2026 EXP Poster Gallery
Explore the EXP Poster Gallery! This page includes all of the 2026 EXP Poster Challenge submissions that reflect the 2026 SEGD Conference theme “Meet Me in the Middle.”
Meet Me in the Middle
As an extension of this year’s conference theme, we invited SEGD’s Emerging Experiential Professionals to bring their voices to the conversation through design. “Meet Me in the Middle” is more than a theme. It is an invitation, a philosophy, and a provocation.
Experience designers have always worked in the middle: between client vision and user need, the built environment and the human spirit, data and story, and the world as it is and the world as it should be. This year’s Poster Challenge asked emerging designers to explore what meeting in the middle means to them, whether geographic, collaborative, social, emotional, or something entirely their own.
The works in this gallery explore convergence and division, tension and connection, movement and meaning. Together, they consider how design can hold complexity, bridge difference, shift stories, and create experiences that people feel, remember, and carry forward.
The middle is not a compromise.
The middle is where meaning is made.
We invite you to explore the gallery and discover how the next generation of experience designers is meeting us in the middle.
Astrid Hoglund
To me, the theme “Meet in the Middle” means that we can all come together in one place and at one moment. We each have different origins, perspectives, and experiences, bringing vibrancy and value to our conversations and designs. This poster invites you to rotate it, read its varying messages, and view it from different perspectives. It encourages us to recognize that everyone comes from a different place, and that each perspective has its own value.
The photograph in the poster was taken with a Diana F+ film camera using a splitzer lens, which allows exposures taken at different times and locations to be layered and combined. This process acts as a representation of our convergence as a design community, bringing together distinct moments into a single composition.
Brady Rudisill
Despite our differences in background, perspective, and experience, humans have always found ways to connect across distance. Power lines have become an icon of the “middle of nowhere”—a place that feels distant and disconnected—yet they overcome that distance by carrying an invisible current between points. In much the same way, communication, collaboration, and the design process create a network between people, transforming different ideas and perspectives into something shared. Illustrated across an abstracted map representing the complex paths we navigate, the power lines become a simple allegory for connection: even when common ground feels far away, the lines that connect us may be closer than we think.
Charisma Stidham
My poster explores the front porch as a physical and symbolic place to “meet in the middle.” Existing between the private home and the public world, the porch acts as a liminal space where conversation, imagination, and community can flourish. Inspired by the idea that the porch is “the world right outside” where people can “stretch the limits of desire and the imagination,” this work celebrates the shared experiences and connections that transform spaces into meaningful places. Through the familiar architecture of the porch, the design reflects how community is built at the threshold between people, perspectives, and possibilities.
Emily Balton
For me, the middle is a messy place where we go as creatives to roll up our sleeves and get the real work done. It’s where I invite my students, my clients, and my community to come together and let go of the safe or most expected answers we think are right and then reach into the void for a new one. We don’t always get to enter these spaces, but we can protect what they embody: a daring sense of curiosity in our work.
The question I bring to that space is always the same: what if we? What if we tried this? What if we pushed it further? It is a question that presses against the edge of what we already know, and expanding past our boundaries is where innovation and growth lie.
As an educator, I ask my students to meet me in the middle, to trust me, and to walk this path of curiosity and courage with me. But the goal is not for them to simply follow, it’s for every student in the room to become someone their peers and community will look to for clarity amid chaos. Meeting in the middle is a step toward that.
Fika Khoirun Nisa
Poster Title: The Shape of Together
The middle is not an empty space between us, it is the place we create together. Every hand arrives carrying its own identity, yet none is enough on its own. As the pieces connect, diversity transforms into belonging, and separate stories become a shared future. Inclusion is not found in sameness, but in the courage to build something larger than ourselves.
Goyen Chen
Poster Title: Words of Love
Words of Love transforms the familiar symbol of a speech bubble through a three-step paper-folding process, gradually unfolding it into the shape of a heart. The transformation suggests that words can open possibilities for understanding, empathy, and connection. In the space between speaking and understanding, dialogue becomes love.
Jack Fu
Poster Title: Tropical Education
The banana leaf represents the rainforest, which symbolizes pristine, undeveloped nature and underdeveloped education. Feathers, used for writing in ancient Europe, represent education here. The combination of feathers and banana leaves symbolizes equality in children’s education; education should reach every corner, even children in the rainforest can receive it. The feathers, coming from birds, represent peace.
Green represents the rainforest and health and peace, while lemon yellow symbolizes the light of knowledge reaching every corner of the world.
Jie-Fei Yang
Poster Title: Technology & AI for Peace
My poster is about the new possibilities and potentials that new technology can bring to our future.
The poster envisions the “digital self” as a seed in the garden of algorithms, where nature and technology coexist. It reflects on AI’s power- rooted in human values to connect, heal, and inspire. As gardeners of the future, we embrace change and cultivate identities that grow and transform toward a more abundant and peaceful world.
Katarzyna Panek
Poster Title: Caught in the Middle
The poster presents the idea of being caught between two opposing forces. The figure in the centre represents the effort required to maintain balance and find a place between extremes.
Keith Khan
(no description received)
Lieh-Hsiang Tung
Poster Title: Education Builds the Bridge
Education builds a bridge across the gaps created by prejudice, ignorance, and division. Responding to “Meet Me in the Middle,” this work transforms a pen nib into a visual metaphor: its air hole becomes a balloon, while a hand holds the string, symbolizing education as a force that carries hope beyond limitation. The bridge connects different perspectives, creating a space where knowledge meets understanding, empathy crosses boundaries, and dialogue becomes possible. Here, the “middle” is not a compromise, but the bridge itself—a shared space where differences meet, understanding begins, and new possibilities emerge.
