making — fifty variations, twenty copy options, a working prototype in minutes. When production is instant, the scarce skill is no longer "can you make it?" but "can you tell what's good and defend why?" This workshop treats taste not as arbitrary preference but as a practisable skill: recognising quality, navigating ambiguity, making defensible decisions in context. Small mixed groups work a real AI design brief, argue their choices out loud, critique each other's work through structured lenses, and close by co-authoring principles the room takes home.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A framework for evaluating AI product decisions: "does it work?" vs. "does it wow?"
• Confidence making decisions in ambiguous, multiple-solution situations
• A weekly practice for sharpening creative judgment

You have an idea, a product, a point of view — so what? Being good at what you do is no longer enough; in a world competing fiercely for attention, you have to make people notice, understand, remember, and ultimately care. This immersive workshop explores how storytelling transforms the way we communicate ideas, products, experiences, and ourselves. Over three and a half hours, participants experiment, collaborate, and put their own ideas through creative tests — looking at why some ideas grab us instantly while others vanish, and how the same thought becomes more powerful told differently. Expect stories, surprises, hands-on challenges, plenty of debate, and a final test of your ability to make a room full of people care.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A practical understanding of what makes communication cut through the noise
• Hands-on experience reshaping your own idea until it lands
• A sharper instinct for answering the question that always comes next: "So what?"

In this beginner friendly workshop, you will learn how to use AI to amplify, augment or even automate your design process. Beyond the technical setup, we will unpack the evolving identity of the designer and discuss how you can set yourself apart in this new era. Whether you're new to leveraging AI across your design process or have already been using agents & skills, you'll learn something new!

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• Hands-on AI Prototyping — build, iterate, and deploy functional prototypes from scratch.
• Navigating Creative Control to avoid the "generic AI" look using Agentic Skills
• Architecting Scalable Workflows by creating customised AI skills & purpose-built mini-apps, for a personalised design toolkit.

AI agents are arriving on both sides of your business: as machine customers at your door, and as capability inside your walls. Most organisations are staring at one side. This half-day session designs both as a single system, not two separate problems. Built for executive and senior leadership teams across commercial, digital, product, customer, technology, and strategy, it runs as a single leadership team or mixed cohort of 12–40, in person, working at tables — the people who will own where agentic capability lands, and answer for it when it acts.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A single framework for designing both sides of the agentic economy together
• Clarity on where agentic capability should land, and who owns that decision
• A shared mental model your leadership team can act on immediately

Most deathbed tales are stories of regret. Rather than add to that pile of "I wish I had's," this session uses imagination to build a speculative reality — a past, a future — that helps process the parts of the self that never found expression. That led to a rabbit hole of self-portraiture: using the intersection of AI and traditional art to redraw the self, generating self-portraits of a missed childhood and translating them onto canvas — because regrets sometimes make the best prompts.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• Using art as therapy — creation as a path to freedom from the inner voice
• Treating emotion as valuable — introspection as a prompt for generative tools
• A set of personal self-portraits spanning photography, drawing, and generative art

Most designers are brilliant at making products people love — but stumble when it's time to price their own work. This masterclass dismantles the guesswork: a repeatable breakdown model for scoping any UX project, from discovery sprints to full-scale product design; fluency in CapEx and OpEx so no overhead goes unaccounted for; and tools to protect profitability, including scope clauses, discovery pricing, and go/no-go deal criteria. Built for design entrepreneurs, mid-level practitioners, and strategists, whether pitching a first freelance project or scaling a consultancy.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A repeatable effort-estimation framework for any UX project
• A full cost model covering CapEx and OpEx
• Margin-discipline tools — scope clauses, discovery pricing, go/no-go criteria

AI can now help you make products, interfaces, and experiences that look great and work beautifully, but can it make you feel something? In this hands-on workshop, you'll explore experience familiar interactions, unpack what makes them feel the way they do, then take on a challenge: you'll be given a feeling and an interaction, and asked to design one into the other. Using a simple Feel, Frame, Compose & Test canvas, you'll turn emotional intent into an experience and put it to the ultimate test: did people actually feel what you intended?

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• A practical framework for turning a desired feeling into deliberate design choices
• Hands-on practice designing experiences beyond usability and aesthetics
• A new lens for understanding the distinctly human role of emotion, judgement, and creativity in the age of AI

Letterpress is one of the oldest forms of relief printing, dating back to the 15th century — a meticulous, analogue process first used by Gutenberg to print the world's earliest books and newspapers. Its uniqueness hasn't faded: the look and feel of a hand-crafted finish, the beauty and dimension a physically impressed letter brings to a page, is something no digital process has replicated. This workshop takes attendees hands-on into the process itself — setting type, inking, and pulling a print — with the precision the craft has always demanded.

