The quest of turning an event from physical to digital
Back from my Christmas break, I had just started to work on a series of roundtable events to follow the launch of Design Council’s new strategy. The roundtables were to convene sector leaders, designers and innovators from different disciplines (architecture and the built environment, service design and product design) to explore our three strategic priorities — improving health and wellbeing, enabling sustainable living and increasing design skills.
In the early stage of the project we spent a lot of time planning the perfect end-to-end journey experience for our participants — inspiring and thought-provoking guest speakers, a venue that could speak our values, locally produced catering and so on. Having visited many spaces across London, I was finally set to finalise the details for hosting the roundtables at the Garden Museum, a hidden gem next door to Lambeth Palace on the river Thames.
Then the coronavirus outbreak happened, and all the planning and progress made on shaping the perfect experience just vanished. But as much as the outbreak was quickly escalating, the world was rapidly adjusting to working in new ways. And so we set ourselves a new question to answer:
How do we create an equally inspiring and engaging virtual experience for our participants?
With the perks of the physical experience gone, we started to think about some of the physical details of our more traditional workshops and how we could bring those into the digital space. First on the calendar was our “Design for Sustainable Living” event, a session dedicated to discussing the challenges faced by industries in promoting and supporting more sustainable practices. We retained the overall format of the event but adapted it to a digital setting. It worked extremely well. With this in mind, I wanted to share some of the learnings from planning the event.
Digital platforms
We used a combination of Zoom and Miro, the former for speaking and presenting, and the latter as a visual, collaborative whiteboard.
Combining physical and digital
We added some carefully considered details to make the digital space feel more real and welcoming, including a double-door entrance, and workshop spaces with tables and pictures of the attendees sat around them. We even decorated the virtual room with plants!
Top tips
- Send something physical in advance (although don’t create an industry out of this), a nice human touch in a virtual world! We sent ethical teabags (and tried to send a biodegradable coffee pod but not everyone has the right equipment and it might not fit in the letter box — we prototyped that).
Zoom
We decided to use Zoom, probably the most popular video conferencing platform currently in use, as most of the participants were already comfortable with it. Zoom allows you to share the screen and enables presenters to either present slides from their own screen or take control from the organiser’s screen. The use of the chat during the panel presentations provided much richer conversation than taking a couple of questions in a normal Q&A. Zoom also allows you to create ‘break out rooms’ where small groups of participants could have more intimate discussions.
We invited participants to join the call 15 minutes before the actual start, as people dialled in we welcomed them with a light chat and signposted them to the Miro board.
Top tips
- Play music at the start of the event as everyone arrives.
- Provide customised backgrounds (e.g. we used a background photo of our office bookshelf full of design manuals).
- Encourage the use of the chat function by someone from the team adding in some comments (so others follow), but not so many that it detracts from the speakers.
-Have a photo of everyone’s headshots in a grid on your slides so when you do an introduction people know what order they are in, meaning fewer awkward silences.
From sketch to virtual environment
Having chosen the Miro board as the virtual space in which to host the event, we internally brainstormed the best ways to use the platform, to follow the narrative and flow of the session and to re-create some aspects of the physical environment. Having sketched it out on paper first, we worked with our design team to turn the idea into a beautifully designed board, intuitive and easy to navigate. We built three different spaces within the board:
- A reception area where participants could view key information about the event — the agenda and objectives, a copy of our new strategy and an overview of the panellists.
- An inspiration library — a place where people were invited to leave an example of sustainable living so they could engage with the platform ahead of the event.
-The workshop space — showing the illustration of a closed door which opened on the day, revealing the workshop setting and the table groups for the roundtable discussion.
I will share the template of the board and a video demo very soon.
Top tips
-Consider your Miro board as a physical space and add human touches, for example photos of people in the room and other touches such as plants!
-Share the link to the board before the event, along with a set of basic instructions and a little homework, so that participants can familiarise themselves with the platform and don’t have the pressure of learning something new on the day.
Preparation is never enough
Testing and iterating is a key design principle and never to be underestimated when running digital events. Testing the technology and the running order with an internal test group ahead of the event gave us great feedback and ideas for improvement — from adjusting the legibility of the board to ensuring we had a back-up channel on another device in place (like a Whatsapp group) to communicate between organisers.
Top tips
-Run through the event internally first! Ensure everyone in the team has clear roles and responsibilities.
-Ask presenters to sign into the call early to practice presenting (especially if they are taking control of the slide deck).
-Create a back-up group (e.g. Whatsapp) to communicate between organisers.
-Send a short survey (ours was too long!) for feedback and do an internal reflection session.
Hiccups are part of being human
Despite strong preparation there is always room for technical glitches, we had a couple as well, but nothing that a good chair or facilitator can skilfully minimise. We are all adapting to doing things differently and it is important to acknowledge the circumstances everyone is working under. Whether is an unusual noise in the background or someone starting to speak on mute, these aspects just enhance the human nature of the experience.
Top tips
-Limit a plenary introduction to no more than 20 people to avoid them dragging on too long. (We also asked people to say what they could see outside their window, which probably got a little stale after 20 blue skies!)
-Make sure you have plenty of time for the table discussion. We didn’t really have enough (we had 40 minutes) and it would have been nice to do a deeper check in with each participant to really build relationships.
-Don’t get distracted by the aesthetics. The point of these roundtables is the content — what was said, who connected, what action is taken as a result. Time taken in synthesising, following up with individuals and developing ideas for work on the back of the discussion is as time-consuming as preparing for it.
-Don’t assume everyone has the same level of digital skills. Have one person in the team dedicated to support anyone in need of technical assistance.
I confess, I do have a bit of nostalgia of our good old face-to-face workshops but I also recognise the many benefits coming from the digital experience: saving travel time and expenses, reducing carbon our footprint, being challenged to think about alternative and innovative solutions on how we deliver our work, as well as the luxury of turning up to a chief executive event in my slippers! Going digital also meant that more people from around the UK were able to join than if we were hosting the event in London.
This is just the start of a bigger digital quest. Running this event left us with even more appetite to discover what we can do to be more creative in our new virtual reality. At Design Council we are constantly learning and adapting our ways of working to improve the delivery of our services, testing new software and platforms that work for our clients. This is not just a stop gap but a way forward in our offer.
