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There was a time when people predicted the demise of the conference, digital channels ending the need for audiences to come together in the same physical place. In fact, the reverse has happened, in spite of our economic woes more people are finding the time and money to get out of the office and go to events. But their reasons for attending and what they want from a conference have changed.

Successful event organisers need to understand the changing dynamic of conference attendance and respond with a new type of exciting, brave and fit-for purpose events – what might be referred to as new conferencing.

So, firstly what are the new (and not so new) drivers behind conference attendance?

1) Focus

The brilliant book ‘The way we’re working isn’t working’ highlights just how distracting the modern work place is. Increasingly conferences offer that rare chance to get away from the office and spend time thinking about the things that really matter.

2) Collaborate

Pre-internet conferences had a role to play in simply sharing inspiration. Today we’re overwhelmed by the amount of inspiration we receive, whether through twitter or our RSS feed. People go to a conference not simply to hear more inspiration but to do something with that inspiration, to discuss it, to apply it to some scenarios, to test out a few half-baked thoughts on other attendees.

3) Contribute

Thanks to blogging and forums and social media many of us are more confident about creating our own content. Where in the past people were largely happy to go along to conferences listen and maybe tentatively ask a question, today a growing sector of the audience want to help shape the agenda (both in advance and on the day) and have a platform for their own voice.

4) Epi-centre of an idea

Ideas first raised at conferences are given oxygen by the online conversations that continue around them. As the number of digital channels and the sheer volume of discussion around conferences grow so does their ability to catalyze innovation. People are attracted to the very best events to be at the epi-centre of new thinking.

5) Networking

Ok, so people have always gone to events to network but in the age of digital social networking real world connections are becoming ever more highly valued.

So how can those of us who create events for internal and business audiences, ensure that we are meeting these changing audience needs? Here are five things to think about:

1) Build more hallways

Architects use the expression ‘collision zones’ to describe the important areas in buildings where people bump into each other and chat. Conference spaces should be designed in the same way to help people network and collaborate.

2) Drop a few speakers

Too often conferences are jam packed with presentations and workshops and don’t leave enough time for delegates to chat amongst themselves. Think about longer lunches and breaks, and more time for networking.

3) Open up the agenda

Most people have heard of unconferences – events organised around a particular topic that turn over the entire agenda to the audience and encourage people to host their own sessions on areas of interest to them. Whilst this might not be right for your event, the spirit of pushing boundaries and turning attendees into participants is a good one. Perhaps you could have a part of the day where groups of people facing similar challenges can get together and share experiences?

4) Try some new technology

The printed conference pack will soon be a thing of the past replaced by event Apps that not only supply the information people need but help them hook up with other attendees and contribute questions and opinions. At the same time virtual conference technologies are getting much better at helping remote audiences play an active part in an event. You should try out some of this stuff.

5) Make it fun

As many of us become more desk bound, we crave an excuse to get out and have some fun. Conferences should be the antidote to the flat-lining corporate HQ. How about trying some new presentation formats such Pecha Kucha, could you use gamification as a way to involve the audience in the content?

Audiences are willing you to do something different, hopefully this list is a useful start-point.

The Secret Policeman’s Ball

We’re very pleased to be involved with The Secret Policeman’s Ball as part of an inter-agency team. The Ball takes place at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on March 4th, the stellar line up of A-listers includes Coldplay, Mumford and Sons, Jon Stewart and Russell Brand. .

Tree Envy

Choosing a Christmas tree used to be a simple three way decision: with roots, without roots or plastic. Not any longer. You’ve got the responsive social media tree, the art installation tree, the product inspired tree (see Jack Daniel’s barrel tree or Lego’s St Pancras tree), the recycled material tree, and so it goes on. Here are some of our favourites.

Not sure why, but then again why not? It’s a smoke breathing Godzilla tree for Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall in Tokyo.

Closer to home, you’ll find this amazing 38ft Lego tree at St Pancras Station.

Complete with QR code baubles.

