Ina Conradi delivers opening keynote at UXINDIA 2026 Design Leadership Week

Singapore, September 2026

Associate Professor Ina Conradi of NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media will give the opening keynote at the UXINDIA 2026 Design Leadership Week, held from 23 to 25 September 2026 at The Leela Bhartiya City in Bengaluru, India. Her talk is titled Every Thread a Possible World: Animation, Science, and Design Futures in Asia.

The keynote begins with a condition most city dwellers now live inside. Cities are wrapped in a digital skin, and these surfaces too often deliver spectacle rather than meaning. Against that, Conradi sets a different proposition: that animation can communicate science, not by illustrating it, but by translating it through textile traditions, cosmologies, and metaphors of thread and root.

That method has been built through long collaboration with physicists and ocean scientists, and more recently through work with AI. In this practice metaphor functions as an instrument of understanding rather than as ornament, a way of holding scientific structure in a form that a public audience can enter. The talk closes with an invitation to young designers, and to women especially, to take up these emerging spaces.

What the audience takes away

The keynote develops three claims. The first concerns scale and purpose: large public surfaces can move from spectacle to worlding, becoming sites of memory, care, and shared perception rather than displays. The second concerns knowledge: metaphor and regional knowledge systems can carry complex scientific and ecological ideas to broad audiences, offering a decolonial alternative to inherited Western visual frameworks. The third concerns the studio and the classroom: design education in Asia becomes a different proposition when students learn to compose with AI for public audiences at urban scale, and that shift asks something of educators and industry partners alike.

About the summit

The Leadership Summit is Track 01 of UXINDIA’s Design Leadership Week, addressed to CXOs, CDOs, CTOs, CPOs, heads of design, and senior practitioners shaping design inside their organisations. The organisers frame the week around a shift they see under way in the region: that India is no longer only the world’s execution centre and is becoming a centre of design leadership, designing for scale, complexity, and an AI-powered future rather than adapting playbooks built elsewhere.

The programme runs across three days, with pre-conference workshops on 23 September and conference days on 24 and 25 September. Conradi’s keynote opens the conference programme on 24 September.

Event details

• What: UXINDIA 2026 Design Leadership Week, Leadership Summit
• When: 23 to 25 September 2026
• Where: The Leela Bhartiya City, 6/2 Thanisandra Main Road, Thirumenahalli, Bengaluru 560064, India
• Keynote: Every Thread a Possible World: Animation, Science, and Design Futures in Asia, 24 September
• Programme: https://www.ux-india.org/leadership-summit
• Tickets: https://www.ux-india.org/tickets
• Sponsorship: https://partner.ux-india.org/