Meeting in the Middle: Two Presidential Stories, Two Design Perspectives

September 2, 2026

Cybelle Jones

This fall’s SEGD Conference Experience is built around a simple idea: some of the most meaningful design happens in the middle. It’s in the negotiation between vision and constraint, between one story and another, between what we design and who we design it for.

Across three days in Kansas City, that idea takes shape through conversations spanning wayfinding, exhibition, media, technology, placemaking, architecture, and more. On back-to-back days, two of this year’s featured sessions approach that idea from very different directions, taking us inside the design of two presidential destinations.

On Friday, the Emotional Middle takes center stage with “Making Media for the Obama Presidential Center.” Sara Pasch of the Obama Presidential Center, Aki Carpenter of RAA, and team members from batwin+robin productions go behind the scenes of nearly 75 media experiences created to carry the emotional force and complexity of the Obama presidency. It’s a rare look at the combination this work demands: rigorous technical craft paired with genuine human care, and the challenge of translating history, memory, and lived experience into something visitors can feel.

Then, on Saturday, the Social Middle picks up the thread with “Making Space for Tension.” Taylor Loutsis of Studio Loutsis and Paula Neston of Dimensional Innovations bring us inside the signage and wayfinding for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, exploring tension as a productive force for challenging assumptions, negotiating differences, and pushing boundaries. Set against the beauty of the North Dakota Badlands, the project asks what it means to design for a complicated legacy without flattening its contradictions—a reminder that empathy in wayfinding isn’t soft; it’s structural.

Different places. Different centuries. Different design disciplines. Yet both projects ask their teams to navigate complexity rather than design around it: to balance vision and constraint, story and stakeholder, history and contemporary experience.

That same challenge runs throughout this year’s Conference. Meeting in the middle isn’t about compromise for compromise’s sake. It’s about what becomes possible when different perspectives, disciplines, histories, and lived experiences converge, and designers make space for all of them.

These are just two of the conversations we’ll be bringing into the room this October in Kansas City—and two more reasons to join us there.

Register by September 4 for discounted rates.