Intersection 26
My firm &friends produced it with Intersection Group, the non-profit that owns the conference series and publishes EDGY. I was the producer. I handled the program, the website and the brand, and I gave the closing talk. The twist: we designed and ran the event with EDGY, the very language the conference is about (more on enterprise design and EDGY). Designing an enterprise design conference in front of enterprise designers: no pressure at all.
At a glance
- Dates
- October 7–9, 2026, after a virtual pre-conference on September 16
- Venue
- Espace Ax.c, Montréal
- Format
- Two conference days, then a practitioner day of workshops and case studies
- Program
- 31 sessions on site, 37 speakers
- Languages
- English, with a full day of bilingual programming
- Produced by
- &friends, with Intersection Group
- Website
- 2026.intersectionconf.com
The model, drawn
Two of the EDGY maps drawn from the model. The Milky Way shows the event as eight workstreams around one purpose. The blueprint follows an attendee from first sight to the published talks, with what had to run behind the scenes at each step.
Photos: Laurent Harel
The campaign
Every visual came from the same model: speakers, sessions and dates were pulled from the notes, then dropped into one Figma system.
Three principles I designed it around
A practitioner exchange to learn with experts
No sales pitch on stage, not even a paid one. Speakers talk to peers, as peers.
Local in the room, international in reach. The host comes first.
The ambition was international. A French-language track respected the host culture instead of translating it.
The event is a moment; the discipline lives all year
An event with no follow-up doesn't count as a success. That's why the talks were recorded, to be published afterwards.
What people said
From attendees' and speakers' posts in the week after the event.
What I love about Intersection Conference is that you quickly step outside your own discipline. […] I'm leaving with far more questions than answers. And honestly, that's probably the sign of an excellent conference.
[…] people who were so generous in sharing their experience. […] So much of the content was directly useful to the work I'm doing.
The cross-sector approach was truly refreshing. It had been a long time since I'd had such professionally nourishing conversations.
But what I'll remember first is the community. […] The event ran beautifully.
Montréal hosted an event of remarkable quality.
[…] a great reminder of how important it is to design change with people rather than for them.
From the model to the room
The same notes kept feeding everything downstream. For the three days themselves, the &friends team built an attendee hub on the event website, with the program, the Wi-Fi, restaurants and questions. They also ran live Q&A for the sessions. The session list came straight from the schedule.
AI helped us survive the micro-tasks, but it was never the base: the model, the people and the partners were.
Even the name badges came from the speaker list, then were engraved in wood.
How to re-invent an event with EDGY?
“You never design from nothing. You always redesign.”
The talk followed that idea through four chapters: Web à Québec in 2014, the WAQ and Interface years, Intersection 25 in Brussels, and Intersection 26 itself, which started from the EDGY model of the Brussels edition. Its closing thanks were the last words of the conference.
Most people think reinventing an event means changing the venue or hiring flashier speakers. The talk argued that the real issue was deeper. Most events run on old habits that no longer match economic reality or strategic ambition. They optimize the parts while the system drifts.
To change the outcome, you have to break the model. The session was a case study in systemic redesign. I showed how we used EDGY to rethink the event from the ground up. We mapped the tensions between our ambitions and our financial constraints, then made hard choices about what to keep and what to kill.
Where Intersection 26 is today
Intersection 26 took place in Montréal from October 7 to 9, 2026: the first edition of the global enterprise design conference held in North America. The event site is still online with the full program, and the virtual pre-conference session is on Intersection Group's YouTube channel. Sources: 2026.intersectionconf.com and intersection.group.
Credits
- Producer: program, website and brand
- Jean-Sébastien Daigle · &friends
- Venue and partners
- Éric Letarte · &friends
- Presidents
- Milan Guenther and Wolfgang Goebl · Intersection Group
- Brand guardian
- Dennis Middeke
- Attendee hub and live Q&A
- The &friends team
- Co-organizer and owner of the conference series
- Intersection Group
Volunteers and crew
They poured the drinks, took the photos and carried the boxes, and attended the conference in exchange.
- Marjorie Bédard
- Magdalena Göbl
- Laurent Harel
- Lucie
- Domenico Micheletti
- Mathieu Roy
- Natasha Thomas