David Sward is Vice President of User Experience at Siemens, where he leads global UX strategy across a broad technology portfolio and drives the organisation’s shift toward design centric product development. He is an experienced UX executive with a long track record of building high performing, cross functional teams and embedding human centred methods into complex engineering environments.
Before joining Siemens, David held UX leadership roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Symantec, directing organisations of more than 120 designers, researchers, and strategists across the US, Europe, and India. Earlier in his career at Intel, he helped establish human centred design as a core part of new product development and co-created the IT Business Value Program.
David has held academic appointments at Arizona State University and the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and is the author of Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology.
Upcoming Talks
28 May 2026
When David arrived at Siemens he found not a lack of design systems but dozens of them, many locked inside long lived industrial products that will never be updated. He explains how Siemens created a single design language without enforcing one tech stack, how the team handles legacy products that stay in market for decades and why design systems break the moment acquisitions occur unless they are built to evolve. This is a rare look at design systems at true industrial scale.
Outcomes
• Create a migration model that improves consistency while accepting untouched legacy products
• Build a tech agnostic design language that survives acquisitions and diverse engineering environments
• Set clear expectations so teams deliver the expected experience without dictating delivery methods
• Track design system adoption and report progress at board level to maintain executive support