Top 4 trends within venue design for events in 2018.

The event industry, worth over £39,1 billion in the United Kingdom, which has increased almost £4 billion for the last 8 years (Britain for Events, 2010). The Corporate Event Sector including conferences, meetings, exhibitions, trade shows, incentive travel and corporate hospitality, is the worthiest one with revenue of £30.3 billion.

With such a huge impact on the British economy the business event sector is under a constant development. Events managers are constantly looking for more innovative venue choices and decor in order to create new and exciting experiences for attendees (Dannen, 2015). Clients are demanding more from the venues in terms of productivity and efficiency. They want to see venues demonstrating and adding a real value to the way they offer themselves on the market. In this blogpost we will be identifying some of the current trends in business event design.

• Unique venue with flexible space

  What we mean by ‘Flexible Space’ is to allow participants or attendees to connect and interact with each other at a conference and to engage together in social learning (Dannen, 2015). It will be an asset if the design of the venue allows participants to meet informally and all-day access to food and beverage. For example, lounge style area it will be excellent as it will also allow participant to interact between each other and potentially with the presenters. (Janssen, 2017; Davidson, 2018).

  Why do we think it works?  Well… By allowing attendees to interact with each other freely, organisers let attendees to immerse themselves completely and experience the event. In other words, organisers are making attendees, participants rather than keeping them just sitting and listening for hours. Great examples for this type of venues could be meeting rooms within interactive restaurants or coffee shops, museum spaces or outdoor garden with a lounge area.

  

  

•  Event Design= NOT a Solo Sport

Some of the best events are designed by teams. The collective effort and learning from your teammates have proven to be more engaging within meetings and corporate conferences (Janssen, 2017). However, this requires a serious change in one’s behaviour but Elling Hamso says ‘Change of behaviour is the only mechanism known to mankind that creates value in the event’ (Janssen, 2017).

Why do we think it works? It is a common knowledge that happy team makes a productive team, so the market for team building venues is potentially huge. Depending on what the client wants the venues might vary between karaoke bars, kitchen venues for organising culinary classes, outdoors playgrounds or even museum spaces.

• Home Meets Event – Create sense of the place

It looks like 2017 was the year to move on from basic and boring logistical approaches within event design (Oates, 2017; Janseen, 2017). Some of the most successful events designs have managed to influence participants and make them feel like they belong to the venue and create a sense of being at ‘HOME’. Robertson (2017) argues that to achieve that few things should be considered. The first one is to play with colors. Use bright and strong colors for your next meetings which can have impact on participant imagination and boost their creativity. The second one is seating arrangement. It should be designed for people to feel the comfort as they will in their own ‘homes’. It said when people are comfortably seated they concentrate easy and the attention is higher. Again, depending on the kind of event venues might vary. Some of the most popular ones are lounge areas with comfortable seating or meeting/conference venues with soft and bright color.

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• Tech Venues

Technology within events is a powerful and enormous topic, which we won’t look at today. However, the point is that clients and events professionals do prefer venue who are equipped with  some technological connection. Robertson (2017) says this is from a great importance to establish the access that participants will have through their devices. Another trend related to participant’s access is the availability of laptop touchdown spots with power outlets (Kelliher, 2018; Robertson; 2017). Depending on the type of the business event, videoconferencing screens should be provided within the venue, plus twitter screens, live or chat screens ((Janssen, 2017; Davidson, 2018; Kelliher, 2018).

Using these ideas for venues will hopefully provide  an immersion and exciting experience for the events attendees. The venue management area within the events  is fatly developing in innovating the participation of attendees. There are plenty of trends which contributes to the contemporary variety in the industry, however these are my Top 4 which I believed will have the biggest impact on the industry in 2018.