Autodesk’s Alëna Iouguina Returns to CanUX in 2025

An AI primer for designers is on deck for this year’s event..

 How to Take Control of the (Seemingly) Uncontrollable Machines
} Oct 3/4, 2025 TBD / 30 MINUTES

Industrial design joined the world of automation ~15 years ago with the mass introduction of rapid prototyping tools and the integration of ML into digital manufacturing processes. All this dramatically improved the design process with a small caveat: only for designers who learned to work with these new tools. UX design was largely unaffected by this wave of automation. Prototyping for both desktop and mobile was still manual : Invision, Sketch, Figma, Framer and other prototyping tools for UX offered an improved experience and more capabilities but little true automation.

That is until LLMs entered the scene. In a blink of an eye, we’re now in a world where LLMs allow a single UX designer to do the work of several and improve the designer’s velocity at generating a multitude of ideas to prototype and test. I’ll share examples from my work that succeeded and failed at reigning in the machine and maintaining a good balance between the human and the artificial minds.

 Speaker Bio: Alena Iouguina
 AI Research

Alëna is a design leader with over 15 years of experience spanning startups and global enterprises, specializing in complex systems design, building high-performing teams, and leading through organizational change. She is currently working as Experience Design Director at Autodesk, leading a team of 30+ designers across some of the company’s flagship products: AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and Reality Capture. Previously she held senior UX leadership roles at Shopify and Klipfolio.

Some of her work includes research and design in the domains of commerce, business intelligence and AI, hardware-software integrations, and more generally any problem spaces that require integration of multiple systems across many levels to address human needs.

Follow Alëna on LinkedIn .

Prior Presentations:

THE BIOMIMETIC APPROACH TO USER EXPERIENCE (UXcamp 2013)
Nov 9, 2013 1:15pm

*Image credit: Alena Iouguina and generative AI.