UX Festival 2026: Arndtteunissen Looks for Tomorrow's Trends
29.6.2026
Research, networking and exchange. What challenges will our clients face tomorrow and the day after?
What a meeting of 300 UX specialists at the Zughafen Kulturbahnhof in Erfurt reveals about the future of products and society.
If you want to understand how products and systems will need to be designed in future to noticeably make people's everyday lives easier, you sometimes have to travel to places where the logistical infrastructure of industrialisation was once organised. At the Zughafen Kulturbahnhof in Erfurt, a former freight depot, almost 300 specialists met for the German UPA's UX Festival.
The professional association fundamentally relies on the voluntary work of its members, who are collectively committed to sharing knowledge and fostering well-founded opinion on usability and user experience (UX). The format of the meeting: a barcamp. No rigid agenda, no lecture-style teaching, but a dynamic marketplace of ideas. Right in the middle of it: Arndtteunissen. As a member of the umbrella association and partner of the Usability Testessen in Düsseldorf, we are not observers here, but seismographs of a discipline whose relevance reaches far beyond web and software development. After all, digital touchpoints, or digitalisation, are ultimately just one playing field among many. At the core of UX is the overarching goal of making the interaction between people and their environment – in whatever form – simply better and more intuitive.
Many user experience topics, even more perspectives
The range of topics over the weekend was like a stocktake of this deep human-centredness, spanning everything from hard practice to strategic vision. The most important levers of modern UX strategies and concrete measures against operational barriers were discussed, while a Design Sprint Challenge focused on solving complex problems quickly and collaboratively. The handling of new technologies was also debated in a nuanced way: alongside a deeply critical look at AI in the design context, the sessions covered very practical use cases such as the sensible use of AI in usability testing. This was complemented by in-depth insights into regulatory questions such as the evolution of ISO standards and geopolitical IT debates about the digital sovereignty of European platforms in times of dominant US hosting infrastructures.
Best UX: We design the backend too.
Amid these debates, it became clear how closely the design of digital systems is interwoven with real life. This was also reflected in the session by our Managing Director Benjamin Arndt, entitled “Upgrade for the Hometown”. It addressed the question of which factors make a place both liveable and future-proof for the creative industries and for the population as a whole – an impulse whose collected ideas will feed directly into the strategic association work at Kreativwirtschaft Düsseldorf e.V.
It is precisely these interfaces and this diversity of topics that make the barcamp so valuable. Even though the rapid development of artificial intelligence was discussed quite controversially in the intensive conversations among all participants, the two days in Thuringia delivered above all one overarching insight: since UX is, at its core, inherently about empathy, understanding human behaviour and solving real-life problems, this expertise cannot be streamlined away. Tools change – but the need for experts who translate systems for people and design spaces sensibly is growing.
For an agency like Arndtteunissen, it is no longer enough to adopt trends only from trade magazines. Anyone who wants to succeed in the market has to operate close to the industry, help shape the discourse and anticipate early which waves will break next. Only through this constant exchange on equal terms can technological and societal currents not only be understood, but proactively shaped or even claimed on behalf of our clients. The barcamp on the grounds of the old freight depot was the best proof of this: if you don't want to miss the future, you can't wait for it to land fully developed in your inbox. You have to go where it is being negotiated live. In that spirit, we are already looking forward to next year in Erfurt, at the next German UPA barcamp, and will now feed many exciting insights and new trends that are in focus this year into our daily work for our clients.