2027 speakers
Rosa Vieira de Almeida
TALK
Staying with the tension: What UX cannot solve
Designers are used to making sense of messy systems. We research, define, name and simplify. But what happens when the tensions we encounter aren’t something UX can solve?
That’s the question Rosa Vieira de Almeida experienced firsthand. After a year designing a commercial marketplace for an open-source ecosystem, she thought the problem was well understood—until launch approached, and a user described the work as “enshittification.”
It didn’t end there: after launch, some of the strongest criticism wasn’t about the experience, but about what introducing a commercial layer represented for an open-source community. If UX couldn’t resolve that tension, the challenge became how to keep designing without smoothing it away.
This talk explores:
What changes when user frustration is rooted in something UX cannot solve
How to keep unresolved tensions present in the design process
How to create clarity without papering over the contradictions underneath
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Rosa Vieira de Almeida (she/her) is a UX content designer at Moodle, with a background in research and academia.
Her wider work spans commercial projects in fintech and edtech, as well as community projects around migrant rights, housing justice, and deathcare.
She is a fan of most humans and words, an enthusiast of systems, and particularly interested in the possibilities—and limits—of language for making sense of the world around us.