SYNC - Conference Organising System
A communication system designed for conference organisers to communicate details of the organising process
Category
Service Design
Client
Karnavati University
Date
Background
Organising an academic conference is a nightmare!
And the people doing it aren't professional event managers
The people running this conference are university professors — doing all of this on top of their actual teaching and research jobs. I worked on the very first edition of this conference at a design university. There were nine teams, four levels of people in charge, one hard deadline, and absolutely no notes from a previous year to fall back on. The only thing holding everything together was communication
Process
A lot of small things, all at once
The problem wasn't effort. It was the system.
When I mapped out how all nine teams connected and depended on each other, it became clear fast — no team was working alone, but nobody had a full picture of the whole operation. Decisions made in meetings would disappear into chat threads. Tasks got assigned but nobody really owned them. The tools everyone found easiest to use were also the ones that kept the least record of anything. And since this was the first time the conference was happening, everything learned this year would just vanish once it ended.
