UX Speakeasy is Southern California's largest UX design community — free monthly events, an open member directory, and a movement run entirely by volunteers. Here's how we serve that mission.
United by community and purpose, UX Speakeasy champions User Experience Design in Southern California. We connect people, share knowledge, and amplify local voices to shape a better future, by design.
UX Speakeasy is Southern California’s largest UX community—a volunteer-powered nonprofit connecting designers, researchers, writers, product people, and the organizations that need them. Through free events, shared resources, regional partnerships, and an open member network, we create the connections that help good people and good ideas move forward.
We serve both sides of the design economy. Practitioners gain knowledge, visibility, relationships, and opportunities to grow. Employers gain access to local talent, fresh thinking, and a stronger understanding of what effective UX can bring to their organizations. By bringing the two together, we strengthen the profession, the companies that depend on it, and the Southern California community we share.
UX Speakeasy at a monthly event
Free events and an open directory that turn strangers into your people.
Talks, workshops, and a video library that keep you sharp.
A stage for members to speak, host, and get seen.
UX Speakeasy carries forward a legacy of human-centered design advocacy in Southern California — one that stretches back decades before our founding in 2011.
The San Diego chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society takes shape at the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory, where psychologists study how sailors detect sonar signals — an early study of how people and machines work together.
Don Norman joins UC San Diego, taking up a post in the Psychology Department alongside the university’s newly forming Center for Human Information Processing.
Norman publishes The Psychology of Everyday Things — later retitled The Design of Everyday Things — still the top-rated book among UX practitioners today.
Apple names Don Norman its User Experience Architect — the first recorded use of the term in a professional job title.
The UI SIG is formed by Larry Marine, giving the region’s interface designers a place to gather.
The San Diego chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH is founded, gathering the region’s computer graphics and interactive systems community.
The San Diego chapter of ACM SIGCHI is founded, gathering the region’s human-computer interaction community — and takes the name SandCHI.
The UI SIG is renamed the User Experience SIG, a shift that reflects just how far Norman’s decade-old term has traveled.
UX Speakeasy is founded when 13 UX professionals in San Diego come together, determined to build the network their region is missing. Down the coast, OCUX takes shape in Orange County around the same need — a place to learn, connect, and advance the craft. Both become official chapters of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA): rooted in their own communities, part of a design movement taking shape around the world.
Each chapter develops its own character. UX Speakeasy grows up alongside San Diego’s craft brewery scene, favoring events where the room and the people in it matter as much as the program. Its unofficial motto — “Easy on the Speak and Heavy on the Easy” — says it best: serious about design, never precious about itself.
UX Speakeasy stages a conference at the San Diego Zoo, drawing more than 250 practitioners, employers, recruiters, and sponsors together in one place.
SandCHI steps outside its SIGCHI affiliation and becomes SDXD.
The UCSD Design Lab is founded by Don Norman, Hollan, and Scott Klemmer, extending the university’s reach into complex sociotechnical systems and interdisciplinary design.
UX Speakeasy becomes a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, formalized under the leadership of Chad Q. Martin.
The Design Forward Alliance is founded by the UCSD Design Lab, extending its work beyond campus.
SD Design Trek is formed, opening studio doors to early-career UX professionals.
UX Speakeasy signs a pledge alongside key partners, committing to help make San Diego the next World Design Capital.
The inaugural San Diego Design Week arrives, presented and organized by the Mingei International Museum.
UX Speakeasy joins as an Alliance partner in San Diego–Tijuana’s winning bid for World Design Capital 2024, helping secure the designation and build spaces where designers connect, grow, and elevate the impact of design.
A San Diego chapter of the Global Service Jam takes root, with support from UX Speakeasy.
The DDX (Design Drives X) conference lands in San Diego during Design Week.
UX Speakeasy and OCUX merge, uniting San Diego and Orange County as one Southern California design community.
UX Speakeasy launches a new website, debuting the first-ever SoCal UX Designer Directory and job board.
Our programming serves newcomers and design leaders, practitioners and employers, San Diego and Orange County alike. By connecting people, organizations, and ideas across the region, we help the whole Southern California design community learn, grow, and shape what comes next.
"It's the people. I've made close friends here—spent holidays, gone on vacations, and shared plenty of beers. Every event feels like social hour with old and new friends alike."
"Hosting the AI Conversations series with UX Speakeasy was time well spent. It gave us some quality time with San Diego's UX leaders, and we all left feeling energized."
"Today's co-working session was percolating with coffee, talks of AI, and the design practice of little to no interface as an interface solution."
