The conference started in 2014 after an accident and a series of events that led to Helle Martens being laid off her job as senior UX’er. She decided to start her own company, and started joking that she wanted to host a conference on UX and design. About a year later, things suddenly fell into place, and she sold 144 tickets to her first event in March 2015. 2024 will be the 10th UX Copenhagen® conference. The themes so far have been: Customer Experience; Designing for Emotions and Trust; Designing for Empowerment; Ethics and the Role of the User Experience Designer; Consent & Privacy, and Influence & Designing for Good, Commoning, Creating a Culture Change, Invisibility, and for 2024, the theme is “Degrowth and Consumerism” Every year, the conference has about 200 participants of whom 76% are international. 50% of the audience are “UX Designers” (interaction designers, service designers, UI designers, content designers etc.), and 25% are managers (UX Lead, Head of Design, Head of Software Development, etc.). The rest are marketing folks, graphical designers, and other creatives. It’s a great networking event with a really wonderful crowd of participants and speakers. Helle runs the conference pretty much on her own. She has certain principles, for example she insists on having at least 50% women speakers, and as many different points of view as possible presented on stage. She always has at least one “new/junior speaker” on stage each year, and tries to promote charities, new startups, and initiatives that promote UX and doing good. The budget for the conference is solely based on ticket sales and (very few) company sponsorships, so she doesn’t have a lot to give. She does her best to share what she can though, and is adamant that both the speakers and she feels that what they agree upon is fair.