Creating a spark with the IBM Spark Design Festival
Be engaged. Feel empowered. Get excited.
Written by: Cara Viktorov and Felix Portnoy
When the conditions are right, a stream of electrons will jump across a gap, making the air around them glow and expand. That’s a spark.
From May 25–27, 2021, a dedicated team of IBM design volunteers created the conditions to let sparks fly among IBM’s design community at the first-ever IBM Spark Design Festival. Designers from all parts of IBM, the world, and every design discipline came together for three days of community, creativity, and connections. Designers were inspired, learned from one another, grew their network, and had fun — all in a completely virtual environment.
Event highlights
The IBM Spark Design Festival was the first event of its kind at IBM and was attended by 1,700 IBMers from 48 countries, representing 11 business units (BUs) in the company. The festival featured more than 100 peer-reviewed presentations and discussion panels. It also offered many social activities found at an in-person conference, including a live DJ, cocktails, networking events, a poster and lightning talk expo, collaboration projects, an art gallery, and even after parties.
In addition, the festival featured two keynotes: an opening keynote* by best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discussed her unique approach to the creative process, and a closing keynote* by IBM Fellow Charlie Hill, who discussed the strategic role that researchers and designers can play in creating platform-based products.
So, how did this all come together?
The idea of this festival was sparked from a revelation.
With nearly 3,000 designers worldwide (At IBM, the term designer is used to aggregate five design-related disciplines: Content Design, Design Research, Service Design, UX Design, and Visual Design.), IBM is positioned to ensure that it keeps its customers’ needs and wants at the center of attention. However, with such a large design team that is geographically distributed across several BUs, developing a unified community culture and promoting cross-collaboration has proven difficult.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, IBM Director of Global Design Leadership Karel Vredenburg initiated the COVID-19 Design Challenge in partnership with the World Design Organization and Design for America. Designers around the world, including many IBMers, came together to address social challenges posed by the pandemic; Felix Portnoy was one of those designers. The positive experience that came from collaborating and interacting with so many designers inspired an idea — what if we could bring together all IBM designers for a global event where they could network, learn about each other’s projects, and learn about the latest advancements in research and design practices?
And so it began. In September 2020, Felix mapped the entire IBM design community to create a directory of design teams, secured executive buy-in to support this initiative, and built a leadership team by recruiting design leaders across the company to join the effort of unifying IBM’s design community. This led to a grass-roots movement, pioneered by 129 volunteers from 17 countries, who virtually worked shoulder-to-shoulder for the next nine months to deliver the IBM Spark Design Festival.
Establishing the festival tenets
During the festival’s early formation, the leadership team set up three main goals:
1. Conduct user research to understand the needs of our design community.
2. Ensure the conference was globally inclusive and multidisciplinary.
3. Learn from the experience of others who have created smaller events at IBM.
We interviewed more than 45 designers across geographies, BUs, experience levels, and design disciplines to understand what IBM designers hoped to experience from a virtual festival. The team translated those research recommendations and outcomes into a set of design tenets for the event. These tenets guided decisions in programming, planning, and how to measure the festival’s success.
Figuring out the details and making it happen
Based on the research, the leadership team divided festival planning into several roles and committees.
Project management
To manage the creation of such a large event, we had to be strategic about where time was spent, so we deliberately leaned into self-organizing teams and always prioritized activities that would have the highest impact on successful delivery.
Each committee owned different aspects of the festival, with authority over how they planned, coordinated, and tracked their progress. Open communication was encouraged, and committees collaborated as needed. To ensure the committee leads stayed connected, we organized a minimal amount of team-wide coordination mechanisms:
- Committees co-created and maintained a high-level timeline with a transparent view of major milestones and deadlines.
- The leadership team participated in a weekly scrum-of-scrums with a collaborative agenda to provide structure to keep things moving forward.
We participated in regularly scheduled retrospectives to help the team learn, re-prioritize, and adapt as we went.
Branding
The branding committee was responsible for setting the overall tone and spirit of the festival and building the festival’s brand, including the vision, conference name, visuals, website design, presentation templates, and content.
We wanted our brand to convey the feedback we received from the design community — to communicate a sense of energy, innovation, connection, inclusion, engagement, and inspiration. We also wanted the branding to be unique to the event, while using IBM design style, communicate without needing explanation, provoke conversation, show love for design, and be fun.
To achieve this, we made the following design decisions and carried these through all assets:
- We used global language, and human-centered, conversational tone in all content, not corporate or technical jargon.
- We brought an inclusive visual identity to the festival by utilizing simple graphic “spark” elements with human illustrations to create a sense of empowerment and ownership of their spark.
- We prioritized consistency.
The branding committee also collaborated with other committees in almost every aspect of the festival, such as speaker instructions, scripts, videos, interviews, session descriptions, and the festival schedule.
Community insights, diversity, and engagement
The community insights committee aimed to make the festival inclusive for speakers, volunteers, and attendees. In addition to the research work, there were two other subcommittees to split up the work: diversity and inclusion, and festival engagement.
