Three days in a former Berlin crematorium for senior in-house design teams, with onsite seats gated by an application and the keynote day streamed to anyone.
An annual three-day conference in Berlin for experienced product designers, UX researchers and design leaders, run by Hatch Community Events. The 2026 edition pairs two onsite workshop days with a keynote day that also streams online. Onsite access is not sold openly: buyers apply first and are screened on seniority.
16 to 18 September 2026, three consecutive days. Silent Green Kulturquartier, Gerichtstrasse 35, 13347 Berlin, a listed former crematorium in the Wedding district converted into a cultural quarter with indoor halls and open-air space. The 2025 edition ran 10 to 12 September at the same venue, so the venue holds and the dates move a week later.
Hatch Community Events UG, registered in Berlin at the Charlottenburg commercial register under HRB 240592 B, VAT number DE352197369. Damian Martone is named on the imprint as the person responsible for content and opens the conference day from the main stage. The company also runs Ateliers Sessions, an online design leadership series that publishes recaps through the year.
Around 500 onsite, plus several hundred online, a figure published by the independent design events directory Neon Moiré rather than counted by anyone. The audience is senior in-house: product designers, UX researchers, design managers, design directors and chief design officers. Seniority is enforced at the door of the ticket shop, not just advertised: to buy an onsite pass you submit an application, your LinkedIn profile is reviewed, and you need a design-related background plus a senior-level title or five or more years of experience. Online tickets carry no such screen.
The main and dome stage roster published for 18 September 2026:
Hosts are Hang Xu on the main stage, Hannah Baker on the dome stage and Rachel Kobetz, whose stage role the lineup page does not state. Rachel Kobetz is listed among hosts, not among keynote speakers, for this edition. Around forty further names run the labs, roundtables and workshop days and are listed on the facilitators page.
Three changes against the 2025 edition. Mixers, flagged as new by the organiser: twelve free satellite meetups in ten European cities on 16 September 2026, organised by local communities and companies rather than by Hatch. A two-stage conference day, main stage live and dome stage released afterwards, so an online buyer now gets both tracks instead of choosing. And the dates shift from 10 to 12 September 2025 to 16 to 18 September 2026, same venue.
Four themes run through the three days: product design craft, UX research, design leadership and applied innovation, with AI cutting across all of them. Day one, Super IC Day, is six full-day workshops for individual contributors on AI skills, design systems, agentic prototyping, voice interfaces and adaptive AI interfaces. Day two, Strategy and Biz Day, is half-day modules on growth design, AI strategy, business value, design ethics, storytelling and executive presentations. Day three is the keynote day, on three stages, closing with Paula Scher.
Five formats, none of them a trade-show floor. Full-day workshops on 16 September, each ending in a built artefact and a certificate of attendance. Half-day workshops on 17 September in classes of sixteen to twenty-two people. On 18 September, 25-minute keynotes on the main and dome stages, 50-minute workshop labs, and 50-minute roundtables in two rooms. No matchmaking app, no pre-scheduled meeting system and no awards programme are documented.
Two kinds. On 16 September 2026, twelve free Hatch Mixers run in ten cities: Athens, Prague, Berlin (three, including a UserTesting evening at Soho House and a Fin evening on design in the AI era), Frankfurt at REWE digital, Barcelona, Paris at Doctolib, Manchester, Porto, Lisbon and London at Attio. Onsite, the Strategy and Biz Day ticket includes an evening networking event on 17 September, and an afterparty at Panke Culture from 20:00 on 18 September is EUR 15 plus 19 percent VAT, free for conference ticket holders.
Two populations, two routes. Onsite passes are applied for, not simply bought: the application is reviewed against seniority criteria and returns a purchase code. All three onsite passes are sold out for 2026, waitlist only. Super IC Day, 16 September, one full-day workshop: EUR 550. Strategy and Biz Day, 17 September, two half-day workshops plus the evening networking event: EUR 670. Conference Day, 18 September: EUR 420. Online passes are open to everyone with no application. Online single pass: EUR 75. Five online passes: EUR 300, ten online passes: EUR 500. All prices are quoted before 19 percent German VAT. Payment is by card or by invoice with fourteen days to transfer.