Designed by Paprika this ice tree sculpture features 300 recycled water bottles and hangs in the window of a Montreal furniture store.

Sharp’s 2008 tree at New York’s Grand Central Station made up of different sized plasma screens synchronised to show falling snow flakes and the like was rather special.

This year Jack Daniels have created their 26ft Holiday Barrel Tree and used it as content for an integrated campaign developed by Arnold Worldwide.

Another one in the recycled bottle mode, artist Jolanta Smidtiene used a staggering 40,000 bottles to create this gorgeous glowing tree in Lithuania.

42ft from ground to fairy!

Electric Tree – as part of his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami Mark Handforth has lit this giant banyan tree.

Madrid’s 2007 animated Pac-Man tree (photo by alvarezperea).

If all this inventiveness has left you feeling worn out, you could always just knock a few books over.

Happy Christmas.

Zee

Rachel took the opportunity of a recent recce in Liverpool to check out Kurt Hentschläger’s installation Zee. This is what she had to say about it.

The Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger is known for creating installations which challenge perceptions through the use of innovative audiovisual techniques. Zee, which has been described as ‘mind-altering’, is no exception, and makes for a unique and powerful sensory experience.

The installation takes place within a room filled with dense fog; before entering a disclaimer must be signed such is the intensity of what is to come. Visitors must guide themselves through the space using a rope; the room becomes increasingly obscure, to the point that you can only see a few inches ahead of you. Strobe lights are then played into the space through the fog.

The effect of this is a psychedelic and hypnotic experience in which the line between dreams and reality becomes blurred due to the intensity of the light show combined with a feeling of total disembodiment. The kaleidoscopic images fill your entire vision, whilst everything around you, including your self disappears into the fog.

The experience has some similarities with Anthony Gormely’s ‘A Walk in a Cloud of Mist’ which was shown at the Hayward Gallery a couple of years ago.

There is a video here of people expressing what if feels like to experience Zee.

Zee will be showing at FACT, Liverpool until the 27th November.

Curtain Call

The Roundhouse was built as a turntable for trains and since first becoming a performance space in the sixties people having been looking for clever ways to use its roundness. Ron Arad’s Curtain Call is a 360 degree installation celebrating five years since the venue was spruced up and reopened.

50km of translucent silicon tubing hangs from a circular steel rig creating a shimmering fluid screen, enveloping the audience in a cocoon of projected imagery. A dozen artists have created work to play on Ron Arad’s curtain including; David Shrigley, Mat Collishaw and Hussien Chalayan.

There is something about the Roundhouse that is intrinsically fun and what makes Arad’s installation both interactive and joyous is that you walk through the screen; parting the silicon tubing like a beaded curtain hanging behind the counter in a corner shop. Where screens are normally static this one waves as people come and go and kids try to distort the projected image.

Once inside the screen you sit on the floor and watch the various films unfold around you, some are better than others but what challenges your attention span is sitting on the floor, a bean bag would have been bliss. In the programme notes, Arad talks about creating ‘an easy spectacle’ something that is really straightforward to experience and he’s achieved this in spades. People do three things; sit and watch from the inside of the screen, jiggle the silicon tubing to affect the image and take a stroll round the outside to look at it from the other side.

Whilst it is a straightforward experience it is technically complex. Arad worked with Blitz Communications – well-known to those of us in the event world – it took six months to achieve this luminous curtain and uses twelve projectors. Normally of course the technical crew are hidden away, not here, Blitz’s mission control with its twelve computers and twelve monitoring screens is effectively an installation in its own right.

If you get a chance head along to the Roundhouse to see this amazing installation before the curtain comes down. Oh and here and here you’ll find some videos I shot.

Narrative in Practice

Attending a conference on a sunny Saturday takes some commitment, but the near capacity crowd who trooped through the heat to last weekend’s Narrative in Practice event made the right choice. Organised by two Saint Martins graduates, Despina Hadjilouca and Nina Honiball, it was another example of people with a passion taking the plunge and putting on their own event. Their enthusiasm for the topic, good connections to a like-minded audience and the resulting ability to attract and knit brilliant speakers into a coherent structure are all reasons why the ‘amateur’ conference is so much more rewarding than the mega-bucks conferences organised by trade magazines.

