Conferences and Change Events

Making Sense was a series of four events at Berlin’s FUTURIUM and sought to explore the importance of directly engaging the human senses to create unique and accessible experiences. Over the course of four evenings, experts from various creative disciplines were invited to share insights into their thinking and individual work processes. Three of the four events were streamed live. The recordings can be found on XPRO’s YouTube channel.

Making Sense was a B2B networking event series by XPRO Berlin and Retune and was supported by FUTURIUM Berlin. The concept was developed by Julian Adenauer, Retune and me in my then role as director of XPRO Berlin, a B2B format I conceived for Messe Berlin in 2020. The XPRO was unfortunately discontinued at the end of 2022.

The Immersive Showroom was an exhibition area within the Stage|Set|Scenery trade show that provided a comprehensive overview of the latest experience technologies as part of a three-day interdisciplinary exchange. The format also included a forum curated by me, where international experts from leading agencies and museums provided insights into the various innovative technologies and their potential uses.

The Signal Iduna Executive Congress 2018 in Berlin was the kick-off for the transformation program VISION 2023. Keynotes, workshops and several interactive stations enabled an intensive exchange and a perspective-rich approach of the executives to the topic. On behalf of Signal Iduna, I developed the overall dramaturgy, the scenography as well as various interactive mediation formats. In addition, I supported the agencies involved in the conceptual planning and implementation of the event.

In 2012 and 2017, the d.confestival was one of the largest international design thinking festivals. It was hosted by the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam. The mixture of conference and festival offered an extraordinary creative-productive atmosphere and enabled design thinkers to discuss forward-looking models, methods and solutions with international experts in various formats. Together with Prof. Ulrich Weinberg and his team, I developed the orchestration and scenography for the three-day festival around a circus tent on behalf of Triad Berlin.

Furore is Markenfilm Hamburg’s creative conference and annually presents exclusive and personal close-ups of bold, boundary-breaking artists from film, art, theater and advertising. In 2017, I was invited by Markenfilm to curate the guests and develop the content of the format. Invited were Tim O’Brien, US illustrator; Martin Peters Ginsborg, Creative Director at Anomaly in Amsterdam; Markus N. Beeko, Secretary General of Amnesty International Germany; Andrew Shoben, artist, art professor and founder of the collective Greyworld, London; Kirill Serebrennikov Artistic Director at the Gogol Center in Moscow until 2020 and Jakob Lass, director from Berlin. Kai Schächtele led through the day. Concept & Design by Markenfilm HH.

In 2016 and 2017, I was asked by Messe Berlin to test the three-day ITB Berlin congress to subsequently provide conceptual and design impulses for possible optimizations. This involved a year-round consideration of the event and its formats in the various communication stages on site and online.

The Land of Ideas initiative promotes Germany at a national and international level. For this, they look for good ideas and people who implement them, to make them visible and connect them. In 2016, I was invited to conduct an employee workshop to develop scenarios for a successful future of the initiative. Germany – Land of Ideas

In the run-up to IFA 2015, admodum, an agency based in Potsdam invited five experts to the SILENT GREEN Kulturquartier in Berlin to discuss ideas for a sustainable trade show. This exciting discussion gave me the opportunity to engage with the CEO of the Bundesverband der Industrie e. V. Dr. Markus Kerber; Dr. Martin Buck, Director at Messe Berlin; Christopher Bach, Head of Communications at Thales and Prof. Dr. Thomas Thiessen from the Business School Berlin. The event was moderated by Heiko Haenler, Managing Director at ad modum.

In 2014, in order to trace the ephemeral concept of ELEGANCE, international experts provided insight into the discourses of diplomacy, mathematics, soccer, ethnology, technology, philosophy, dance and the city. The impulses came from Moritz Ege, lecturer at the Institute of Folklore and European Ethnology at LMU; Jan Knippers, chairman and director of the Institute of Building Design and Structural Engineering; Charles Didier Gondola, professor of African history at Indiana University Purdue, Indianapolis; Olga Holtz, Russian mathematician; and Anna Thalbach, actress and artist. The closing discussion was led by American journalist Melinda Crane. Together with the product designer and university professor Axel Kufus, the philosopher Hannes Boehringer and the photographer Hans Hansen, I was the initiator and curator of this interdisciplinary conference in the rooms of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory. We were supported by the Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research, Triad Berlin and Berlin Partner.

“365 Places in the Land of Ideas” was a competition of the location initiative “Germany – Land of Ideas”, which was realized together with Deutsche Bank. In 2012, the format was to be condensed from 365 places to 100 places. On behalf of Triad Berlin, I supported the management of the initiative with strategic arguments and complementary ideas in the conceptual realignment. Germany – Land of Ideas

On October 13, 2008, the first WELT Business Summit took place at the Axel Springer Building in Berlin. A dialog format with guests from business and politics. Among the speakers were Eckhard Cordes, Metro; Thomas Enders, Airbus; Carl-Peter Forster, General Motors; Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Lufthansa; René Obermann, Deutsche Telekom and Martin Winterkorn, Volkswagen. In the afternoon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered the results of the special cabinet meeting that had just ended. The day was hosted by Christoph Keese. I supported those responsible in the room staging and the flow dramaturgy of the first three WELT business summits.

From 2006 to 2010, I was able to design and realize a total of five management conferences together with Axel Springer Corporate Communications. In each of these conferences, different upcoming change processes were addressed and worked through in several interactive formats in order to sustainably anchor the challenges and opportunities in the minds of the executives. The focus was on understanding customer orientation in practice or upcoming digitization processes and the resulting effects on the company, the employees and journalism.

In 2006, Dr. Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, formulated the goal of becoming the most customer-friendly media company in Europe by 2010. For this reason, the Customer Orientation Initiative invited the 28 responsible divisions to a one-day workshop. The task was to work in groups to develop and present the three best ideas on the subject of customer orientation. I developed the spatial concept, which gave around 100 participants the opportunity to discuss and present their ideas in smaller groups, and was responsible for the on-site processes.

In 2006 and 2007 I supported Axel Springer Corporate Communications in the conception and implementation of two sales conferences.

The X. International Bertelsmann Forum in 2006 gave European leaders from politics, business, academia, media and culture the opportunity for an informal exchange of ideas. For the two-day conference, the historic World Hall in the center of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin was completely transformed. On behalf of Bertelsmann, I developed the overall spatial and dramaturgical staging together with the event unit of Triad Berlin.