SEGD Brings Global Experience Design Community to Kansas City for “Meet Me in the Middle”

September 22, 2026

Cybelle Jones

Three-day conference explores how design creates connection across people, place, technology and culture, with more than 30 speakers, 11 city tours, expanded NEXPO programming, awards celebrations and pre-conference learning

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 17, 2026 — The Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) will bring its global community to Kansas City, Missouri, October 22–24 for the 2026 SEGD Conference Experience Kansas City at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown. Optional pre-conference bootcamps, a destination tour to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and a welcome party begin Wednesday, October 21.

This year’s theme, Meet Me in the Middle, takes Kansas City’s position at the geographic heart of the United States as a starting point for a larger conversation about where experience design happens: between client vision and user need, culture and place, technology and humanity, the built environment and the human spirit.

“As experience designers, we have always lived in the middle. Between client vision and user need. Between the built environment and the human spirit. Between the world as it is and the world as it should be,” said Cybelle Jones, CEO of SEGD. “This conference is about what happens when we stop treating that middle as a place of tension and start treating it as a place of possibility. Kansas City is the perfect city to have that conversation.”

Over three days, designers, architects, fabricators, artists, technologists, educators, cultural leaders, and changemakers will examine how design helps people move, gather, learn, remember, and belong. The program is organized around four interconnected lenses: the Geographic Middle, the Collaborative Middle, the Emotional Middle and the Social Middle. Together, they move the conversation from the city and the systems that shape it, to the human experience at the center of the work, and finally to design’s responsibility to help people navigate complexity and bridge divides. Throughout, Kansas City itself becomes part of the curriculum.

The Geographic Middle begins with place. It asks how Kansas City’s location, history, and deeply connected design community have shaped a city known for civic collaboration, cultural storytelling, and a sports architecture practice with global reach. The Collaborative Middle explores what becomes possible when disciplines, institutions, and communities align around a shared ambition. The Emotional Middle turns inward to examine instinct, empathy, perception and the ways designed environments make people feel. The Social Middle asks what design owes the public, particularly when projects carry contested histories, civic meaning, or the responsibility to help people see themselves and one another more clearly.

The conference is led by co-chairs Rick Smith, Vice President of Experiential Design at Dimensional Innovations; Wendy Manning, Founder and Managing Principal of Demeter Strategy Design; and Jackie Berra, Founder and Brand Experience Director of JBerra Consulting & Design, with support from SEGD Kansas City Chapter Chairs Kate Schmidt and Sarah Onken. The conference identity was developed by Studio Loutsis.

Three Days That Move from Place to People to Possibility

Rather than treating the theme as a single idea, each day approaches the middle from a different direction. Thursday establishes the conference’s center of gravity in Kansas City and the collaborative systems that have shaped it. Friday explores the human instincts, emotions, and technical expertise behind meaningful experiences. Saturday considers the bridges designers build across generations, histories, disciplines and communities.

Day One – The Center of Gravity

Thursday, October 22, opens in the Geographic Middle, grounding the conference in its host city. The morning examines how Kansas City’s unusually collaborative design ecosystem, civic ambition, and culture of making have allowed a city in the middle of the country to influence experiences worldwide. From there, the program moves into the Collaborative Middle, looking at what happens when tourism, sports, healthcare, design and public leadership converge around needs and opportunities no single organization could address alone.

Dawn Taylor, Executive Director of AIA Kansas City and the Center for Architecture & Design, opens with “Kansas City’s Secret Sauce: A Collaborative Design Ecosystem,” examining the relationships and civic leadership that have helped design thrive across the region. Cynthia Sharpe, Senior Principal and Executive Creative Director at TAIT, follows with “Design as an Act of Repair,” exploring how third spaces and location-based experiences can be designed to be more inclusive, restorative, and human.

In “World Cup and Beyond: KC’s ROE,” Kathy Nelson, President and CEO of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC, joins Tucker Trotter, CEO of Dimensional Innovations, to look at what became possible when tourism, sports, hospitality, government, business and design aligned to welcome the world for the FIFA World Cup 2026, and what that investment can continue to return to the city.

Thursday morning closes with “The Emotional Architecture of Healthcare,” featuring Smith; Bethany Foss, Design Leader at HOK; Erin Nybo of CannonDesign; and Mara Sabatini of HDR. Together, they will explore the role of design in children’s mental health, neurodivergent environments, and spaces intended to support healing.

In the afternoon, attendees choose from 11 designer-led tours that turn Kansas City into a living case study in wayfinding, exhibition, public art, sports, technology and cultural storytelling. NEXPO remains open for hands-on exploration and conversation, and the day concludes with the President’s Welcome Reception and Auction for Excellence.

