World Design Summit
Brand and UX work for an unprecedented interdisciplinary gathering of designers.
About the Summit
The grand vision of this event was to create a large-scale design expo that would bring together 6 design disciplines, by aligning international design organizations with thousands of independent designers, with the purpose of meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
While it is difficult to summarize the sheer volume of this event, here are the numbers:
More than 1,000 speakers
Foot traffic exceeding 9,000 participants and visitors
Dozens of additional programming throughout Montreal (where the expo was held)
WDS App
Attendees of the Summit needed tools to manage the complexity of the event to maximize their learning and networking opportunities. I designed the mobile companion app that would be used by all Summit participants and Expo exhibitors. Participants had to choose from over a thousand speakers in dozens of rooms, plus extracurricular programming. For obvious reasons, this event could have been a logistical nightmare. I was able to interpret the grand vision of the Creative Director, and then break it down into buildable, testable pieces. This allowed us spot UX problems before they went live.
WDS Website
Where typical conference might have dozens of speakers, the World Design Summit (WDS) had more than 1000. While many summits use apps to enhance the experience, with the volume and magnitude of this event, creating a digital hub for the conference was paramount.
In the run-up to the event I helped the organizers to meet their deadlines by designing a Digital Submission Portal, where thousands of talks were submitted. To manage the volume, I automated the process of notifying people if their talks had been accepted or rejected. By allowing people to log in and see when their submissions would be coming up for review, I was also able to mitigate a common issue conference organizers face: the unending stream of emails asking, “Have you reviewed my paper yet?”
WDS Brand
The World Design Summit (WDS) was organized to align international design organizations and thousands of independent designers toward meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. I updated the summit’s existing branding to create a more approachable atmosphere, and clarify the many components of the complex event.
Working within the constraints of the existing system, I used cheerful colours, patterns and an off-register colour block to bring the brand more into line with the diverse and accessible experience intended by organizers.
