2026 SEGD Xlab Returns to New York

May 27, 2026

Cybelle Jones

SEGD Xlab 2026 brings the experience design community to New York City on July 22–23. Featuring industry speakers, hands-on workshops, and studio tours, the two-day gathering explores how designers can create meaningful, human-centered experiences in an era of AI, noise, and accelerating technology.

Xlab has always had a following. Consistently, it delivers something harder to find: a room full of people who care deeply about making things that matter, and two days designed to remind them why. Year after year, experience designers, studios, and thinkers who make up this community come back because Xlab leans into experimentation and meaningful connection in ways that most gatherings don’t. That reputation was earned slowly, and it shapes everything about how we build the program.

This July, Xlab comes to New York and Brooklyn with its most intentional program yet.

What We’re Exploring

On joy, care, and making things that matter when everything is a lot.

The world is noisier than it has ever been. AI generates faster than we can process. Spectacle has become ambient, something to scroll past rather than stop for. And yet the designers in this community keep doing something radical: asking people to slow down and feel something real.

Not reaction. Not engagement metrics. Feeling.

2026 Xlab is a two-day experiment in that act: how we design for it, how we hold onto it, and why it matters more right now than it ever has. We are using increasingly powerful tools to make increasingly human things. There is something surreal about that. Something worth contemplating, working through, and debating together.

This is not a symposium about the state of the world, though the state of the world is in the room with us. It is a gathering about what happens when experience designers, people who work at the intersection of craft, technology, and human emotion, decide to make meaning on purpose, in a moment when that really takes effort.

The Two Days

Day One, July 22

Takes Xlab into Manhattan for workshops, studio tours, and the kind of access that only New York makes possible. We’ll move through spaces, studios, and conversations that set the stage for what’s coming: getting our hands into the work, meeting the community, seeing what designers in this city are building. The day closes with an opening reception that is a chance to arrive, settle in, and remember why this group is worth showing up for. More tours and social events are being added and will be announced soon.

Day Two, July 23

Brings the full symposium to BRIC in Downtown Brooklyn.

• Morning: The Weight – We arrive carrying everything the moment is asking of us. We name it. We don’t look away from it. This is where the day opens and where the room gets honest about what it’s brought through the door.
• Midday: The Counter-Move – What does slowness ask of us? What does it look like to use technology in service of feeling rather than stimulation? We’ll hear from designers whose work moves in the opposite direction from noise and who invite us to consider what that takes.
• Afternoon: The Experiment – Xlab has always been a place to explore. We will play with more ideas of experimentation and connection based on the space and time that we work in now. We hope to share a brief that is unexpected and deliberately constrained. The only requirement is to do it together.
• Close: Joy as Practice – Not joy as escape. Joy as resistance. A closing that names what it still means to love this work and sends the room back out into the world with something refilled.

The Venue

The symposium takes place at BRIC, a 45-year-old arts and media institution in Downtown Brooklyn whose entire existence is an argument for what Xlab is trying to say. BRIC is a creative catalyst for community. It presents and incubates artists, runs Brooklyn’s public access television channel, hosts Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park, and has spent four decades centralizing diverse voices that take risks and drive culture forward.

Hold Your Spot

Xlab is where SEGD goes to reconnect: to experiment, to make things that don’t fully work yet, to ask the questions out loud that usually only get asked in the car on the way home from a project. It is built for the designer who still gets moved by a well-made thing, for the studio figuring out how to hold onto craft while everything accelerates, and for all of us who have been quietly wondering whether joy is still available to us in our work.

Spots are limited, and this community fills them fast. Register now, and stay tuned for more tour announcements, social events, and programming details coming soon.

New York. July 22 and 23. We’ll see you there.