Chrissy Welsh

I want to bring something very practical to UX Rotterdam. We’re entering a strange moment in design. Prototyping is becoming incredibly cheap, AI can generate ideas in seconds, and, respectfully, every PM has now busted out a vibe design. So the question for designers becomes less, “Can you make the thing?” and more, “Can you explain why this is the right thing to make, get people behind it, and move a room towards a decision?” That is the territory I want to explore. My working keynote is called Great Work Isn’t Enough, and it is about the gap between doing strong design work and actually getting that work adopted. Designers are trained to make good work. We are much less often taught how to earn attention, hold a room, handle resistance, communicate with authority, and influence the people who ultimately decide whether our work lives or dies.

As design moves further upstream into problem framing, strategy and decision making, I think those skills become part of the craft, not a nice extra. So I have been pulling together research, communication science and a lot of tried and tested workplace methods into a practical toolkit. Things like how you open a conversation, how you frame a recommendation, how you make evidence memorable, how you deal with the person who says “I don’t think customers care about that” after six weeks of research, and how you make sure the meeting actually ends in a decision.

I’m also trying to be quite ruthless about the word science. There is a lot of communication advice floating around LinkedIn and podcasts with a university name attached to it and absolutely no sign of the university. Part of the talk is separating what is genuinely supported by evidence from what is simply useful stagecraft.

The bigger idea is that as execution gets easier, our value shifts further into judgement, framing, influence and understanding the problem. Great work still matters enormously, but great work sitting beautifully in a Figma file while nobody backs it is, unfortunately, just very organised sadness.😢 And for people who want to go beyond listening to me talk about it, I’d love to pair the keynote with a workshop. Because hearing someone tell you to hold the room is one thing. Actually practising it, with resistance, awkward stakeholders and real simulated workplace scenarios, is another. So the workshop would give designers a safe place to practise some of that power, try the techniques, get it wrong, laugh, try again, and leave a little more dangerous 😈 in their next stakeholder meeting. The content is still evolving, but the ambition is very simple: help designers make their work land, not just make the work.