The starting point was understanding what this event needed to feel like — and that meant understanding its audience. Technology pioneers and young founders don't want to feel like they're at a traditional conference. The environment needed to feel current, collaborative, and intentional. Contemporary without being cold — and unmistakably the Forum.

The three-zone structure gave the campus legibility. The Village is where the hubs live, where communities gather, where the energy concentrates. The Atrium held invitation-only session rooms. The Plenary sat outside both. Getting the zoning right meant participants could orient themselves intuitively.

The Village presented the hardest spatial problem. In previous editions it had always been contained in a single area. Here we had to split it across the ground floor and mezzanine. The challenge was making two levels feel like one coherent environment. The answer was consistency of design language: the same materials, the same palette logic, the same furniture selection applied across both levels.

Wood was the unifying thread. Bespoke benches with integrated chargers and lighting gave the Village a built quality rather than a temporary one. Each zone had a distinct colour atmosphere, but the wood detailing and material language remained constant throughout. The result was spaces that felt visually distinct but spatially coherent. The furniture selection reinforced this: elegant, restrained, beige and black details that held against the boldness of the colour zoning without competing with it.

One of the more considered decisions was how to apply the event identity across these spaces. Rather than applying it uniformly in standard blue, I adapted it to the colour of each zone — so a green lounge carried a green-toned identity rather than a blue one dropped into an incompatible environment. A small decision with significant impact: the space feels unified rather than branded-over.

The session rooms carried the same material rigour: felt panels for acoustic warmth, wood detailing, colour differentiation between room types. Each format felt distinct while remaining unmistakably part of the same event.

Tianjin was also where the wayfinding framework had its first live test. We applied zones as named areas for the first time here. The approach didn't fully hold — naming zones rather than lettering them created ambiguity especially with translating signage. But that friction was precisely what defined the more robust structure developed for Davos. Testing it in a real environment, with real participants, made the Annual Meeting system significantly stronger.

The exhibition framework followed the same logic. Working with the Head of Arts & Culture, I built the first co-curation structure that treated Forum and host country exhibitions as a single unified space: defined footprints, shared content hierarchy, consistent display principles — creating coherence where there had previously been fragmentation.