At Live Union when we’re creating events we devise an ‘event narrative’ and it was intriguing to hear how people in disciplines such as architecture, museum design and public art use a similar process.

A short sidebar – there is an important difference between story and narrative. Story is what is told, narrative expresses the dynamic; the story and the way in which it is told. In this way narratives can be seen to have five components: author, story, telling, audience and context.

Amongst the brilliant speakers there were two who particularly resonated in showing how narrative can be a useful lens through which to design real world experiences. Scott Burnham has a dream job, he creates urban design projects – the fun stuff as opposed to roundabouts and one-way systems.

photo by anjens

With Stafan Sagmeister he produced an installation in Amsterdam made with 300,000 eurocent coins individually laid out to read ‘obsessions make my life worse and my work better’.

photo by anjens

photo by Adam Chapman

The coins had a blue sticker on their reverse enabling people to come along and remix the design by turning them over.

photo by anjens

The installation was left overnight only for the Amsterdam police department to sweep it up in a kind hearted bid to protect it from being stolen.

photo by anjens

This is exactly what Scott’s work is about, placing something in a public space and then recording the unpredictable stories that unfold.

photo by scottburnham

Other projects Scott referenced were an open source sculpture project by Marti Guixe called Sculpt Me Point featuring a block of soft cement that people could chip away at creating their own artworks and NL Architects Moving Forest (trees in shopping trolleys) letting the public express where they think greenery should be within the city.

photo by jasoneppink

photo by scottburnham

Julia Pitts is Manager for Narrative Environments at the Science Museum. Starting with a big robust idea, such as ‘what makes you, you’, Julia showed the process by which the museum design content into a coherent visitor experience. A remarkably simple working process is used to order and map vast amounts of content in a way that ensures the visitor can zoom in on a particular story and overlay their own experience whilst linking back to the big idea. It is the solidity of the narrative that makes the Science Museum’s multi-media exhibitions so compelling. Interestingly Julia hinted that the museum are pushing greater audience involvement in the development of content which has interesting parallels for how narratives evolve when working with businesses.

Beyond Scott and Julia’s talks the event produced many fascinating examples of narrative being used within the creative process. There is a quote by the film director Brian De Palma in the event’s specially produced newspaper that sums it all up “People don’t see the world before their eyes until it’s put in a narrative.”

somewhereto_

We recently created a series of launch events for a major Olympic Legacy Trust project. somewhereto_ will give 16-25 year-olds access to space to do the things they love whether sport, culture or art. The events took place in London and Newcastle, these photos are from the wonderful Shunt theatre space in Bermondsey.

Extending the platform

Have you attended a virtual or hybrid event yet? If not, the chances are that you will sooner or later.

First a quick clarification of what they are:

Virtual = non physical events that facilitate a shared online real time experience, normally with post event on-demand functionality.

Hybrid = a real world event that also offers people the chance to participate remotely via an online event interface.

Not surprisingly a lot of the discussion around hybrid and virtual events focuses on the technology used to deliver them, a useful resource for this, and indeed for this area in general is US company The Virtual Edge Institute.

Purely virtual events have interesting roles to play, particularly if you’re trying to test the water with a new concept, but as anyone who’s taken part in a virtual event knows they suffer from not having a live audience. It’s a bit like watching a film of a band playing in a studio versus a film of them live at a the Apollo.

Taking a hybrid approach though makes perfect sense. Firstly, there are the logistical, budgetary and environmental reasons why people might not be predisposed to attending your event in person. Also, as a recent survey reported on MeetingsReview makes clear, offering people the chance to try your event remotely makes them more likely to attend in person in future. Reassuring it doesn’t seem that the chance to attend remotely cannibalises physical attendance, rather it grows the universe of your total audience. There is also some evidence that offering a simultaneous virtual experience increases the satisfaction of those attending in person.

