Speaker
Andrea Malanski
Head of Experience Design, Polestar
I am Head of Experience Design at Polestar, where I lead a multidisciplinary team working across the brand’s digital ecosystem and the wider customer journey, from discovery and purchase to ownership and support.
Who is Andrea Malanski?
My team brings together service, product, visual and motion design, copywriting, SEO and GEO, alongside a dedicated Design System team. Together, we shape experiences across Polestar.com and digital products including the Polestar mobile app, car configurators, storefronts and internal platforms, while building a coherent design language across markets and touchpoints.
Before Polestar, I was Head of Creative at NA-KD Fashion, leading multidisciplinary creative teams across digital platforms and campaigns. Earlier in my career, I ran my own design consultancy in Sweden, working with teams across Europe and Brazil, and spent more than a decade as Creative Director at DMSBOX, creating work for brands including Renault, Volvo and Electrolux.
Across these roles, my work has consistently moved between brand, digital products, storytelling and experience design, and increasingly focuses on what becomes possible when those disciplines are treated as one connected design practice.
What is your vision on our creative industry?
I’m particularly interested in what happens when UX, brand, technology and creative craft come together, rather than being treated as separate disciplines.
For a long time, digital organisations have tended to separate these concerns: UX solves the journey, brand creates expression, content tells the story and technology delivers it. But people never experience those things separately. They experience one product. Typography influences comprehension. Motion creates hierarchy. Imagery shapes perception. Interaction can communicate character. Performance and accessibility influence how a brand feels just as much as art direction does.
I believe the opportunity ahead is to design these dimensions together rather than sequentially. For me, that means expanding the definition of UX beyond usability and flows, and at the same time expanding creative direction beyond the visual layer. The most interesting digital experiences emerge when function and expression are designed as parts of the same system.
AI makes this shift even more relevant. It is changing how quickly we can explore, prototype and produce, while allowing interfaces and experiences to adapt to context. But as production becomes easier and more abundant, I think human judgement, taste and intent become more important, not less. The question moves from “Can we make this?” towards “Why should this exist, what should it communicate, and what should it feel like?”
That is what excites me about where the industry is heading: technology giving us more possibilities while increasing the value of distinctly human qualities such as curiosity, judgement, storytelling, craft and the ability to create desire.
What are you bringing to UX Rotterdam?
The Product Becomes the Brief How product character shapes digital experience
The keynote will explore a design challenge we work with at Polestar: how do you translate the character and design intent of a physical product into a digital experience? A car carries years of thinking across design, materials, engineering, performance and brand. Online, all of that also needs to become information: specifications, features, pricing, configuration and everything customers need to understand and consider the product. The challenge is how to communicate that information without allowing the information architecture to become the experience itself. Using recent Polestar car experiences as examples, I’ll explore how the product itself can become the creative brief for digital design, identifying what is distinctive about each car and using storytelling, art direction, CGI, motion, interaction, typography, and pacing to give that character a digital expression. More broadly, the talk will look at the relationship between UX and creative craft, and the tension between information and emotion, function and expression, conversion and desire. The central idea is that digital design can do more than describe a physical product: it can interpret it.
April 22 & 23, 2027
2 DAYS CONFERENCE TICKET
€649,-
+21% VAT
REGULAR PRICE TICKET
Regular price of tickets ends 1st of March 2027
Your ticket gives you access to:
All keynote talks on the main stage big theater and in the small theater
Any workshop (first come, first seated) across both days
Evening events: To be announced
Daily lunch, coffee, and snacks
Networking lounges (including the exclusive recruitment lounge)
Selected video & keynote slides archive after the event
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