Onze Amerikaanse collega's van EventManagerBlog organiseerden een online evenement. Managing the Virtual Experience. Een 3 uur durend online event waar gekeken werd naar hoe evenementen omgezet kunnen worden naar online ervaringen. Één van de sprekers was Ruud Janssen, oprichter van het Event Design Collective. Het Event Design collective biedt een visuele tool voor het ontwerpen van evenementen. Met EDCO kun je duidelijk maken hoe een evenement waarde creëert.
 

Ontwerp nooit alleen

Als je gedrag wilt veranderen, moet je bereid zijn jouw gedrag te veranderen. De manier waarop we evenementen maken, is verbroken en dit is wat we hier proberen op te lossen. De bouwstenen van het eventcanvas kunnen op elk type event worden toegepast. Eerst moet u de gedragsverandering die u wilt maken uitzoeken, vervolgens de beperkingen definiëren die u in die verandering moet opnemen en ten slotte prototypen van mogelijke oplossingen.

Wanneer u het proces doorloopt, kan het er ongeveer zo uitzien:
1. Maak een lange lijst van belanghebbenden
2. Bepaal wie een inzet heeft
3. Zoek uit wie veel macht en interesse heeft
4. Analyseer die inzet
5. Schrijf de ontwerpbeperkingen op binnen het ontwerpkader
6. Maak een prototype van de mogelijke oplossingen om uiteindelijk met uw evenementverhaal te komen



The Event Canvas for Experience Design Events involve many different aspects, from event sponsorship, to the participation journey, security, hygiene, catering, speakers, event ownership, and the host city, or in this case, the platform that you’re using to host it. This complexity is compounded when you have to adapt to a new format and translate the social layers, sense of direction, feedback, listening, need for action, etc. — all of this can be quite stressful for some.

It’s important to accept the situation and focus on moving forward, and then you can find stability in your team as you create a new narrative on different platforms.

We will need to keep experimenting with online and hybrid events and figuring out the pathways to success. The first thing you need is a process. A process leads to an outcome, and without a process, there’s a giant set of confusions. First of all, you need to consciously design an event and articulate the event story in a 60-second format.

You also need to bring your team together. Allot time for event design before you go into execution mode and spending. You need to spend this time in the beginning figuring out what you need, steeping in the challenges you’re trying to solve and really discovering from various perspectives how that will work as you move forward.

If you’re not the event owner, how can you justify claiming that time to them? The issue is that they might not have a fully clear idea of what they’re asking of you, and it falls on you and your team to manage and coordinate the execution of that event.

This is where you articulate the change, define the event framework with all the restrictions, and create the actual prototypes. That leads to the event canvas.
 

The event canvas is available in 14 languages for free at eventcanvas.org. You can also access the first hundred pages of the handbook, which give you instructions on how to use it, as well as guiding questions on the event canvas.?
 

Events create value through behavior change from entry to exit for multiple stakeholders who may have different types of behavior changes. Your team needs to know exactly what they’re doing and to think collaboratively to bring that together. The event canvas exists to get everyone on the same page.

Never Design Alone

If you want to change behaviors, you need to be ready to change yours.

The way we create events is broken, and this is what we’re trying to fix here. The building blocks of the event canvas can be applied to any type of event. First, you have to figure out the change in behavior you want to make, then define any restrictions you need to incorporate into that change, and finally prototype potential solutions.

When you go through the process, it can look something like this:

1. Build a long list of stakeholders
2. Define who has a stake
3. Figure out who has high power and high interest
4. Analyze those stakes
5. Write up the design restrictions within the design framework
6. Prototype the potential solutions to ultimately come out with your event narrative

If a group of people do that together, and perhaps use some role cards to make that process fun, ultimately what you can do is leverage the brainpower of the group to spend that time very wisely.

The moral of the story is never design alone. This is not a solo sport.
 

Map Out Your Strategy

But how do you design at the speed of change when change is going so quickly?

Study what these events are doing, and map out things that you think would work for your event, as well as things that don’t currently work. We have these types of galleries for all the current events and past events we have designed. Study what these events are doing, and map out things that you think would work for your event, as well as things that don’t currently work. We have these types of galleries for all the current events and past events we have designed.

Then, we map them on the axis as you see here from structure and virtuality, from self-organizer to highly defined, and from face-to-face offline to remote online. All of these bubbles that you see are formats, event brands, or case studies that move along these axes in a certain direction. They grow, they shrink, they move from being more selforganizing to more highly defined, or from offline to online as we’ve seen recently with many of the events. And all of these changes have been documented in research, how-to guides, and case studies that are made available in the report that you will get after this.

Virtual and Hybrid Event Complexity

So what’s changing for the event professional? Well, as you can see, teams and people are changing. Based on a study from 2012, some of the roles that a hybrid event team needs include production director, creative director, technical director, digital strategist, consultant, emcees, marketing managers, and educators. All these roles are significant in the future.

With hybrid events, you can play with space and time. You can have the event in the same place at the same time, in multiple places simultaneously, spread the event out in a given location over a longer period of time, etc.

And you have these modularities of building blocks to remote, face to face, studio events without audiences (or small audiences), and then online individuals. Then, we have all the connectivity from realtime oneway broadcasts to two-way connections to on-demand broadcast streams to realtime. This is how we can play with the various modularities of connecting your event in various ways to pods, studios, and individuals across the planet. Then you’re dealing with complex time zones and the most complex thing, the audio.