Top 3 takeaways from this session

• Hands-on experience with genuine letterpress printing
• A grounding in the history of printing and why the technology mattered
• An understanding of the precise, manual work behind traditional letterpress

Ten years in, DesignUp26 opens its big stage — at a crossroads between AI and craft, speed and taste. A look back at a decade, and a grand welcome for the decade to come.

Designers and social sector leaders are working inside a contract they didn't write — one that's rapidly being rewritten around them. A case for becoming intentional authors of what comes next, before someone else does.

A weekend, no engineering background, and no team — yet a live platform now getting garbage cleared across Bengaluru. What happens when a designer stops waiting for permission and builds for a citizen instead of a customer.

TBA

GDP was designed in 1934 for a world of factories, not forests — and we're still navigating with that map. A case for redesigning how we measure economy, society, and environment together.

How Atlassian has rethought the way it actually practices design in the AI era — the challenges, the opportunities, and what it means for staying relevant, valued, and trusted with customers.

The DesignUp Futures Challenge asks young designers to name a job title that doesn't exist yet, set in 2036, and build a world around it. Winners are awarded on stage.

A breezy look inside a decade of motion design built on one ethos: playful, handcrafted, unique. From a chance meeting at RISD to work that keeps them excited about the screen's future.

A print-only magazine built as a Trojan horse — using Bangalore's identity, water, games, and music to pull readers from scrolling alone to gathering around the city's own stories, issue by issue.

How a limited-edition, collector's publication — sitting between literary anthology and immersive art object — became an exercise in pushing print technology, interpretation, and thoughtfulness to their edges. Here's how it happened.

After years of designing and handing off to engineering, a designer decides to build something himself out of pure panic. The story of BlrBloom, and what shipping solo does to a design identity.

Jay Dutta reflects on ten years of building DesignUp community-led, from the ground up, and how much design itself has changed since — with more change, more community, still ahead.

Real-time lessons from Rubrik's own design evolution — on what it actually takes to stay relevant as tools democratize execution, and the one superpower that might future-proof your career.

Two decades of putting Indian characters on screen — from micro-shorts for global platforms to a self-funded feature that ran nine weeks in cinemas. A look at telling stories for his own people.

An intimate account of a personal journey — the stumbles, detours, and unexpected turns — and what a life spent reviving lost art forms and inventing new ones has taught him along the way.

A quick look back at everything the day brought — the talks, the moments that landed. A preview of what's ahead tomorrow, before the evening opens up for drinks.

Day two of the Decade begins. Fresh energy, fresh talks, and more of the crossroads still ahead of us. Let's pick up right where yesterday left off.

UX has survived the web, mobile, and lean/agile — each first arriving as a threat before becoming an opportunity. A look through decades of archives at the pattern behind AI's arrival now.

AI learns from every line designers refuse to compromise on. A raw look at holding the standard from zero, with no data and no precedent, when everyone else is ready to ship.

Since the 1960s, computing has meant staring at flat glass rectangles. Spatial computing changes that — letting digital content live as 3D objects in our physical world, shared with people near and far.

In a world where brands live beyond the screen, what does a brand actually sound like? An ear-opening look at sonic identity, memory, and emotion, and how sound builds recognition.

Every good story pivots — plot twists, new chapters, characters who change course. This talk reframes career shifts the same way: not detours from the plan, but what makes the story richer and wiser.

A data-driven view can build our picture of India — or quietly undo it. Why the numbers we choose to look at, and the ones we don't, shape every design decision we make.

Social media shows us what people want the world to see. This talk goes further — into dozens of dream journals collected over weeks, hunting for the themes India's collective unconscious is really processing.

What happens after the research produces a sharp insight? Stories from humanitarian systems on what it actually takes to stay with a solution once it meets reality — and what empathy really demands.

A moment to recognise the partners who make DesignUp possible. Trophies presented live on stage, celebrating the sponsors whose support turns a decade of ideas into a decade of impact.

A look at building tech experiences that support the body, mind, and spirit of the people inside them — not just their attention.

What do we preserve, what do we question, and what do we dare to change in a familiar letterform before we stop recognising it? A journey through Devanagari type, tradition, and experimentation — and eventually, some tortellini.

A final look back at the Decade — the talks, the ideas, the crossroads we walked into together. Gratitude for everyone who made it happen, and a send-off until next year.