JC The starting point is usually around what we want people to experience, not how much technology is in a space. Innovation earns its place when it makes an event more engaging, easier to navigate or more accessible. Technology should be invisible, so that the audience can fully enjoy the experience, otherwise it’s a barrier. The usability factor for audiences is that an immersive experience should feel intuitive, with visuals that support the content rather than compete with it. Personalisation can offer meaningful choices and doesn’t always require users to download an app or interact with a device. Visual systems need straightforward controls, reliable repeatability and workflows that staff can confidently manage between events. Bringing creative, technical and operations teams together early, then testing with the people who will use the space, helps to strike that balance. The goal is to give audiences something extraordinary without making it unnecessarily complicated to deliver. How important is the underlying infrastructure in creating a genuinely future-proof venue? The underlying infrastructure is a critical part of the plan. We generally like to make the experience feel like magic by keeping as much technology out of view as possible, including neatly dressing and concealing any cabling. This is harder to achieve in temporary installations. Permanent projects may offer more time to design technical installations to be as discreet as possible. NB DT The underlying venue infrastructure is the most critical consideration during the design and build phases. The vast majority of projects are years in the making, from concept to client handover, so understanding the expected outcome and planning the associated infrastructure is key. You can then finalise the physical equipment lists closer to the time, based on new models and technologies. Ensuring that the critical infrastructure is accessible and allows for future expansion is also a key consideration when working with architects and engineering teams, so that the backbone of cable systems and cable trays allows for future expansion. Too often we see poorly designed cable trays
overfull at handover, with no possibility for additional cabling.
What does the venue of the future actually look like, and how much is tech influencing the physical design of spaces? JC The venue of the future doesn’t really have a single, fixed look, but it should be flexible and able to change the experience without having to rebuild the space. We’re seeing a shift towards treating venues as canvases, with projection and LED often working together to make the whole environment part of the event. By planning ahead and understanding how the architecture and technology can work together from the outset, you’re already putting into place ‘future thinking’. Walls, floors, objects, façades and even sports-playing surfaces or stage sets can all become part of the visual experience. In multi-purpose sports and concert venues, projection mapping on basketball courts and ice hockey rinks shows how dramatically a space can be transformed without permanent structural changes. That flexibility matters when a venue needs to quickly switch between one sport and another – or to a live performance – due to tight schedules. The venue of the future isn’t necessarily a new building. Technology can open up new possibilities for enhancing existing architecture, rather than replacing what makes a place distinctive. It creates an opportunity to design spaces that can accommodate different experiences while retaining their own unique character. As audiences increasingly expect immersive, personalised experiences, how do you balance innovation with usability? In our experience, it’s critical that the end user gets the benefits of the immersive experience; feeling the impact of the technology, but ensuring that this remains an experience in a human way. While we can marvel at technology and DT what it has become – and the opportunities it gives us to create magical experiences – we should ensure that the audience remains immersed, and isn’t aware of the technology supporting that immersion. Any audience interaction with technology should remain intuitive and usable for all guests and not just a limited few. We should always design experiences with all guests in mind.
Venues are starting to become more like content-production environments. What does that mean for the tech? JO The modern venue must increasingly serve two audiences at once: the people in the room, and those experiencing the performance through a recording, stream or later piece of content. That affects almost every part of the technical design. Audio, video, communications and control systems need to be planned as connected workflows rather than separate departments. A performance might need to feed into a PA system, active acoustic system, broadcast mix, multitrack recording, archive and online stream simultaneously. The venue therefore needs reliable routing, synchronisation and monitoring, along with straightforward ways to both save and recall configurations.
DT We have become a society that reacts instantaneously to content
that’s shared with us both in a positive and a negative way, and we instantly form an opinion, rightly or wrongly. It’s therefore so important to venue owners that, as designers, we ensure we take the time to carry out our research into the solutions that we propose. Additionally, for the professional content production it’s important that we provide a backbone of infrastructure that supports as many scenarios as we can consider and that the budget will allow. Making sure that content can be generated discreetly, and without having to run temporary solutions, will always give a venue an edge over its potential competitors. More venues might look to add video and streaming facilities to offer paid access to events online. Modern NDI cameras can be positioned discreetly around NB the performance space and controlled remotely by an operator. Today’s compact ‘studio’ equipment takes up little space, leaving more room for revenue-generating activities. Digital audio mixers can automatically provide separate mixes for front-of-house sound and streaming, helping to reduce staffing costs. Where do you see some of the biggest opportunities for venues in terms of AI? Artificial intelligence is already a powerful tool, but is under-exploited by most venues. Local AI processing of media, especially in searching and repurposing applications, can give in-house content NB creators a substantial boost in the speed and efficiency of content production. We already see this trend with the use of on-premises media asset management and AI tagging software, so existing content and archives can easily be repurposed for social media to drive additional marketing visibility and sales. Integrating AI tools with a venue’s booking system could also enable the automatic creation of additional content based on expected audience demographics, helping the venue tailor its messages to the audience. JO The greatest opportunity for AI is not to replace creative or technical input, but to remove repetitive work and help teams make better-informed decisions. For audiences, AI could improve accessibility and navigation through more responsive captioning and translation, and personalised information. For AV teams, there is also an opportunity
Venues should prepare for audiences and artists to expect spaces to be adaptable rather than fixed... and capable of supporting a range of experiences
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