UX Lecture: Designing interactions between human and AI

Every button you click, every swipe you make—there's an algorithm watching, learning, responding. For designers, this changes everything. We're no longer just crafting interactions with systems; we're choreographing conversations with algorithms that can delight us or drive us to despair. What separates the smooth, rewarding experiences from the maddeningly frustrating ones? In this talk, we'll explore which interaction patterns help users feel genuinely in control of their AI tools, and in which contexts, what the usability problems are with many of the human-AI interactions, and how some interactions are really just smoke and mirrors: the dark patterns that create an illusion of agency while quietly manipulating behavior.

SPEAKER
Aletta Smits is professor of Human-Centered Technology at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences and assistant professor at Utrecht University. She is an expert in Human-AI interaction patterns and is in the process of building an extensive interdisciplinary pattern library for human-AI interactions. She also hosts the RAPPID 2026 conference this year, on bridging the gap between professional designers and academic design researchers.

HOST
Koos is an international strategic design agency with offices in Amsterdam and Dubai. For over 15 years, its team of researchers, designers and strategists has helped leading organisations such as NS, ING, Careem, Digicel, City of Amsterdam, and KNMI, navigate complexity and accelerate change through human-centered approaches. Combining service design, UX, and human-centered AI, Koos delivers products and services that are distinctive, future-proof, and grounded in real user needs.

PROGRAM
18:00 Doors open, food & drinks
18:30 Talk + Q&A
19:30 Drinks & networking
📸 Please keep in mind there will be pictures taken at the event. They will be uploaded to the meetup page and might be used on social media.

FORMAT
UX Lecture is a format where people from academia share their research results and methods with UX practitioners in order to close the gap between academia and industry.