As we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we’re excited to invite you to our 10th IxDebate! Contentious topics, four panelists, one empty chair.
It’s time once again to host our beloved IxDebate, and this one will be a doozy! IxDA Pittsburgh is celebrating our 20th anniversary of organizing interesting, entertaining, and relevant events for the UX community. It just so happens that this is also the 10th IxDebate. That’s two significant milestones to celebrate, and we hope you will join us. Let’s make this one for the ages!
Attendance is free, but seating is limited.
The IxDebate Format
We’ll have an opening panel of four local designers whom we’ll be announcing leading up to the event. Topics will be drawn from a hat and posed to the panel. The audience isn’t allowed to speak, but anyone can claim the empty chair and join the panel to have their say. Once discussion on that topic is done, somebody on the panel has to step down to free a chair for the next audience member to step up. Doors open at 6:00, and we’ll get the proceedings underway about 6:30. You can suggest debate topics when you register.
IxDebate IX in 2023 at Threadbare
The Panelists
We’ll be announcing our panelists leading up to the event, so watch this space.
Val Head
Val is a Principal Designer at Adobe and the author of Designing Interface Animation. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, A List Apart, and Smashing Magazine, and she’s spoken at design conferences around the world, including Web Directions and An Event Apart.
She shapes the future of creative tooling by bridging the gap between keyframes, AI, and human imagination. Her work focuses on making motion tools smarter, simpler, and more human.
Beyond design, Val is an award-winning dog photographer and film photography enthusiast who loves exploring the small, quiet details that make stories come alive.
Bill Bernstein
Bill is a UX designer and discipline lead with career beginnings in industrial design. Currently, he creates secure identity & access experiences in clinician reference tools as a principal designer at Elsevier. Bill spends his free time both playing and taking in live music.
Alina Bengert-Lombardi
Alina is a Lead Product Designer at UPMC Enterprises, where she blends creativity and strategic thinking to improve efficiency and elevate service delivery across healthcare operations. With nearly a decade of experience in healthcare, fintech, and e-commerce, she is known for aligning design with business constraints while uncovering opportunities for meaningful impact.
She is also the founder of the ALINA™ Method, a practical approach that elevates UX into everyday business operations—guiding teams to make better decisions, reduce friction, and deliver results that work in the real world.
Ian DeJesus
Ian’s objective is to challenge assumptions and delve into the core of a problem. He enjoys tackling complex issues that culminate in meaningful services and solutions that meet customer needs and drive business impact. He has extensive experience in researching and resolving problems across diverse domains such as manufacturing, Industrial IoT, defense, healthcare, and health insurance.
Our Moderator
Mary Hatch
Mary is a passionate User Experience Researcher, currently part of the IT Design Team at Cisco. With over a decade of experience at start-ups and global corporations—and across industries including healthcare and robotics—Mary brings energy, empathy, and insight to every project. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, hiking, travel, and spending time with her family in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.
The Venue
We are thankful for our event host, Lolev Beer, who is allowing us use of their space at no charge. It is only through gracious partners like Lolev that we can continue bringing you events like this, so please avail yourself of their beverages during the event.
Lolev Beer
We focus on creating beers that are purposeful, refined, and worth savoring.
Our approach combines traditional brewing techniques with modern innovation, always in service of flavor and quality. We source the finest ingredients, obsess over every detail of the brewing process, and constantly refine our recipes to achieve the perfect balance in every glass.
