Reflection - VISUALISATION TOOL     Challenge & selection  I work for an architectural design company heading up marketing and communications, and  as part of my role I run a lot of events in our own and various hired spaces. My role in these  events is from managing the overall objective setting, concept design, planning, through to  overseeing execution and then event follow up. I work with a team of people on the various  elements of these events, but often I am the only one that is working on them from start to  finish – so in some ways I’m the glue of these projects and the one with the holistic idea of  what we are trying to achieve.    Over time, I realised the whole team needed to be on the same page about what we wanted  the event to be from a guest journey and experience point of view. How should our guests  feel, what should they experience, what should they walk away thinking, what actions do  we want them to take after? All of this is underpinned by the objectives of the event and  why we are doing it.    I started using the visualization tool at the beginning of planning for events, as a framework  and reminder of what we are trying to achieve, so that everyone working on the event was  working towards these holistic outcomes, rather than just taking care of a specific area (for  example, catering, guest check in or event marketing). It’s a reference tool during the entire  event planning process. By visualising the whole experience a person will have at one of our  events, we can map out their journey and think about all the touchpoints (physical, digital,  human) and potential pain points that need to be resolved – literally by putting ourselves in  their shoes.      Application   Last year, my company was celebrating its 80th anniversary and we decided to organize a  large travelling exhibition of our project work with the kick off taking place in Shanghai. The  opening night was a big deal with our top tier clients and collaborators flying in from around  Asia and our senior management coming in from around the world. The experience of the  opening night needed to be seamless and given the exhibition was in a hired space, we had  to really understand the constraints and possibilities of the space for the evening and map it  out.    With my team, I got big sheets of paper pinned up on the wall and:  *Set objectives for the opening night event   *Envisioned in words what the overall experience should be like  *Created a number of personas of the typical types of guests who would be present on the  evening (clients: CEO of a large international developer, government official from a  municipal government, project manager from a local developer; collaborators and  influencers: researcher from partner agency, key opinion creator; media: journalist from key  publication; talent: up and coming designer we are looking to bring into the company;  internal stakeholders: Managing Director from our global head office)  *Mapped out an individual journey of the evening for each of these persona types and  visualised what they would want to experience and how we could match that to our event  design and program design (in a linear diagram for each, starting from event invitation)

*Mapped out the potential issues that each of them could encounter – their ‘pain points’  along the experience – which helped us work out what the potential risks of the night were   *Set out to design the event in terms of physical space, content, program, hosting, catering,  music, communications etc. to meet these journeys.    During the visualisation process, we referenced things that have made an impression on us  at various events that we have attended ourselves, particularly in relation to how they had  made us feel and what was most memorable about them (both in a positive and negative  way).     Insight & approach   The visualisation tool was great at getting the whole team thinking about the opening night  event of the exhibition as more than just the sum of its parts, and actually placing ourselves  in the shoes of the guests, imagining us being them and what we want and expect. It also  enabled us to draw on each other’s experience and pull from a larger pool of ideas to map  out the event for a variety of different guests, which led to a better outcome.    It’s a tool I will definitely keep applying to future event design and planning, but through  this course I’ve learnt that I could enhance this process by using tools other than words in  the visualisation process – such as visuals, videos, sound, scent, textures (essentially  ‘moodboarding’ our event to make it a lot more evocative  - as per the video in Week 1 of  the course). We should also review the feedback from guests and apply that to new event  visualisation and planning, closing the loop again.

