Marijke Jorritsma is passionate about pushing the boundaries of where design can go. As a Design Manager and Product Strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she works at the intersection of augmented reality, AI, and space exploration—helping to reimagine how robotic spacecraft are designed and operated.
Beyond her work at NASA, Marijke consults with a wide range of organizations—from Major League Baseball’s quantitative analytics teams, advising on how design can contribute to a World Series win, to film production companies exploring human-centered AI that can spot sleeper hits in stacks of scripts.
Wherever the challenge, she champions design as a critical tool for shaping the future.
Upcoming Talks
13 May 2025
How UX and design professionals can be strategic change-makers in unstable environments, ensuring user needs, ethical considerations, and human-centered values aren’t lost amid layoffs, shifting priorities, and leadership changes.
Design Manager and Lead User Experience Designer
14 May 2025
In many organizations, UX is still viewed as a finishing touch - brought in late to improve the look and feel of a product. But in complex organizations, UX is evolving into something much more powerful: a strategic function that shapes how teams work, make decisions, and deliver lasting impact.
In this talk, Marijke Jorritsma shares what it takes to embed UX meaningfully in deeply technical, complex organization. Drawing from years of experience working across disciplines, she’ll explore how UX contributes far beyond the user interface—through service design, systems thinking, and close collaboration with engineering, product, and operations.
This talk is for anyone working cross-functionally who wants to:
- Understand how UX can influence systems, workflows, and strategy—not just screens
- Collaborate more effectively with design in technical, high-complexity contexts
- Break down silos between design, engineering, and product thinking
- Learn how to co-create solutions that are not only usable—but adopted, sustainable, and scalable
- Reframe UX as a partner in innovation, not just execution
Whether you’re building software, shaping policy, or leading programs, this session will offer practical takeaways on how to partner with UX to create more resilient, human-centered systems—together.
Design Manager and Lead User Experience Designer
Past Talks
17 May 2023
Every product will contain some form of AI going forward. This poses two challenges for product teams: how to work with AI and how to work if there is AI.
How to work with AI
There is a big UI shift away from menus towards more prompt focussed applications. What are the new patterns that teams need to learn?
How to work if there is AI
Copilot is writing 40% of the code that people write. Generative UI apps are able to create Figma editable mockups from prompts. How will the roles within a team shift when AI’s can start taking on more of the work.