Through the call for proposals at call.hatchconference.com, which is closed for the 2026 edition and carries no published date for a 2027 round. Selection is curated by the Hatch team, which states that each speaker is picked for a topic they can uniquely deliver rather than for audience size. Two other routes onto the schedule are documented: facilitating a workshop or lab, and hosting a roundtable. Volunteering, a separate track, closed on 28 June 2026 and buys free time on conference day rather than a stage slot.
There is no published rate card. The partners page carries a request form asking for first name, last name, email and company, and that form is the only documented entry point; general enquiries go to info@hatchconference.com. Four tiers are visible from the published roster: main sponsor, sponsor, exhibitor and supporter, with a separate media partner tier. Buying a ticket also means consenting to have name, email and company passed to the main sponsor, which tells a sponsor what the main tier actually buys.
Main sponsor: UserTesting, following its merger with UserZoom. Sponsors: Figma, Mobbin, Fin, Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), GetYourGuide. Exhibitors: Amazon Design, BilendiUX, Dessn, Hyphen, Jitter, Triplesense Reply. Supporters: Accelerate Design, Accelevents, Ahead Nutrition, OBJ.Studio, Qt, HelloFresh Group. Media partners, each of which carries the label at every mention in this page: Uxness (media partner), Effectus Software (media partner), GermanTechJobs (media partner), Make Users Happy (media partner), the Interaction Design Foundation (media partner), Qubika (media partner), Berlin Design e.V. (media partner) and BigEvent.io (media partner).
Not published. No attendee breakdown by company type, size or country is released by the organiser, and the seniority screen on applications is the only stated filter. What can be observed is the affiliation of the people on the schedule and on the sponsor roster: European product companies and scale-ups (Notion, Mozilla, Attio, Pleo, GetYourGuide, FEELD, Unily, Cloudflare, Figma), design tooling and research vendors (UserTesting, Mobbin, Fin, Superhuman, Jitter, BilendiUX), consultancies and independent practices (Pentagram, Metalab, Hyphen, Triplesense Reply, Near Future), and a thinner layer of large corporates and institutions (Amazon, SAP, Visa, Henkel, Rabobank, Air France, HelloFresh).
Not publicly disclosed. The site has no press or media page, no accreditation form and no named press contact; the only published address is info@hatchconference.com. Two conditions a journalist should know before asking: ticket buyers must consent to their name, email and company being shared with the main sponsor, and must consent to being photographed and filmed for the organiser's own promotion.
No coverage by a named news outlet with a byline was found for the 2025 or 2026 editions. What exists is listings and participant writing: entries on the independent design events directories Neon Moiré, UIUX Trend, Site of Sites and dev.events; a listing on BigEvent.io (media partner); a write-up of the 2025 edition on the Zalando Design publication on Medium, indexed but not retrievable for this pass; and a post about Hatch 2025 on the DesignTaxi account on X (unverifiable information). The organiser also publishes attendee testimonials on its own site.
Sorted into the four usual levels, almost nothing sits in the top one. Placed coverage: anything appearing on BigEvent.io (media partner), Uxness (media partner) or the Interaction Design Foundation (media partner) is contracted, not editorial. Independent but promotional: the Neon Moiré and UIUX Trend listings are third-party and corroborate dates, venue and scale, but they are calendars, not reporting. Predictable and unconfirmed: a designer employed by a sponsor or an attending company writing a recap, as on the Zalando Design publication. Organiser-claimed without proof: the testimonials and the 500 onsite figure, which no audited source confirms.
Junior designers and students: the onsite application asks for a senior title or five or more years in a design discipline, and the workshops are written to skip fundamentals. Anyone wanting a tradeshow floor: there are six exhibitors, not an exhibition hall. Anyone who needs to be in the room this year: all three onsite passes are sold out and the organiser states no further onsite tickets will be released. Engineers and AI practitioners looking for a technical conference: the AI content here is about designing AI products, not building them.
It is the mid-September fixture for in-house design leadership in Europe, deliberately small at 500 onsite where the large European product and design events run into the thousands. Events Index tracks it inside the developer and AI engineering circuit because its 2026 programme is dominated by AI practice, but the room is a design room, not an engineering one. Its closest neighbours by audience are the design craft conferences of the same month rather than the cloud and platform events that share the circuit.