- Diversity and inclusion
The diversity and inclusion subcommittee focused on the volunteer effort needed to build the conference. We wanted to stay true to the festival tenets — be inclusive of all geographies, design disciplines, and experience levels. Volunteers were able to self-select activities that matched their interests and skillsets and often selected more than one. The team consisted of 129 volunteers from 17 countries; their work experience ranged from less than six months to more than 30 years. Our volunteers engaged in all aspects of festival planning and running the event itself, and they will continue engagement with the design community long after the festival. - Festival engagement
The festival engagement subcommittee was responsible for developing the end-to-end attendee experience. An important goal for us was to emulate meetups that happen naturally at a face-to-face event. To make the festival global, social, collaborative, varied, and inclusive, we provided the following social activities:
- Wild ducks of a feather provided a conference corridor experience where attendees could discuss topics related to the three conference tracks — career, strategy, and craft — and virtually meet up face-to-face at after parties.
- Co-creation wall provided a space for attendees to contribute their ideas for a design challenge project. Themes addressed global systemic challenges, design career concerns, and the power of inclusive communities at IBM.
- Festival receptions offered opportunities to unwind with a yoga stretch at your desk, dance along to our live DJ, and make the signature “Spark of Inspiration” cocktail.
- Maker gallery* gave attendees a place to share inspiring, personal projects that they create outside of their work at IBM.
- Gamification in the form of a scavenger hunt added an element of fun and a common thread through the festival.
We created a festival schedule that could be attended during North American waking hours, but we staggered live sessions and social activities to ensure participation was possible from all geographies. We also offered 24/7 activities for attendees to experience when it was convenient for them.
Event programming
The event programming committee was responsible for selecting and organizing festival content. Based on our research findings, we decided to accept nine presentations, eight discussion panels, and 72 lightning talks. Our selection criteria, also guided by research, was to include not only quality content, but to also ensure we had engaging content that represented a diverse workforce in terms of geography, design disciplines, and experience level.
The call for sessions led to an incredible response of 339 submissions, which were then reviewed using a double-blind method by 46 subject matter experts. However, the sheer number of submissions introduced a new challenge — our acceptance rate in some sections was as low as 8%, forcing us to reject many quality submissions. We had to balance the need to build our global design community and yet maintain high standards for content. Therefore, based on our review ratings, about 50% of submitted sessions were given the option to submit a pre-recorded lightning talk or poster that would be featured on our website. While we were not able to include those presentations in our live program, we were able to make them available to our design community. In addition, about 20 presentations were referred to other live events at IBM to be featured under the IBM Spark Design Festival brand name.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure committee handled festival logistics, including:
- Making it accessible and available to the audience and presenters.
- Ensuring attendees had a way to find information about upcoming events.
- Ensuring the festival experience ran without issues.
The work was split into two subcommittees:
1. A development team to create the conference website experience.
2. A logistics team to design, set up, and run the festival experience.
Understanding attendees’ expectations for a virtual event was integral to how we identified must-have features and planned the overall experience, given restraints of not being face-to-face (e.g., providing a quick turnaround for replays and slide decks).
We used a combination of internally available tools — primarily IBM Watson Media and Cisco Webex — to build the conference platform. We also recruited eight production crew volunteers, who were involved in many hours of training to learn complex professional production software. Our production team successfully provided our international audience a seamless experience and access to more than 40 live events during our conference.
The entire IBM Spark Design Festival team wanted this festival to be a unique virtual experience for IBMers. We had three main goals:
1. Bring together a large, dispersed community.
2. Provide opportunities, resources, presenters, and activities that the design community requested and desired.
3. Make the festival experience valuable and enjoyable.
Based on the feedback we’ve received during and after the festival so far, we did just that.
The IBM Spark Design Festival is only the beginning. We opened the door for a series of year-round activities that engage, empower, and excite our entire IBM design community.
Creating the first-ever, IBM-wide design conference was a career highlight for our leadership team. We didn’t know each other at the beginning of this venture, but we became a collaborative, self-motivated, and self-driven team who collectively wanted to make a positive impact for our design community and for IBM.
When the leadership team conducted a retro after the IBM Spark Design Festival ended, a few key takeaways stood out that made our team and the festival a success:
- Making it accessible and available to the audience and presenter.
- We took ownership, committed to the vision, and united to get the work done.
- We did research with the design community to understand the type of virtual experience we should create.
- We focused on diversity and inclusion throughout all aspects of the festival.
- We set high standards for deliverables (e.g., branding, communications, festival program and schedule, website, speakers, activities).
- We enjoyed the challenge and had fun.
Special thanks to the IBM Spark Design Festival leadership team, who contributed to this article: Andrea Barbarin, Data Oruwari, Jen Hatfield, Jill Sherman, Joan Haggarty, Jon Temple, Justin Weisz, Katy Lewis, Kelsey Scott, Mark Joyella, Moses Harris, Oen Hammonds, Sheila Babayan, Trish Garrett, and Zoë Marrich-Simon.
*Links with an asterisk are accessible to IBMers only.
Cara Viktorov is a Content Strategist at IBM and the Content Strategy Lead for the IBM Spark Design Festival. Felix Portnoy is a UX Craft Lead at IBM and Chair of the IBM Spark Design Festival. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
