The Future of Academic Conferences

Abstract

Scientific conferences are a valuable place in which a lot of knowledgeable people come together to create meaningful content. However, in a fast-evolving world with increasing environmental issues, inequalities and crises, conferences seem to only change slowly. Besides the irresponsibility towards the environment, due to the large usage of resources and vast amounts of travelling to conferences, also the exclusion of groups of people are still widely a result of the current conference system.
Therefore, we need to investigate the context of the future conference in order to design a better conference of tomorrow.

This graduation project dives deep into the purpose of scientific conferences and how this purpose can evolve in the future to propose a new visionary concept. It investigates changes within the domain of the academic society and its conferences but also takes into account factors that can have an impact on the domain, such as climate change, societal and technological developments or the COVID-19 pandemic. The result of this project is a new conference vision that proposes design interventions within the organizational and interaction level in order to create a more inclusive but also impactful conference.
The report presents the investigation for designing a future experience for academic conferences. The exploration revealed three main driving forces that can play a big role within the world of conferences:

1. The growing relevance and awareness of academics’ impact on climate change and on society will continue to increase academics’ sense of responsibilities. There will be more focus on creating knowledge and doing so in a meaningful and respectful way towards environment and society.
2. The growing relevance and awareness of inclusion will highly impact the social value. The community is going to become a safe and welcoming space for people to celebrate uniqueness and distinctiveness rather than fit and sameness.
3. Technology can make it easier and more effective to reach an inclusive and impactful community by giving people the chance to be able to express themselves and inspire each other.

The final design ‘The living conference’ is a response to these main driving forces by providing a space with more flexibility in participation as well as creating more insight and consideration into individual contributions and people. This shall help to make it easier for people to participate (inclusion) as well as creating a more effective space for knowledge creation (impact). The design consists of a digital space that makes use of interactive data visualization to represent content and people for more consideration and insight but also presents different formats of sessions to provide people with eye-opening content and activities.