Other benefits of adding a virtual element are the opportunity to better use the event content within your social media and the analytical tools that can measure how the audience respond to event content; do they download a presentation, request more information, email an enquiry – how quickly do they act and where in the consideration cycle are they?

Some recommendations for producing good hybrid content include the following:

Don’t treat the audience as ‘one’. As well as some entirely shared experiences, provide different content opportunities for real world and virtual audiences. Cisco Live did this particularly well with virtual online chat opportunities with presenters once they’ve finished on stage. They also offered what they called ‘livesim’ content as a value add for the virtual audience – previously recorded presentations streamed with a comments feed from the online audience.

Finally – get the online interface right. There are many terrible examples of stilted avatars poncing around in visually offensive ‘graphic worlds’.

Where all this becomes even more fun is when you add in a cross-located live audience situated in different physical locations and enable them to share content and work on simultaneous problem solving along with the virtual audience. This is a challenge we’re working on at the moment – we’ll keep you posted on how we get on!

Coming to a screen near you

We’re surrounded by all manner of digital screens: Kindles, ipads, smart phones, home cinemas, billboards. Within a few years even mundane consumer goods will have screens designed into them. And then there are the new ways of interacting with screens: facial recognition, motion tracking, augmented reality and so on.

Despite the fact that the screen has traditionally been the physical and communication centrepiece of business events, conferences have on the whole been slow to take up these new technologies.

Here we look at four ways in which screens can be used to share information and help presenters and audiences interact. We’re not interested in technology for technology’s sake, rather we’re keen to make events more engaging, productive and generally valuable to those taking part in them.

1) Prezi
A presentation tool that has one large advantage over PowerPoint and Keynote, it is non linear. Rather than having to slice and dice your thoughts into a series of individual slides you can move around an infinite canvass, zooming in and out, returning to central points and navigating the audience around what is in effect a mind map. It is incredibly easy to use, have a go and see what you think.

2) Interactive Screens
The traditional projection screen and PowerPoint combo doesn’t encourage audience interaction. The presenter has scripted the journey and set down a path along which the presentation must travel. Two readily available technologies change this. The first is widely used in schools; interactive projectors and pens allow presenters to write on any surface, annotate presentations in response to audience feedback, work collaboratively with the audience and save the results.

The second is the development of interactive foil, which can be applied to plasma screens to turn them into touch screens or combined with rear projection to turn conference screens into giant touch sensitive tablets.

3) Sifteo Cubes
Ok, so this one isn’t available in the UK yet but we’re excited about it and think it has with huge potential for events. Sifteo Cubes are an example of a type of computer interface better matched to how our brains work. In short, each cube has a motion sensor, wireless data input and reacts to the cubes around it. Here’s a short TED talk from a couple of years ago which brings the concept to life.

Imagine the opportunities for workshopping business challenges within events, the cubes could be programmed with different types of business specific data, teams of people working together to find the ideal solution. The moderator would be able to change and update the information read by each cube, continually evolving the challenge and resetting goals. Equally the content of each set of cubes could be fed back to the main screen.

We can’t wait to get our hands on some of the little critters.

4) Holographic Presentations
You’ve probably heard of Musion, they’re the people who brought the Gorillaz to life for stadium audiences. We’ll they can do the same for your conference, enabling you to source presenters from around the world without them having to travel. If you imagine this turns your CEO into a stilted Max Headroom type character you couldn’t be more wrong, the video on this page shows just how strong this method of communication can be.

Legacy Trust appointment

We’re really pleased to announce that we’ve been appointed to work with Olympic Legacy Trust project somewhereto. A key project of the Cultural Olympiad, somewhereto will connect young people with space holders in their region, enabling them to do the things they are passionate about.

The project is being delivered by youth communications agency Livity in collaboration with Channel 4, we look forward to working with them both to create great live experiences around the UK in the lead up to 2012.

C&IT magazine has done a nice write up about the appointment here.