Shift

Island

Sept 2 - 7

2025

Texel

Netherlands

Shift

Island

Shift Island is an all-inclusive experimental conference happening during Swift Island 2025. Happening from 1 till the 7th of September.

The Pitch

You are so much more more than the solutions you type, and so much more than the coder behind the screen. You are a whole person with interests and a physical body.

But life sometimes tend to fill itself with work, deadlines, nagging project managers and days seem to fly by without thinking and doing what we really want from life.

This is why we have created Shift Island. To let you experience the sweetness that life has to offer, to gently step outside your comfort-zone while being in a safe space.

The Format

Shift Island is a series of talks and activities spread out during our Swift Island conference. You'll get to experience morning exercise like running, yoga, meditation, you might even do a cold dip in the Waddenzee. There will be highly inspirational talks about subjects you had no idea existed, and there will be a hottub, beanbags and a lot of like-minded people.

The full experience.

Shift Island is best experienced with a lot of empty space, silence and time to reflect. This is why your stay is best experienced with an extra weekend on the island, to contemplate, reflect, integrate and embody what you learned. Research tell us this is true.

Speakers for 2025

Feli Bernutz

Feli is an iOS Engineer at Spotify and a strong advocate for accessibility and usability. She’s often seen at conferences creating sketchnotes of talks but occasionally, she switches perspectives and takes the speaker stage herself. With a love of learning and adventure, Feli approaches everything with a passion for the unexpected – including her pizza toppings, where pineapple always has a place.

Fennande van der Meulen

Fennande van der Meulen, with 25 years of experience in organizations under her belt, focuses on culture, change, workplace happiness, and social safety. With more than 10 years of experience in the field of workplace happiness, she is one of the most well-known experts in the Netherlands. She put Happy Office on the map and launched the International Week of Workplace Happiness in 2018, which has now spread across more than 55 countries. You can turn to her for an interactive session about how you can take control of your own workplace happiness and what role emotions play in this process.

Ryan McLeod

Ryan McLeod is a California-born interaction and game designer now based in the Netherlands. Driven to solve unconventional problems through novel interfaces, he created the no-touch, sensor driven puzzle game Blackbox. Blackbox’s fourth-wall-breaking iOS debut and evolutionary leap to visionOS earned Ryan not one, but two Apple Design Awards. When he isn’t building new puzzles, you might see him speeding around Amsterdam on his bike, foraging for ingredients in parks, and making ice cream.