Lindsey Washburn
We find meaning in design when we can find the gap and fill it when we can slip between the brief and make connections with pieces of our lives, those are where the best ideas come to life, even if it appears impossible at first.
Lou Chuang
Poster Title: Whatever one sows, one will also reap.
Planting a tree is not only an act of caring for the environment, but also a way of planting hope for oneself. It represents faith in growth, renewal, and the future. Each tree symbolizes a commitment to life and a belief in a better tomorrow.
Maria Corredor-Morales
The concept of virtue is between the excess and deficiency for Aristotle. However, that middle point is not mathematically constant. It is relative to us and to the circumstances. Through our phronesis, or practical wisdom, we discover what the middle measure should be. Everything becomes our lesson, and each lesson shapes who we are as well as our actions.
The graphic representation of the concept means that each virtue is located between its respective excess and deficiency; However, it does not stay mathematically centered between them. It moves in the way the middle point, which we have to find, is relative to us, to the circumstances, and to our experience-based wisdom.
All these virtues together make up the human being : ME. The human figure becomes a representation of a person who is created through their experience and decisions and the search for the personal middle.
And that is ME after all that shifting middle points.
So, meet ME in the middle.
María Inés Yáñez
My concept is based on the idea of transformation and the space in between. Rather than seeing “the middle” as simply a physical point between two places, I interpreted it as the moment of change: the space where something is no longer what it was, but has not yet fully become what it will be. The visual development of the poster was inspired by the process of metamorphosis. I explored how forms transform, stretch, connect, separate, and evolve, using these transitions as the foundation for constructing the letters MMITM. The typography itself becomes part of the narrative: each letter emerges through a process of transformation, allowing the final effect to communicate movement and change while remaining within a static composition.
Through this approach, I wanted the poster to capture the idea that the most meaningful part of a journey is not always the beginning or the end, but what happens in between.
Molly Berger
My research ultimately narrowed to the intrigue of moiré patterns. Moiré occurs when complex visual systems such as grids, pixels, and dot matrices overlap with slight differences in alignment and create a pattern that is completely new. Historically, analogue CMYK printing practices endeavored to avoid these, or aligned just so to create a rosette pattern. I was fascinated by this convergence, a literal visual representation of the ways complex systems can meet and achieve something that would be impossible without cooperation and collaboration. And with designers at the helm, the meeting point becomes a purposeful playground for meaning-making.
Emphasizing the designers role, my visual development process was relaxed and exploratory – prototyping, experimentation, and pure taste guided the final visuals, which to some degree came together by chance. There are hundreds of visual variations of this poster that would have remained essentially the same poster.
Hannah Arendt described the table as the object that both relates and separates the people gathered around it – a literal middle. Moiré takes its name from watered silk, and textiles themselves are nothing but meeting points. I wanted the table woven into the surface, not set on top of it. I also used SEGD as a visual element to both nod to the inspiration it’s provided to my journey, and to express how the community can act as a grounding force amidst all the chaos.”
Nathanael Komline
In preparation for this design, I spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of compromise and cooperation. Kansas City is located at the convergence of two rivers, which combine and join a third river, which then joins the ocean. None of these rivers are diminished by joining the other, they become part of something greater. This seemed an apt metaphor for the nature of cooperation, something fruitful to meditate on in divided times.
Olena Sarzhenko
(no description received)
Qin Yibiao
Poster Title: The Trumpet
(no description received)
Rebecca Stone
The design is a typographic exploration of forms literally “meeting in the middle.” Kansas City, or “The Heartland” is known for its central location and the meeting of two states in one city, which further informed this design’s overlapping circles. The color palette was inspired by the city’s red brick architecture, complemented by color selections that would pop off the background. The overall approach is minimal, balanced with hints of texture from the newsprint effect on the background gradient and an overall grain effect.
Shao-Wei Chuang
Poster Title: Woven in Difference
Woven in Difference visualizes diverse voices crossing paths and meeting in a shared space. Rather than erasing differences, each voice retains its identity while becoming part of a larger whole. The work reflects the idea that meeting in the middle is not about becoming the same, but about creating meaning through connection.
Wenjie Huo
Poster Title: Choose
Choose your mood. Don’t let them choose you.
Wiktoria Głowacka
For this poster, I wanted to explore the “middle” not as a compromise, but as the intricate convergence of our inner worlds. Instead of relying on literal depictions of emotions, I approached this through the lens of digital technology – using overlapping primary CMYK/print-screen structures as a metaphor for human complexity.
Just like overlapping channels of color create a richer spectrum, our personal “selves” are a hybrid mixture of joy, frustration, and melancholy. As a technology-driven artist, I believe this digital, glitch-infused framework is the most honest way to visualize how we collide, integrate, and find meaning in the spaces between.
Yasna Saraabi
People are constantly striving to prove their own points of view, pushing their beliefs, and often viewing conversations merely as a battleground to assert their own truth. This poster visualizes that struggle— represented by two characters carrying contrasting red and blue speech bubbles, laboring up opposite sides of a mountain.
However, in the midst of all these contradictions and the exhausting effort to be ‘right,’ they inevitably reach a shared intersection at the summit. It is precisely at this point of convergence—creating a unified purple space—that the true meaning of their effort is revealed. The poster illustrates that ‘the middle’ is not a compromise or a surrender of beliefs, but rather the profound moment where our shared struggles intersect to create new, unified meaning.
Zifan Yang
The past and future stand as two illusory opposing poles. Only the present, situated squarely in the middle, serves as the sole space where all things converge and genuine meaning takes root.