2026 SEGD Xlab New York Speakers + Events

Explore Snøhetta’s experimental retail and wellness concept space housed within a historic SoHo cast-iron building. Designed as a place for testing ideas, prototyping experiences, and exploring new models of engagement, 113 Spring Street brings together architecture, technology, storytelling, and human-centered design under one roof.

Join the team behind the space for a behind-the-scenes look at how experimentation drives innovation and discover how one environment is helping shape the future of experiential design.

Sponsored by McCann Systems

Ashley Lukasik, Founder & CEO, Murmur Ring

Sue Walsh, Senior Advisor on Design, SYPartners

9:15–10:00 am

How do we truly understand this moment in the world? Today, driven by rapid technological disruption, economic precarity, and geopolitical uncertainty, we have reached the end of predictable progress. This shift has brought about an emotional deterioration, leaving many stuck in survival mode and foreclosing our imagination of the future. To recognize the potential of what comes next, we must first believe that something better is possible. Ashley Lukasik and Sue Walsh will discuss how design can foster belief, agency, and hope on a societal level and invite designers to reimagine their role in the world.

Eve Moros Ortega, M.P.A., Senior Director, Lord Cultural Resources

10:00–10:30 am

When history and science themselves are being contested, who holds the story together? Eve Moros Ortega spent years as a filmmaker learning how to find the thread that makes people care. Now, as Senior Director at Lord Cultural Resources, she brings that instinct to the institutions that need it most. Her work spans cultural plans across Rockford, Charlotte, Ulster County, and beyond, as well as strategic plans for organizations including the Noguchi Museum, BRIC, and Aperture. She reflects on why narrative distillation matters more than ever, and why arts and cultural institutions have never had a more vital role to play in how we make meaning together.

Lee-Sean Huang, Co-Executive Director, Learning + Programs, AIGA

11:00–11:30 am

In the summer of 2024, a stranger sent Lee-Sean Huang an email out of nowhere. An AI had hallucinated a connection between them that didn’t exist, but something about it was worth sitting with. So he let it be strange for a while, then followed the curiosity. Drawing on years of training in improv comedy and musical performance, Huang works at the edges of categories as a designer, educator, performer, and community organizer. From improv comes the “first unusual thing”—the unexpected moment you don’t explain away but heighten. From music comes the understanding that mistakes are opportunities to riff. All design begins with a story, and the better design begins with weirder stories. This talk is about the necessary part of experimentation that precedes hypothesis testing: the practice of noticing and following where curiosity leads. Come ready to participate.

Julie Maggos, Senior Director of Experiential Design, IA Interior Architects

11:30 am–12:00 pm

Julie Maggos came to reframing through her own experience, learning during a cancer diagnosis how that single act can shape our ability to navigate change. That insight drives this talk. When production gets easier, human value doesn’t disappear. It moves toward framing, intention, and cultural judgment. But the shift isn’t simple. AI output can be fast, impressive, and completely wrong—thin, generic, and culturally off-base in ways that are hard to name but impossible to ignore. What rises in importance isn’t output. It’s discernment: knowing what a space should mean, who it’s for, and why it matters. Julie will invite designers to move upstream, into the authorship and judgment that separate work that impresses from work that resonates.

Kimberly Gim, Head of Design & Creative Director, Blet

1:30–2:00 pm

How do you get teenagers to put down their phones and actually engage with the work and with each other in person? Kimberly Gim has spent her career finding out. From transforming unexpected spaces into experiences for young audiences, including the Met’s 81st Street Studio, to the messiest corners of client collaboration, her work insists that children and teenagers are not a problem to be managed but an audience worth designing for seriously.

She digs into the friction between what a client knows and what an experiment needs to learn, and makes the case for treating what doesn’t work as information rather than as failure. If you’ve ever had to design for an audience that didn’t ask to be there, this one’s for you.

Jason Bruges, Founder & Creative Director, Jason Bruges Studio

David Schwarz, Co-Founder & Creative Director, HUSH

2:00–2:45 pm

Jason Bruges has spent more than two decades reimagining public space through large-scale technological art. David Schwarz has spent his career defining how some of the world’s most recognizable companies show up physically. Two different practices, two different instincts, and a striking tendency to arrive at the same truths from entirely different directions. This candid, unscripted conversation unpacks where their approaches diverge and align, what each unlocks creatively and commercially, and what twenty years of experimentation actually teaches you about making work that lasts. Expect real-time show-and-tell, candid disagreement, and a live Q&A. Because in an age where everything is impressive and most of it is forgettable, the interesting question isn’t how it was made. It’s why it stayed with you.

Lance Wyman, FSEGD, Designer of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Identity

Ric Edwards, Vice President, Brand Design, Look of the Games & Executive Design Director, LA28 Olympic & Paralympic Games

3:45–4:50 pm

Every edition of Xlab ends with a closing conversation that tries to hold the whole day together. This year, that conversation spans sixty years. Lance Wyman, SEGD Fellow and the designer behind the 1968 Mexico City Olympic identity, and Ric Edwards, Vice President of Brand Design and Executive Design Director for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, share a stage for the first time: two designers, two eras, and the same underlying question. What does it mean to design for the biggest stage in the world?

The Olympics and Paralympics don’t live on a page. They live in cities, in ceremonies, in wayfinding and environments and screens and moments that millions of people move through and remember. Wyman and Edwards will talk about how technology, space, and experience come together to embody a brand at global scale, and what it takes to make that feel like something rather than everything. They’ll talk about leaning into complexity, creating work that outlasts its moment, and approaching joy not as a byproduct of good design, but as an intention. It’s a fitting place to land after a day spent sitting with the weight of this moment and asking what it means to make things that matter. The answer, it turns out, has always been the same. You design for joy on purpose.