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 joined Siemens, he faced the situation of many specialized design systems, each tailored for highly complex industrial products with “very” long product lifecyles. In this talk, he will take you through the incredibly complex journey of creating one single Design Language for all Siemens products, and why Siemens decided to open source all design assets. He will give you insights, why it´s not a good idea to enforce only one tech stack, how his team handles legacy products that stay in market for decades, and why design systems break the moment acquisitions occur, unless the system is built to evolve. This is a rare look at design systems at a truly industrial scale.