Speaker
Frederick Andersen
Founder, EDL
Frederick Andersen is a Danish design entrepreneur and founder of EDL, a Copenhagen-based design studio specializing in UX, product design and AI-ready design systems. With over a decade of experience, Frederick helps technology companies transform complex software into intuitive, scalable digital experiences. His approach combines design, engineering and business strategy, with a strong belief that design systems should be treated as essential product infrastructure rather than simply collections of components.
Who is Frederick Andersen?
Frederick founded EDL, a nine-person design engineering studio in Copenhagen, in 2021. Over the past two years he's led its transformation from a traditional product design studio into a hybrid design-engineering partner, adopting new technology to give designers more ownership over their craft and launching design systems built by designers directly in code (with 84% adoption), cutting production times by 48% along the way.
EDL has worked with over 30 B2B SaaS clients across industries including proptech, healthtech, martech, supply chain, insurtech, IoT, robotics, compliance, ESG and more. Frederick believes the best design studios think in systems, not screens, and that design and engineering are just two sides of the same craft.
What is your vision on our creative industry?
The industry is finally admitting that design was never the final layer, it's infrastructure. For years, design got treated as decoration you add before shipping. That's changing, not because of a trend, but because AI just made the cost of that mistake obvious. When a coding agent can read your design system and ship a screen faster than a person can open Figma, a design system that only humans can parse isn't a system anymore, it's a bottleneck.
What excites me most is that this collapses the old handoff entirely. Design and code stop being two disciplines that pass work between each other and start being one continuous thing. The teams that get this right aren't the ones with the prettiest components, they're the ones who built a system legible enough that both a person and an AI agent can build on it without guessing. That's the real innovation right now, not the AI tools themselves, but what they're forcing every design org to finally confront about how they work.
What are you bringing to UX Rotterdam?
From Handoffs to Upstream
Two pieces. The keynote is 'From Handoffs to Upstream,' the talk I gave at Figma Config. The core argument: design was never meant to be the final layer before code, it's infrastructure, and AI just made that obvious. When an AI agent can read a design system and ship a screen faster than a person can open Figma, a system only humans can parse isn't a system anymore, it's a bottleneck. The talk traces that shift, from handoff culture to designers and engineers building the same thing upstream, together, instead of passing work down a line.
The second piece is a deep dive on research we've been running on Danish B2B SaaS teams, whether they actually do UX research or just decide and ship. It's the practical companion to the keynote's argument: the keynote makes the case that design needs to move upstream, the deep dive shows what's actually happening on the ground right now, what separates teams that validate decisions from teams that guess, and where that gap shows up in the product. Together it's the theory and then the evidence, why upstream design matters, and what happens in the market when nobody's doing 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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