Backstage preparing for a UX conference

I recently wrapped up co-curating and emceeing the Designing with AI 2024 virtual conference with Lou Rosenfeld, for Rosenfeld Media. I’ve been involved in curating conferences for Rosenfeld Media for almost 10 years, going back to 2015 with the first Enterprise UX event held at Rackspace HQ in San Antonio. Over the years, as the event morphed into Enterprise Experience (then back to Enterprise UX) and going fully virtual, my level of involvement and role fluctuated as others were wonderfully welcomed and amazingly involved. No two events were the same, and it’s been an incredible ride all along — truly honored! 🙏🏽 😁

This year with DWAI24 the approach was different in that I took a bit of a co-captain/leadership role in a few areas:

• Shaping the program itself, by reviewing and selecting speakers — with valuable help and feedback from an informal group of advisors
• Working with the speakers & panelists via feedback rounds — with iteration, collaborative reviews, speaker coach, and operational aspects thereof (“herding the cats” with constant comms and calendar logistics 😅)

There’s also a third aspect this year that I leaned heavily into — serving as the program emcee! 🎤

In previous years that role was shared among the conference curation team across the themes or days, or we had someone hired specifically for the whole event. Thankfully, as fully expected with the Rosenfeld team, there was already a well-defined “run of show” document with links, titles, name pronunciations, and exact timings all set up for me — so there’s no surprises (well, that we can control anyway…more on that in a moment!) and I felt fully prepared in advance. Whew! 🙏🏽 ✅

But there were a couple things in particular I did for my own personal preparation.

Physical setup: Where I’ve been located physically has changed during the post-Covid years as we’ve gone fully virtual. Last year I was in NYC along with Lou at Rosenfeld HQ, which was quite fun! This year due to prior travel for eldercare at my childhood home in north central Louisiana, I ended up facilitating DWAI24 from Ruston, Louisiana in my late father’s study! Kinda wild, huh? 😁

Below is a photo I took the day before the conference started:

As you can see, there’s a lot going on!

• Multiple ring lights (like $20/each via Amazon) to ensure even lighting of my face, along with natural window light from the backyard. Also, using an Opal Tadpole 4K webcam, not the internal Macbook Air camera given its low quality.
• Multiple Bluetooth headphones (Beats Pro and Air Pods Pro), along with a wired headset lanyard as a backup in case those fail. Redundancies!
• iPad Pro to view the live-streamed broadcast so I can check if/when that is going slow or breaking (indeed, that did happen the first day!)
• iPhone cradle/charger in case things go haywire, and I need to call or someone needs to call me.
• Comfortable chair and pillow. And yes, taking stretch breaks as needed!
• Not pictured, but brought in later: mints, dark chocolate candy (Hershey’s Kisses), mug of green tea. Also a ceiling fan spinning with A/C blasting — it’s hot & humid in Louisiana, plus those ring lights and monitors create some heat! 🔥

Mental prep: Of course, serving as an emcee is more than simply reading a defined script on cue. I wanted to ensure that the audience felt they were in good hands, as their steward guiding them along their journey — we like to think of the Rosenfeld Media conferences as conversations — feeling as natural and smooth as possible, with ample energy for everyone! ⚡️🙌🏽

So I followed the approach I often do for my own talks — I did a lot of writing days before, to get my head into the right space. I wrote and re-wrote the schedule from memory, to help me internalize the flow of speakers, breaks, sessions. I verbally rehearsed the names again and again. More writing of thoughts, quotes, transitional phrases to connect breaks to sessions. Visualizing the flow of the day, in terms of interacting with Zoom, Slack channels, Google Doc scrips, the live broadcast, etc. Also literally practicing the mechanics moving my cursor across windows, and across monitors.

The whole point of all this prep is to get super comfortable with all that, so come 9 AM there’s not some “shock of the new”, scrambling to get things settled while in a panic of sudden realizations. So, I took it kinda seriously — to ensure maximum quality for the audience and speakers, too! 😌

One final point to emphasize: I sought to be in a state of improv, or “flex and roll” as I call it. As with anything “live”, crazy stuff can happen, and it did. 😆 But you gotta roll with it, and keep the audience going with the flow as well. I’m reminded of two quotes in that regard:

• Maya Angelou’s famous saying that people may forget what you said, but will always remember how you made them feel.
• Lou Rosenfeld’s description of the Rosenfeld Media brand voice/tone as “conversational with human warmth”. 🙏🏽