Day Two – Heart and Expertise

Friday, October 23, belongs to the Emotional Middle: where technical knowledge meets how people actually perceive, feel, and move through space. The day brings together wayfinding, lighting, media and storytelling to examine how human-centered experiences are made, not simply through powerful tools or polished aesthetics, but through attention to instinct, behavior, memory and meaning.

On Friday, October 23, Jonathan Mugmon, Principal and Wayfinding Director at Populous, presents “Designing for Human Instinct.” Drawing from environmental psychology and his book The Science of Wayfinding, Mugmon will argue that the next evolution of wayfinding depends not on aesthetics alone, but on a deeper understanding of how people perceive, feel, and move through space.

François Roupinian, IALD, President of Lightemotion, presents “Light as Material, Human Experience as Purpose: A Human-Centered Philosophy of Lighting Design,” drawing on international cultural, exhibition and architectural projects to examine light as both a spatial material and a way of shaping emotion.

The Friday program also brings one of the nation’s most anticipated cultural projects to the stage. “Filming Democracy: Media Storytelling at the Obama Presidential Center Museum” features Sara Pasch, Director of Integrated Media at the Obama Foundation; Aki Carpenter, Global Vice President and Chief Creative Officer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates; and Valerie Chin and Megan Gargagliano of batwin + robin. The panel will reveal what it takes to create media for a museum dedicated to democracy, public service, and the power of people to create change, while navigating evolving content, ambitious storytelling, and a complex group of stakeholders.

An additional Friday mainstage presentation will feature Jonna Mendez, former CIA Chief of Disguise and a leading voice on the relationship between identity, perception and deception.

The afternoon shifts into NEXPO talks, mentorship and meaningful exchange before the community gathers for the NEXPO Reception and the 2026 SEGD Global Design Awards. The progression from mainstage ideas to materials, makers and recognized work reinforces a central premise of the Conference: expertise matters most when it can be translated into experiences people can enter, understand and remember.

Day Three – Bridges We Build

Saturday, October 24, begins by looking toward the future of the profession and the people who will shape it. It then moves into the Social Middle, asking how design can help people navigate not only physical environments, but also competing narratives, difficult histories, and increasingly divided public life. Across education, professional recognition, sports architecture, presidential legacies and creative uncertainty, the final day considers what designers carry forward and what they make possible for others.

Saturday, October 24, opens with a conversation about the future of experiential design education featuring Joell Angel-Chumbley, Experience Design Lead for the City of Cincinnati; Lisa Maione, Associate Professor at Kansas City Art Institute; Jeremy Shellhorn, Associate Professor of Design at the University of Kansas; and Neeta Verma, retired Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. The panel brings together educators and practitioners whose work spans civic design, screen-based practice, community engagement and field-based learning.

SEGD will then recognize the recipients of the 2026 SEGD Achievement Awards, presented by SEGD Past President Traci Sym, before honoring its newest SEGD Fellows: Jonathan Jackson, Creative Director and Partner of WSDIA; Donna Lawrence, Owner and Creative Director of Donna Lawrence Productions; and Despina Macris and Mark Ross, founders of dotdash. The Fellow designation is SEGD’s highest honor and recognizes individuals whose bodies of work have shaped the direction of the profession.

Saturday afternoon turns to the spaces where design helps people gather, confront complexity, and understand public history. Architect and author Tom Waggoner, AIA, presents “How Kansas City Became the Sports Architecture Capital of the World,” tracing how a concentrated local design community transformed stadium design into a global specialization now exported from Kansas City to venues around the world.

In “Making Space for Tension,” Taylor Loutsis, Founder and Creative Director of Studio Loutsis, and Paula Neston, Cultural Practice Executive at Dimensional Innovations, examine the signage and wayfinding for the newly opened Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Set against the North Dakota Badlands, the project asks what it means to design for a consequential and complicated legacy without flattening its contradictions.

Paul Skinner of Tellart will lead an additional afternoon presentation, followed by the conference closing keynote, “The Creative Power of Uncertainty,” with Lucy Holmes, Founder and Creative Director of Holmes Studio. Holmes will invite designers to resist the impulse to resolve complexity too quickly and consider the creative possibilities that emerge when they remain in the unsettled space between where they began and where they think they need to end.

Together, the opening conversations about a city aligning around shared ambition and Holmes’ closing reflection create two powerful bookends for the Conference: one looking outward at what collaboration can make possible, and one looking inward at the uncertainty at the heart of the creative process. Between them, three days of talks, tours, recognition and exchange demonstrate that the middle is not a compromise. It is where perspectives converge, assumptions are challenged, and meaning is made.

Eleven Ways to Experience Kansas City

On Thursday afternoon, attendees will leave the ballroom for 11 designer-led tours across Kansas City. Each offers behind-the-scenes access to a different dimension of experiential design:

• Atlas9, a 46,000-square-foot immersive entertainment destination combining RFID tracking, projection mapping and live performance;
• The Children’s Place KC, where color, form and environmental graphics help young children feel safe, oriented and welcome;
• CPKC Stadium, the first stadium in the world purpose-built for a women’s professional sports team;
• Kansas City International Airport, the region’s largest infrastructure project and a case study in inclusive, accessible wayfinding at scale;
• National WWI Museum and Memorial, including the new Encounters exhibition and its integration of projection, lighting and narrative design;
• Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the 18th & Vine Jazz District, exploring the power of place-based storytelling and living cultural history;
• The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, examining how exhibition, graphic and wayfinding design work together across a 22-acre campus;
• The Rabbit hOle, an artist-led museum that brings more than a century of children’s literature to life;
• Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, where more than 35 media experiences layer information, interaction and emotion;
• Two Tone Press and Oddities Prints, offering a close look at letterpress, screen printing and the craft of making; and
• Urban Hikes KC Mural Tour, moving from the Barney Allis Pedestrian Bridge through the Westside neighborhood to explore public art, identity and placemaking at street level.

Tours require advance selection; capacity is limited.

NEXPO Moves Into the Heart of the Conference

For the first time, SEGD’s NEXPO industry marketplace expands across two full days and shares the same ballroom as the Conference mainstage. Attendees can move seamlessly among talks, conversations, materials, technologies, and the industry partners who help bring experiential projects to life.

NEXPO programming includes product and technology discovery, networking, EXP mentorship meet-ups, a preview of findings from the 2026 SEGD Salary and Employment Report, and the participatory “What Needs Bridging?” Wall, which will gather attendees’ perspectives on what design must help bridge in their practices, cities and communities.

Friday concludes with the NEXPO Reception and the 2026 SEGD Global Design Awards, hosted by Abigail Honor, Partner at Lorem Ipsum Corp. The ceremony will recognize the year’s most exceptional work in experiential design, including the Best of Show and Sylvia Harris Life-Centered Design Award recipients, followed by a reception in the historic Barney Allis Lobby.

Pre-Conference Learning and a Destination Experience

Three optional pre-conference experiences on Wednesday, October 21, invite participants to arrive early and go deeper.

The Wayfinding, Planning and Design Bootcamp is a four-hour, certificate-based intensive led by Populous specialists Jonathan Mugmon, Ashley Wysong, Ezz Osman and Pan Hu. Through research, strategy, system design, and typographic communication, participants will build a practical, user-centered framework to help people navigate complex environments.

The technology bootcamp, “Technology Is Not the Experience: Designing for Impact, Engagement and Meaning,” is led by Sarah van Haastert and Joe Whitesides of AVI-SPL XTG, Nathan Lachenmyer of Sitara Systems and Cheryl Catterall of HKS. Through case studies and collaborative exercises, participants will learn to evaluate technology as one component of a larger experiential strategy, grounding decisions in audience, story, goals, budget, timeline, and long-term operations.

A daylong destination tour travels to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, for a behind-the-scenes look at the museum’s new 114,000-square-foot expansion by Safdie Architects, along with Keith Haring in 3D, the Bachman-Wilson House by Frank Lloyd Wright and a visit to the Momentary.

All three pre-conference experiences require separate registration and have limited capacity.

Four Days of Community and Celebration

The Conference community first comes together Wednesday evening for a Welcome Party at Boulevard Brewing Company Beer Hall, hosted by Archetype.

Thursday concludes with the President’s Welcome Reception and Auction for Excellence, an annual celebration supporting SEGD’s educational initiatives and featuring one-of-a-kind work and experiences contributed by SEGD Fellows and community members.

On Friday, the NEXPO Reception leads into the Global Design Awards ceremony and reception. Saturday’s program includes the Achievement Awards celebration, Fellow presentations, and an Emerging Professionals lunch at Populous’ newly designed Kansas City headquarters.

The Conference closes Saturday evening at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, where attendees will gather for a final celebration and an inside look at the new Encounters exhibition.

Registration

The 2026 SEGD Conference Experience Kansas City takes place October 22–24, 2026, at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown, with pre-conference programming and the Welcome Party on October 21. Registration, hotel information, the complete agenda, and tour availability are available at segd.org/events/2026-segd-conference-experience-kansas-city.

About SEGD

The Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) is a multidisciplinary global community of designers, fabricators, architects, media developers, creative technologists, educators and students creating experiences that connect people to place. SEGD’s members work across branded environments, digital experiences, exhibitions, placemaking, public installations, strategy and wayfinding to make the built environment more inclusive and intuitive, emotive and engaging, sustainable and shared. Learn more at segd.org.