No. The conference itself has run only in Berlin, at the same venue in 2025 and 2026. What travels is the satellite layer: twelve free Hatch Mixers in ten cities on 16 September 2026, organised locally under the Hatch name. Between editions the organiser runs Ateliers Sessions online, a design leadership series whose recaps are published on the Hatch blog roughly monthly.
English, for the whole programme: keynotes, workshops, labs and roundtables. The site, the ticket shop and the agenda are published in English only, in a German-registered company's home city. No German-language track and no interpretation are offered.
Yes, and the online pass is the only route still open for 2026. The main stage streams live from 09:30 CEST on 18 September 2026. Dome stage talks are released as recordings the week after, dated 22 September 2026 on the site. Both stages are included in one pass. Recordings stay in the buyer's library for six months, after which they go to the Hatch YouTube channel. One caveat: the same site advertises fourteen recordings for five months in its hero copy and fifteen sessions for six months everywhere else, so confirm the count at checkout. The 16 and 17 September workshops are onsite only and are not streamed or recorded.
A full refund is available up to 30 calendar days before the event, no reason required; after that, no refund is owed. Name changes and transfers to another person are free up to 48 hours before the event, in writing to info@hatchconference.com. Illness or a family emergency can be claimed within 7 days of the event date with documentation, at the organiser's discretion. Online tickets carry no statutory right of withdrawal under German law, since they are dated leisure services. Travel and accommodation are never refunded.
The organiser publishes no accessibility statement. The venue does, and it is specific. The main entrance at Gerichtstrasse 35 is step-free; the Plantagenstrasse 31 entrance is not. Five accessible parking spaces are available. The Betonhalle is step-free with accessible toilets and lift access, though the ramp into the hall is steep enough to be hard in a manual wheelchair. The Kuppelhalle and the MARS bar are reached through the inner courtyard and have an accessible toilet. The atelier building is only partly accessible: a stair lift operated by staff, and toilets that are not accessible. The venue asks visitors to call ahead on +49 30 1208221-0.
Gerichtstrasse 35, 13347 Berlin, in Wedding, north of the centre. S+U Wedding is 200 metres away on the U6 and the S41 and S42 ring lines; Leopoldplatz on the U6 and U9 is 500 metres. Tram M13 and buses 120, 147 and 247 stop nearby. From Berlin Hauptbahnhof it is about fifteen minutes by U-Bahn or S-Bahn. Enter from Gerichtstrasse, not Plantagenstrasse.
The onsite passes cost EUR 420 to EUR 670, which is ordinary for a European conference. What is not ordinary is that money alone does not get you in: the seniority screen on the application is what produces a room of 500 in-house design leaders rather than 500 people who could afford a ticket. That is the product. The online pass at EUR 75 sells the content and none of the room, which is why the two prices are not comparable and why the sold-out onsite tiers do not become available at a higher price.
It is not an audited number. The 500 onsite figure and the several hundred online come from a third-party directory listing, Neon Moiré, and the organiser's own site does not publish a headcount at all. The two numbers that are actually anchored are the day capacities the organiser sells against: 110 spots on Super IC Day and 125 on Strategy and Biz Day. A conference that caps its workshop days at that size and then sells out all three tiers is telling you more about its scale than any round number would.
Because in 2026 the programme stopped treating AI as a track and started treating it as the job. A workshop on building agentic prototypes with Cursor or Claude Code, a keynote arguing that design systems now have models as consumers, another on shaping AI model behaviour as a design act: these are not design talks about AI, they are engineering-adjacent work done by designers. The roster shows the same shift in job titles, with a lead model designer and a design engineer on the main stage.
Official site: https://www.hatchconference.com/. Tickets and the full price list: https://tickets.hatchconference.com/. Satellite events: https://mixers.hatchconference.com/. Call for proposals: https://call.hatchconference.com/. General contact is info@hatchconference.com; the imprint names Damian Martone as responsible for content. The organiser also runs a newsletter sign-up on every page, a LinkedIn company page, an Instagram account and a YouTube channel where recordings are published after the six-month replay window.