client TEDxBrussels role Head of User Experience scope event design · service design years 2022, 2023 editions 3 location Brussels
Event Design is the discipline most teams treat as logistics..
It isn't.
Three editions of TEDxBrussels, All Inclusive, RESET, Countdown, running at two distinct scales. The salon, under sixty attendees, intimate and conversation-led. The main stage, 400+ at Théâtre National, public and choreographed. Same editorial spine, two completely different rulebooks.
What the room actually needed.
Three editions in a calendar year. Same independent license, same curatorial direction, same audience promise, but two formats so different they may as well have been separate events. Audience journey, content sequencing, partnership architecture, comms cadence, even seating geometry: none of it translates directly from a salon for fifty to a main stage for four hundred.
The risk: doing both as if they were the same scale just at different sizes. That's how independent TEDx events typically fail, by treating event design as logistics, not as a discipline that has its own questions and its own answers.
Why no team simply nails this.
Event design as a discipline. Four moves.
- Mapped audience journey at each scale.Salon and main stage got separate journey maps. What the audience does in the half-hour before the event, during transitions, after. Where the room becomes a system that does work the speakers can't.
- Defined the editorial spine, and where it can flex.What stays the same across formats (the line, the tone, the brand) and what changes (sequencing, pacing, partnership integration). The doc that prevented every later disagreement.
- Designed format-specific choreography.Salon: conversation-led, fewer speakers, longer pauses, room reset between segments. Main stage: curated arc, recurring transitions, sound and light cues sequenced with content.
- Service-design layer: partnerships, logistics, comms.Partners weren't logos on a slide. Each partnership had a touchpoint in the audience journey, pre-event, in-venue, follow-up. Logistics and comms keyed off the journey, not the calendar.
Four pieces from the work.
End-to-end map for the under-60 format. Where the conversation enters, where it lands, where the room does its share of the work.
The 400+ version. Same skeleton, different musculature, pacing, transitions, lighting and sound integrated as content.
The shared editorial spine plus the explicit flex points per format. The single artifact every cross-functional teammate reads.
Each partner mapped to a moment in the audience journey, not a placement deck.
What changed.
- coherence at two scales Three editions delivered with a single recognizable identity. Audiences who attended both formats described them as “the same event in two registers,” which was the brief.
- audience response Strong audience signal across both formats, speaker engagement, return attendance, post-event content uptake. The salon developed a waiting list by the second edition.
- reusable format library Subsequent TEDxBrussels editions reused the spine doc and the format-specific choreography templates. The work outlived the year it was done.
- internal alignment Volunteer team coordinated faster, the spine doc replaced the meetings where disagreements used to surface late.
What I'd do differently.
If I started this again, I'd push earlier for one rehearsal cycle that crossed scales, running a salon segment in the main venue and vice versa. We did this informally on edition three, and it surfaced things neither format alone could have. The under-investment in cross-scale rehearsal is a structural blind spot of independent TEDx events.
Designing an event at two scales?
Let's talk it through.
No quote, no calendar, no sales cadence. A real conversation about whether and how we'd work.