Director of Product Design
at
Mojang Studios

Orvar Halldorsson

About the speaker

Orvar believes the best digital products feel less like software and more like places people want to return to, with familiar and meaningful experiences shaped by deep empathy for players and creators. For more than 20 years, he has worked where creative direction, product strategy, and user experience meet, helping teams turn complex systems into intuitive and joyful experiences for millions of people.

Orvar is Director of Product Design at Mojang Studios, where he leads Product Design within Minecraft Gaming Experiences. His multidisciplinary team includes Product Designers, UX Designers, Visual Designers, Game Designers and Producers. Together they shape experiences across the Minecraft ecosystem for players, content creators, and partners. He also champions AI-assisted and agentic design practices that speed up experimentation, exploration and prototyping while keeping creative judgment and reasoning human-led.

Before Mojang, Orvar was Creative Director at Xbox, where he led design for the console dashboard, platform experiences, and accessories. Before that, as UI/UX Director at Bungie, he led UI/UX of the Destiny franchise. Earlier he was UX and Design Director for EVE Online at CCP Games. Since 2020 he has been a Senior Lecturer in UX Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology.