Meet Me in the Middle: The Complete 2026 SEGD Conference Experience Agenda

Dawn Taylor, Executive Director, AIA Kansas City and Center for Architecture & Design

Why Kansas City? Positioned near the geographic center of the country, Kansas City is more than a meeting place. It is a confluence of ideas, disciplines, and design influences, and a region where collaboration has become part of the design culture itself.

Explore the story behind Kansas City’s Center for Architecture & Design, the only center in the world bringing together the local chapters of seven design professional associations, including SEGD, and how that spirit of collaboration grew into the D7 National Design CEO Retreat. It’s a model for what becomes possible when designers look beyond professional silos, invite different perspectives into the room, and build something together.

Cynthia Sharpe, Senior Principal, Executive Creative Director, TAIT

Kansas City isn’t New York or San Francisco, and that’s precisely the point. Here, design meets people in the messy reality of everyday life: healthcare, transportation, education, leisure, community, belonging, and access. In a city literally divided by its history, this session explores design as an act of repair. How can the experiences and places we create help bridge divides, restore connection, and address what once seemed insurmountably broken?

Kathy Nelson, President & CEO, Kansas City Sports Commission & Visit KC

Tucker Trotter, CEO, Dimensional Innovations

What does it take to change the way the world sees a city, and perhaps just as importantly, the way a city sees itself? Through the lens of Kansas City’s transformation and its role as a host city for the FIFA World Cup 2026, this conversation explores the extraordinary coordination required to turn a global opportunity into something bigger.

Tourism, sports, hospitality, government, business, design, and community all had a role to play. Together, they created momentum that extends far beyond a single event, demonstrating what becomes possible when a city aligns around a shared ambition and invests in the experiences, places, and connections that can shape its future.

Sponsored by PAM Smarter Navigation

Bethany Foss, Design Leader, HOK

Erin Nybo, VP Healthcare Client Leader, CannonDesign

Mara Sabatini, Health Project Principal, HDR

Moderator: Rick Smith, 2026 SEGD Conference Experience Kansas City Co-Chair; Vice President of Experiential Design, Dimensional Innovations

Healthcare may be one of the few environments we design knowing that many of the people entering them will not be operating at their best. Patients, families, and caregivers may be anxious, exhausted, grieving, distracted, in pain, or waiting for news that could change their lives. Yet these environments are often designed as though people are calm, attentive, and ready to process information.

This cross-disciplinary conversation asks what changes when we design not only for physical needs, but for the emotional and cognitive conditions in which people experience care. From stress and sensory load to neurodiversity, positive distraction, and emotional accessibility, the panel considers a fundamental question: Are we designing the environment, or are we designing for the emotional condition in which someone experiences it?

Jonathan Mugmon, Principal, Populous (Activate Studio)

Effective wayfinding requires more than beautiful signs. The way people move through complex environments is shaped by cognition, memory, stress, attention, and the instincts we rely on to understand where we are and where to go next. Drawing on environmental psychology and observational research, this session explores how architecture, information, and experiential design can work with human behavior rather than against it, creating environments that feel more intuitive, accessible, and human.

François Roupinian, IALD, President, Lightemotion

Light can be artistic material, architectural intervention, and a powerful tool for shaping space. But ultimately, every decision comes back to the person experiencing it: how they perceive, navigate, inhabit, connect with, and remember a place. Moving from medium to context to purpose, this session explores a human-centered philosophy of lighting design in which understanding the deeper intentions of a project becomes as important as the technical or visual solution. The goal is not simply to determine what a space should look like, but what it should make people feel.

Valerie Chin, Media Producer, Batwin + Robin Productions

Megan Gargagliano, Producer, Batwin + Robin Productions

Sara Pasch, Director of Integrated Media, Obama Foundation

Aki Carpenter, Global Vice President and Chief Creative Officer, Ralph Appelbaum Associates

How do you create more than 75 film and media pieces for a museum dedicated to democracy, public service, and the power of people to create change, while navigating an ambitious vision, evolving content, multiple creative partners, accessibility goals, and a complex stakeholder process?

Go behind the scenes of the Obama Presidential Center Museum to explore how the team developed a cohesive film language across media ranging from large-scale emotional moments to intimate, story-driven pieces. Together, these experiences convey the story of the Obama presidency and its historical context while carrying much of the Museum’s emotional force, all while remaining integrated with the architecture, exhibition design, and larger visitor journey.

Jonna Mendez, Former CIA Chief of Disguise

What can a former CIA Chief of Disguise teach us about meeting in the middle? In a career that took her from Kansas to some of the most consequential intelligence operations of the Cold War, Jonna Mendez learned to build trust across deep divides, read people and environments with extraordinary precision, and create experiences convincing enough to transport someone into an entirely different reality.

In conversation with SEGD CEO Cybelle Jones, Mendez reflects on those experiences and the ideas that connect them to the work of experience designers today: observation, empathy, trust, perception, storytelling, and the ability to understand a world from someone else’s point of view.

Abby Honor, Chair 2026 SEGD Global Design Awards, Partner, Lorem Ipsum Corp

Celebrate the year’s most exceptional work in experiential design at the 2026 SEGD Global Design Awards. At 39 years, this is SEGD’s longest-running awards program recognizes projects that demonstrate excellence across the many ways design connects people to place, from exhibitions and wayfinding to branded environments, digital experiences, placemaking, public installations, and strategy.

Join the SEGD community as we reveal this year’s award recipients and celebrate the designers, collaborators, and projects advancing the possibilities of experiential design around the world.

Presented by: DCL

Joell Angel-Chumbley, MFA, SEGD, Experience Design Lead, City of Cincinnati, DOTE, Architecture and Urban Design

Lisa Maione, Associate Professor, Kansas City Art Institute

Jeremy Shellhorn, Associate Professor of Design, University of Kansas

Neeta Verma, Associate Professor (Retd.), University of Notre Dame

Experience design happens in the middle: between disciplines, stakeholders, communities, systems, and competing perspectives. So how do we prepare the next generation of designers to work confidently in a field where navigating relationships and complexity can matter as much as the ability to design?

Bringing together local and national educators, this conversation explores what happens when the classroom meets the real world, from multidisciplinary collaboration and community engagement to ambiguity, emerging technology, and the changing expectations of the profession. At its heart is a larger question: Are we teaching students simply how to design things, or how to navigate the relationships, tensions, and possibilities that make design matter?

Traci Sym, Chair 2026 SEGD Achievement Awards, SEGD Past President, Founding Principal, Plus And Greater Than

The SEGD Achievement Awards recognize distinguished individuals and organizations whose contributions have advanced experiential design and helped shape the profession. Celebrate the 2026 honorees and the leadership, service, mentorship, and lasting contributions they have made to SEGD and the broader design community.

Jonathan Jackson, Creative Director/Partner, WSDIA | WeShouldDoItAll

Donna Lawrence, Owner/Creative Director, Donna Lawrence Productions

Despina Macris, Founder/Director, dotdash

Mark Ross, Founder, dotdash

The SEGD Fellow designation is the organization’s highest honor, recognizing individuals whose bodies of work have shaped the direction of experiential design and represent the highest standards of practice in the field.

Hear directly from SEGD’s newest Fellows, Jonathan Jackson, Donna Lawrence, Despina Macris, and Mark Ross, as they share the work, experiences, ideas, and defining moments that have shaped their practices and their contributions to the profession.

Presented by Pentagram

Tom Waggoner, AIA, Architect and Author, T WAGGONER DESIGN + CONSULTING

Why are so many of the firms designing the world’s stadiums, arenas, and sports destinations based in Kansas City? Today, the region is home to an extraordinary concentration of sports architecture expertise, with dozens of firms and more than a thousand professionals working on projects across the United States and around the world. 

Trace the roots of a design ecosystem more than 50 years in the making, from the firms and architects that established Kansas City’s global reputation to the generations of practices that grew from them. It’s the story of how one city became a center of gravity for designing the places where people gather, compete, celebrate, and belong.

Taylor Loutsis, Founder, Studio Loutsis

Paula Neston, Cultural Practice Executive, Dimensional Innovations

What happens when tension isn’t something to resolve, but something to design with? Through the recently completed signage and wayfinding for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, this session explores tension as a productive force for challenging assumptions, negotiating differences, and pushing creative boundaries.

Go inside the design process behind a major new cultural destination to consider how designers can make room for complexity and competing perspectives without flattening them, and what becomes possible when we resist the instinct to resolve every contradiction.

Paul Skinner, Creative Director, Tellart

We are living in a privileged and disorienting moment. New technologies and discoveries are arriving faster than we can absorb them, opening possibilities we never imagined while the consequences of yesterday’s decisions are only beginning to reveal themselves. AI is accelerating that tension, reshaping not only the tools designers use, but what design and communication can mean.

Drawing from Tellart’s work creating multisensory experiences, including the Netherlands Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, this session considers how designers can work thoughtfully in the gap between the pace of change and our capacity to understand it. How do we use new tools without losing sight of human agency, creativity, and our responsibility to shape a more sustainable future?

Lucy Holmes, Owner, Holmes Studio

What does it mean to exist, and design, in the middle? Drawing on decades of work with cultural institutions including Tate, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The British Museum, and the new London Museum, this session explores the creative potential of the liminal space where the answer isn’t yet clear and nothing is off the table.

Uncertainty can be uncomfortable, but it can also be extraordinarily productive. Rather than rushing toward resolution, what might emerge if designers learn to stay in that space a little longer, remaining open to ambiguity, possibility, and the unexpected?