The global design conversation moves fast. Every quarter brings a new framework, a new tool, a new manifesto. But when you're running a design team in Johannesburg, shipping products from Cape Town, or trying to grow an agency in Durban, the questions that keep you up at night are a lot more specific than "what's trending."

As UXSA builds out its 2026 programme, across the publication, the podcast, and the November conference, these are the conversations we want to put at the centre. Not because they're fashionable, but because they're unavoidable. Each one is an open question, and we're looking for people who are living the answers.

1. AI in the Products We Build

Every product team in South Africa is being asked the same question right now: where does AI belong in what we're making?

Not as a feature checkbox. Not as a chatbot bolted onto the corner of a screen. But as real infrastructure, the kind that changes how a product works at its core. For a fintech building lending products in Gauteng, that might mean using AI to score creditworthiness for people with no formal credit history. For a health-tech startup, it might mean triage tools that work on low-bandwidth connections in rural clinics. For a retailer, it might mean demand prediction that actually accounts for how South Africans shop, across malls, informal markets, and WhatsApp catalogues.

The question isn't whether AI matters. It's whether we're building it into our products thoughtfully, with awareness of the connectivity constraints, the language diversity, and the trust gaps that define our market, or whether we're just importing Silicon Valley patterns and hoping for the best.

We want to hear from product designers, engineers, and founders who are making hard calls about where AI adds genuine value and where it doesn't. What are you shipping? What did you try that failed? What does responsible AI integration actually look like when your users are on prepaid data?

2. AI in the Tools We Use to Design

While the first conversation is about what we're building, this one is about how we're building it.

The design toolkit is being rewritten in real time. Figma's AI features, loveable.ai for wire-framing, AI-generated copy, image synthesis, code generation from design specs, these aren't future possibilities, they're current workflows. Agencies globally are restructuring their teams around these tools. Some are cutting junior roles. Others are finding that AI handles the production layer and frees designers to focus on strategy and research. A few are discovering that over-automation kills the creative differentiation that won their clients in the first place.

For South African teams, this shift carries particular weight. Design agencies here often compete on cost efficiency against both local and offshore teams. AI tools can be a massive equaliser, a three-person studio in Braamfontein can now produce at a volume that would have required a team of ten five years ago. But it also raises hard questions. What happens to the junior pipeline if entry-level production work dries up? How do you price design work when the client knows a first draft can be generated in minutes? How do you maintain creative quality when speed becomes the default expectation?

We're looking for design leaders, agency founders, and in-house heads of design who are navigating this honestly. Not the hype, not the panic, the practical reality of retooling a team, repricing services, and rethinking what "design work" even means in 2026.

3. Designing for the Township Economy

South Africa has two economies, and they run on different rails. The formal economy, banks, malls, subscription services, broadband, is well-served by design as an industry. The township and informal economy, spaza shops, cash-based trade, WhatsApp-driven commerce, community savings schemes, is largely designed around, not designed for.

This is not an abstract inclusion conversation. It's a R268 billion market. The informal retail sector alone employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it is being actively reshaped right now by fintech, digital payment tools, and government digitisation programmes. Companies like Lesaka Technologies are putting point-of-sale systems and digital payment infrastructure into spaza shops. Platforms like Yebo Fresh and Vuleka are digitising ordering and stock management for informal retailers. The UNDP's DIME initiative is working to connect 20,000 spaza shops in Gauteng to digital compliance and safety systems.

But here's the design problem: these tools often fail because they're built with formal-economy assumptions. They assume reliable smartphones, consistent connectivity, English literacy, and a willingness to create formal digital accounts. The reality on the ground is different, half of spaza shops don't have access to a smartphone, WhatsApp is the default business tool, data costs are a constant constraint, and trust in formal systems is low.

This is one of the most important design briefs in South Africa right now. If you're a product designer working on tools for informal trade, a service designer rethinking how government services reach township communities, or a researcher who has done real fieldwork in this space, we want to hear your story. Not theory. Proof. What did you build, what did you learn, and what actually worked?

4. The Future of the Design Organisation

The design industry itself is under pressure, and the honest conversation about what comes next is long overdue.

Agency business models built on billable hours and headcount are being squeezed from every direction. Clients expect faster turnarounds at lower costs. AI tools are compressing production timelines. Advertising agencies are moving upstream into design territory. In-house design teams at large corporates are growing, pulling work that used to go to external partners. Meanwhile, the subscription and retainer models that some global agencies have adopted haven't fully landed in the South African market.

For corporate design teams, the challenge is different but just as real. Design leaders inside banks, insurers, telecoms, and retailers are fighting to prove value at a strategic level, to get a seat at the table where quarterly planning happens, where budgets are set, and where product roadmaps are decided. Many are still treated as a service function rather than a strategic one.

And then there's the question nobody wants to ask out loud: what does a design organisation even look like in two years? If AI handles wireframes and basic UI production, if research can be accelerated with synthetic participants and automated analysis, if front-end code can be generated from design specs, what is the thing that design teams uniquely contribute? Strategy? Systems thinking? Customer empathy? Cultural context? All of the above?

We're looking for people who are actively reshaping how their design organisation works, not in theory, but in practice. New planning rhythms. New pricing models. New ways of demonstrating impact to leadership. New org structures that reflect the reality of a hybrid, AI-augmented, commercially pressured design practice. If you've found something that works, the community needs to hear it.

5. Designing Public Services That Actually Work

South Africans interact with government digital services constantly, applying for grants, filing taxes, registering businesses, accessing municipal services, applying for IDs and passports. Some of these experiences have improved dramatically. SARS eFiling is, by most accounts, genuinely good. But many others remain painful, confusing, and exclusionary, particularly for people who aren't digitally fluent or who don't have reliable access to devices and data.

This isn't just a civic-minded concern. It's a design and business opportunity. Over 136 government services have been digitised, and the government's R7.8 billion digital budget for 2025/26 signals serious intent to accelerate. SA Connect Phase 2 aims to bring broadband to 42,000 public buildings. Digital ID systems, health portals, and education platforms are all expanding.

For designers working in agencies, this represents a growing client category. For those in corporates, the patterns and lessons from public-sector design, designing for low literacy, intermittent connectivity, multilingual users, and high-stakes outcomes, are directly transferable to commercial products serving the same populations. For startups, public infrastructure creates the rails on which new services can be built.

We want to hear from people doing this work: service designers who have tackled a government brief and learned something the rest of us need to know. Product teams whose commercial products serve the same populations and face the same constraints. Researchers who understand how South Africans actually navigate these systems, not how we assume they do.

These five conversations aren't the only ones that matter. But they're the ones we believe can generate the richest, most useful exchange of knowledge in our community this year. Each one can be a talk, an essay, a podcast episode, or a case study in the UXSA publication.

If you're living any of these questions, in your agency, your team, your startup, or your research, we want to hear from you. Reach out at info@uxsouthafrica.com or subscribe to the UXSA newsletter to stay in the loop as we build out the 2026 programme.

UXSA '26 takes place 10–12 November in Johannesburg. Call for speakers opening soon.