The future is being plotted in Chicago conference rooms, and, surprisingly, it’s being memorialized on paper.
Despite being the home of some of the nation’s most forward-thinking tech summits, including Technology in (of) the Arts and elsewhere, organizers are finding that physical objects are an important part of helping you process and absorb complex predictions about what the world is going to look like tomorrow.
When digital overload demands analog solutions?
The phenomenon of conference fatigue is very real, particularly for artificial intelligence, quantum computing and emerging technologies events.
Participants at technology-focused conferences suffer from information overload and are immediately unable to recall critical takeaways with any confidence after just one week post-event.
Which is why even at Chicago’s most forward-looking futurist gatherings, digital presentations are still complemented by firm takeaways you can hang on to long after an event wraps.
The science behind why paper works for future planning
People who take notes by hand understand more than those who type. This is especially when working with futurist topics such as post-scarcity economies and distributed systems of governance.
That strategy was taken last fall at Chicago’s Smart Cities Innovation Summit, where each attendee received a printed future-mapping toolkit.
The contents were more or less worksheets and charts such as timeline worksheets, stakeholder analysis charts and technology adoption curves.
Production logistics for large-scale events
Designing thousands of unique conference materials is good for bearing planning. HelloPrint collaborates with events to manage large orders requiring fast delivery, particularly for last-minute speaker additions or session changes.
Part of the appeal for many planners is being able to buy workbooks from one source, badges from another and coordinate their deliveries so they arrive just in time for setup at a venue.
Chicago Foresight Forum found that this flexibility was required as their keynote had to change two weeks before the event.
There were 800 updated program guides that also showcased the new content and were to be delivered three days before registration opened. That kind of speed can matter when you’re organizing venues, catering orders, and technology setups all at
Building lasting value beyond the event
The best futurist conferences treat their print materials as continuing resources, more so than throw-away handouts. One can use any Chicago printing service for this.
Groups like the Chicago Council on Global Affairs build modular workbook systems with sections that can be updated and reprinted for future quarterly meetings. Your conference is then no longer one event, but a larger education program.
When delegates go home with something meant for further use, they are more likely to apply the conference’s takeaways to actual business problems.
That is the whole point: turning speculative futures into actions today so that organizations are better prepared when change happens.
