Speaking at the Arena

A short write-up of a speaking event on interactive media and audience engagement in large venues.

The session

A discussion of how large venues use interactive technology to engage audiences physically present, and what actually works when thousands of people are in one room with congested mobile networks.

The engineering constraint nobody mentions

Venue wifi and mobile capacity. Any interactive experience designed for an arena has to assume the network will be worse than you expect, which pushes design toward approaches that degrade gracefully rather than fail completely.

Transferable point

Design for the worst realistic conditions, not the best. The same principle applies to ecommerce on a poor mobile connection, which is where a large share of real revenue is decided.