Excerpt from Intentional Event Design, A Professional Opportunity (2017)
Create from Trust
“To use an event to deliver on objectives in a purposeful and innovative manner starts with true creative ideas rooted in collaboration, trust, an understanding of culture and appetite for experience creation. When we hire interior designers or architects, we look at a portfolio of previous work. We ask questions about what makes them tick, and find a person or organization that has a perceived best fit with us to meet our style and needs. Usually, the decision to work with them is made before you begin your design. We need to apply this to events. When the requirement is for a transformational experience using an event, you need to design from a place of deep understanding on both sides. The clients need to know they have the “right” team in place for the task. As we know from experience, each event requires its own team, an assembly of collaboration experts with specific skills and a passion for the project. Solving problems with communal creativity is one of the greatest joys in being an event designer. It is indeed what keeps most of us doing it.
We continue to see turbulent economic and environmental conditions in the world and facing these unexpected challenges requires resiliency and innovation for organizations to flourish. For our clients and our own companies, we must find ways to harness our own style of creativity, and collaborate to create a future where every event leaves the people and destinations we touch richer for the experience.“
I wrote the above paragraph in 2017. Doesn’t it seem like that was foreshadowing! We all now look back fondly on those years of 2017 to 2019 as the ‘busy, happy years’ where demand was high for all the services, travel was off the charts for many of us and 2020 was looking for many to be a ‘best ever year’ in hospitality and travel. Now that the brakes have been screeched on, eased off, pumped back on borders, venues, and seemingly life in general, finding creative ways to travel and meet safely – whatever that means depending on the comfort level of the participant – is an ongoing challenge. We CRAVE time with family, friends and yes strangers sharing a collective experience again. We can’t imagine being as close together as we were in the picture above, as Kando events created a cheese fondue on a mountaintop where the guests were eating at tables carved of snow and sitting on fur covered benches also carved of snow. It was so many together. It was also for many an ultimate moment, breaking through the clouds to the blue sky and sunshine, walking down a snowy path to arrive to a magical location under Mont Blanc in Verbier.
TODAY: The more I learn about creativity, innovation and experience design the more clarity I have around the importance of relationships and communication in developing ideas that deliver transformative moments. This is the moment when a guest (participant) considers their time and resources well spent. Given the challenges of travel and the physical limitations placed on experience capacities that we are faced with it is more critical today than it has ever been that we create environments that can be trusted, by the user experiencing it, and the stakeholders investing.
How much time is wasted on creating concepts that will never see the light of day because they start in the dark? By dark I mean without context. Many creatives produce stunning work every day in art, dance, music, theatre, film, destination or place based experiences, sporting events and live shows, virtual events and most recently in NFTs – non-fungible tokens of digital creative works. These don’t just happen. Ultimately a cohesive team is best able to deliver something exceptional with the greatest success when the clients and stakeholders trust your articulated vision.
Very few create alone and a trusted network is built around those creators. This may include muses, choreographers, supporters, entourages and teams that provide the space for creatives to create, builders to build, editors to refine and for immersive experiences and events to be delivered. Then these moments are photographed, videotaped and shared on a vast array of media platforms – consider this – 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, then add in all the other available social sharing platforms the reach is almost unimaginable.
When we have exceptional moments -fear, joy, surprise, delight – we feel compelled to share. The best events, the ones that move us, think immersing in a well designed exhibit, screaming or smiling through a thrill ride, saying “I Do” or just smiling across a table at a delicious shared meal – these are the moments that become the highlight reel of life. It all comes from a place of trust. Start there.