IMEX America Said Design Matters. We Have a Follow-Up Question.

For three days in October, the most optimistic people in Las Vegas were not at the tables. They were at Mandalay Bay, 18,200 of them, working through 96,000 scheduled meetings at the 15th IMEX America. IMEX does the arithmetic on that figure and calls it five years of business in three days.

We followed the show closely, from Event Marketer’s takeaways to IMEX’s own closing numbers, because IMEX does something for this industry that nobody asked it to do and everybody relies on: it picks the words we all use for the next twelve months. This year those words were design matters. Carina Bauer, IMEX’s CEO, defines design as the intentional shaping of experiences around human needs, and five new education tracks carried the idea: Designing for Human Needs, Design for Spectacle, Regenerative Design, Tech Enabled Futures and Design Matters itself. 

We should admit we are biased. Cramer calls itself a behavioral experience design agency, which is a long name to say out loud and a longer one to live up to. So when the largest show in our industry puts design at the center of its agenda, we are the people in the back row, nodding vigorously and grateful for Event Marketer for recognizing it.

Here is what the industry got right in Las Vegas, and the one question we would add to a conversation we are glad to be part of. 

What We Like 

Start with the people. IMEX built its human needs track on a figure worth repeating: 26% of US adults live with a visible or invisible need, which covers neurodivergence, sensory load, mobility, diet and psychological safety. That track was the most popular at IMEX Frankfurt earlier this year, which says something good about planners. Given a free hour, they spent it learning how to take better care of a quarter of every audience they will ever stand in front of. 

Then attention. Caitlin Krause, who gave the MPI keynote on Smart Monday, argued that every experience is built on an attention architecture, and that “AI can make things faster; intention makes them meaningful” (IMEX). It is the best one-sentence brief for an event designer we heard all year, and she gave it away on a Monday morning to anyone who showed up. 

Then the metric: Kelly Gleeson Smith of Caesars cited data that 63% of planners now rank attendee engagement as their top measure of success, which means the people buying the rooms and the people filling them want the same thing. Amex GBT’s forecast puts numbers on what the attendees themselves want: 42% more interactive learning, 40% more networking, 37% more personalization. Nobody in that building is confused about the goal. 

The sharpest observation came from Cindy D’Aoust of MGM Resorts Events Productions, who said the hardest part of her work is stakeholders who underappreciate how much design, curation and communication before, during, and after an event decide whether the goals are met. It takes a certain confidence to name that problem from a stage, and she did it on behalf of every planner who has ever defended a budget line for a better opening session.

And then the floor, where the exhibitors quietly practiced what the stages preached. Destinations handed people LEGO, bracelet kits, and small tubs of slime so that a conversation with a stranger carried less pressure and a pair of hands had something to do. Tahira Endean, IMEX’s head of program, has a book out called Our KPI is Joy, and Jenn Whitmer of Joysity Works cited a 31% lift in productivity when people feel joy at work. Whether or not anyone used the words, that is behavioral design, done with care, by people who understand rooms better than most of the people who write about them. Ourselves included.

Our Follow-Up Question

Design matters. We agree completely, and we are glad the biggest stage in the industry is saying it. Our follow-up question is the one a client’s CFO asks in the first five minutes: what is the design for? 

Human needs are the right place to start, because a room that ignores them loses a quarter of its audience before the first speaker walks on. Attention is the right material, because without it nothing else is possible. But human needs and attention are inputs. The output of an event is what people do differently afterward, and that is the sentence we did not hear from the stages. Nobody argued against it. The stakeholders D’Aoust described are not wrong to ask what the design is for. Most of them have simply never been handed the answer in a form they can take upstairs. 

The practical test is Monday. Before a single rendering, write down what you want attendees to do on the Monday after the event. A user conference might want customers to book a session with a product engineer within two days of getting home. A leadership meeting might want every manager to run the new review conversation at their first team meeting back. Then design the room backward from that sentence. The agenda changes. The room layout changes. The after-party changes, because now it has a clearly stated mission. 

IMEX’s Design for Spectacle track, with the people behind the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix and the FIFA World Cup, made the case that spectacle creates emotional connection at scale, and they would know. However, with that, we would add one clause: spectacle with a Monday behavior attached is an investment and spectacle without one is still a very good memory. The people who build those memories deserve to see everything else they changed.

Las Vegas settled that design matters. We would like to help show what it changes.

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