Europe's annual conference for senior in-house design teams: design craft, AI and strategic design direction across three curated days at Silent Green Berlin.
Hatch Conference is a three-day annual conference for experienced UX and product designers and design leaders, held at Silent Green Kulturquartier in Berlin. The event is deliberately small and curated, covering design craft, AI in product design, accessibility, design systems, UX strategy and strategic design direction. It runs a structured onsite programme across three distinct days plus an online stream for the keynote day. It sits within the developer and AI engineering circuit tracked by Events Index, which also follows adjacent design and web fixtures such as SmashingConf Freiburg and the Web Engineering Summit.
The programme addresses the specific pressures facing senior design professionals inside product organisations: operating alongside engineering and business stakeholders, maintaining craft standards at scale and navigating the integration of AI tools into design workflows.
The 2026 edition is structured as three sequential days, each with a distinct format and its own ticket:
Topics across the three days include design craft fundamentals, AI's role in product design, accessibility practice, design systems at scale, UX strategy and business thinking for design leaders. The organiser states that speakers are selected for the specific topic they can deliver rather than their audience size, which shapes a roster weighted toward practising design leaders over conference-circuit regulars. This positioning aligns Hatch with the practitioner-first tracks that Events Index follows across the developer and AI engineering circuit.
The Conference Day keynote roster spans senior practitioners from product companies, independent design firms and AI-native startups. Confirmed speakers include:
Workshop and lab facilitators across the two workshop days add further names, including Dagmar Glow and Veronica Ambrosini (90 Minute Labs), Thijs Kraan (Narratif), Tobias Kauer (Celonis) and Mathieu Ritter (Undiscovered). The presence of AI-native roles, from a Model Designer at Nothing Fancy AI to a Lead Model Designer formerly at Block, signals how far AI has moved into the design job itself rather than sitting as a single side topic. Designers comparing options on the developer and AI engineering circuit can also track SmashingConf Freiburg for a web and CSS craft angle in the same month.
Silent Green Kulturquartier is a cultural venue in the Wedding district of central-north Berlin, housed in a converted crematorium complex from the early twentieth century at Gerichtstrasse 37. The industrial architecture, indoor stages and outdoor spaces make it a distinctive and intimate setting relative to conventional conference centres, closer to a design festival than a corporate venue. Its contained capacity is part of the event's design: the onsite programme is capped rather than scaled, which is why passes sell out ahead of the dates.
The event is targeted at experienced in-house designers: senior product designers, UX designers, design managers, design directors and Chief Design Officers working within product companies. Independent freelancers and agency designers also attend, but the programme is angled toward team and organisational contexts. The organiser positions it as a conference for senior design professionals rather than an entry-level or student event.
The onsite capacity is intentionally limited to maintain the conference's character as a curated gathering, with the Conference Day capped at roughly 500 seats and the workshop days smaller still. All three onsite passes for 2026 are sold out. Waitlist registration is available through the Hatch website.
Online tickets provide access to the live stream of the Conference Day on 18 September, plus access to the recordings for six months afterward. Single online tickets are EUR 75; bundle options are EUR 300 for five and EUR 500 for ten, suited to team viewing. All online prices are quoted before 19% German VAT.
Yes. Hatch runs an open call for proposals for speakers and facilitators; for the 2026 edition the submission deadline was 15 February 2026. Selection is curated by the Hatch team, and the organiser states that each speaker is chosen for a specific topic they can uniquely deliver. Check the official website for the next edition's call.
Hatch Conference is Europe's annual conference for senior in-house design teams, a deliberately small and curated three-day event at Silent Green Berlin covering design craft, AI and design strategy. The sold-out onsite programme and the low online price point reflect a positioning decision: high quality over high volume. For design leaders who want peer-level conversation rather than vendor demos, it occupies a gap left by larger technology conferences that treat design as a secondary track, a gap Events Index also maps across the developer and AI engineering circuit and against fixtures like the Web Engineering Summit.
Onsite tickets are sold out for 2026; waitlist registration is available at hatchconference.com. The onsite structure priced each day separately:
| Ticket type | Price (EUR, ex VAT) | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Super IC Day (16 Sept, 1 full-day workshop) | 550 | Sold out |
| Strategy & Business Day (17 Sept, 2 half-day workshops) | 670 | Sold out |
| Conference Day (18 Sept, keynote) | 420 | Sold out |
| 3 Day Pass (all days plus workshops) | 1,300 | Sold out |
| Online single (stream plus 6-month recordings) | 75 | Available |
| Online 5-bundle | 300 | Available |
| Online 10-bundle | 500 | Available |
All prices are listed before 19% German VAT; confirm the VAT treatment at checkout. Online remains the only open route to the 2026 content. Upcoming EMEA design and engineering events are tracked on the Events Index upcoming events page.
Hatch is a small, curated professional conference rather than a general-interest news event, and it does not attract mainstream press coverage in the way a large trade show does. No attributable third-party press reporting from named outlets was found during this verification pass, so this section documents the public reception honestly rather than inventing coverage.
The venue sits in the Wedding district at Gerichtstrasse 37. It is accessible by U-Bahn (Pankstrasse on the U8 line) and by several bus routes, roughly 25 minutes from central Berlin by public transport.
The venue is in Wedding. A range of hotels are available in Wedding and in adjacent Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Berlin's public transport connections are good, so central accommodation works well for reaching the venue each morning.
Yes for online ticket holders. The single online pass includes the live stream of the Conference Day plus access to the recordings for six months. Onsite Conference Day passes also include recording access afterward. Workshop-day sessions are hands-on and not part of the streamed programme.
| Official website | https://www.hatchconference.com/ |
| Speakers | https://www.hatchconference.com/speakers |
| Tickets | https://tickets.hatchconference.com/ |
| Call for proposals | https://call.hatchconference.com/ |
| Developer and AI engineering circuit (Events Index) | /developer-ai.html |
| Upcoming EMEA events (Events Index) | /upcoming.html |