The 21 New Rules of Post-pandemic Experience Design

The fundamental changes that will forever disrupt the industry’s event design practices—and why they’re good for business

To say that the event industry has taken a good long look in the mirror in the wake of the pandemic is an understatement. Most event marketers have used the challenges of the past two and half years as an opportunity to reevaluate. Some even used the pandemic as a chance to rethink their entire event design portfolio and practice.

But as event marketers begin the work of building back, they have to resist the temptation to go back to their pre-pandemic playbooks. Or even their during pandemic playbooks because, let’s be honest, those are already outdated, too.

“There’s no rule book,” says Victor Torregroza, Events and Experiences Program Manager at Intel. “We’re all in the business of storytelling and for the last two and a half years, it was through a bright screen. [Then] we wrote rule books for virtual and those are burned up, too, because now it’s, ‘How do you engage your audiences wherever they are at, in their time zone, when they want, and keep it short and concise.’ So our rule book? Burned, gone, recycled. It’s absolutely exciting.”

This April, Event Marketer and leading event structure partner Highmark Techsystems sat down with Torregroza and a panel of industry peers at the Experiential Marketing Summit Design Lab to discuss the unique nuances and challenges of experience design in a post-pandemic world and what the playbook of tomorrow might include. What emerged was a set of new rules that take into account the many changes impacting the way events are experienced—and the upside for businesses and event marketers who are game for real change.