Philip Rusev has never really been a designer — not in the way most people imagine when they hear the word. No obsession with beautiful Dribbble shots or pixel-perfect Behance projects. What has always driven him is a deep, almost stubborn need to understand why problems exist and whether they’re actually worth solving.
Process, people, and problems. Observing, thinking, discussing. Getting a handful of people who care deeply in a whiteboard room and refusing to leave until we all agree on a hypothesis and next steps. That’s been his practice — whether designing complex B2B SaaS products at Yotpo and the World Bank, teaching and mentoring 200+ designers at Telerik Academy and the American University in Bulgaria, or founding an early-stage design agency built around agentic AI workflows.
Now he’s obsessed with AI — not because it makes design faster, but because it might finally let him stop doing the parts of the job he never liked that much, and focus entirely on what he always believed mattered most. Finding problems worth solving. And actually solving them.
Combined theme at UX Sofia 2026
From Discovery to Delivery — and Back Again
Philip’s participation at UX Sofia 2026 pairs a 20-minute talk with a 4-hour hands-on workshop. Together they form a single arc:
- Role shift. First, a shift in how designers understand their role in the age of AI,
- New experience. Then a lived experience of what that new role looks and feels like in practice.
The shared thesis: for too long, designers have been forced to live in delivery — the execution, the making, the craft. Not because it was meaningful, but because technology left no choice. AI changes that. It’s time to return to where the real value has always been: discovery. Understanding people. Finding the right problems. Solving them.
The workshop is where you feel it. The talk is where you understand it.