Meeting in the Middle: Opening Minds and Hearts

September 9, 2026

From the ambitions shaping Kansas City to the uncertainty at the heart of the creative process, two conversations bookend this year’s Conference with an invitation to open our minds, our hearts, and our understanding of what it means to meet in the middle.

What does it actually mean to meet in the middle?

At this year’s SEGD Conference Experience in Kansas City, the answer changes depending on where you look. Sometimes the middle is a place of convergence, where different people, disciplines, and ambitions come together around something larger than any one of them. Sometimes it is a place of uncertainty, where the answer hasn’t revealed itself yet and the instinct to resolve things too quickly can get in the way of something more interesting.

Two conversations bookend this year’s Conference and approach that idea from very different perspectives. On opening day, Kathy Nelson and Tucker Trotter look outward, at Kansas City and what can happen when design, tourism, sports, and civic ambition align around a shared vision. On Saturday, Lucy Holmes brings us inward, closing the Conference with an invitation to stay with ambiguity and discomfort long enough to discover what might emerge.

Together, they offer a powerful start and finish to three days of Meet Me in the Middle, opening minds and hearts to what becomes possible in the space between.

When a City Thinks Bigger

Thursday, October 22 | The Collaborative Middle

The Conference begins in The Collaborative Middle, exploring what becomes possible when different disciplines, perspectives, and ambitions come together around something larger than any one of them. Few places make that idea more tangible than Kansas City itself.

What does it take to change the way the world sees a city, and perhaps just as importantly, the way a city sees itself?

Kathy Nelson, President and CEO of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC, has spent more than a decade helping make the case for Kansas City on the world stage. That work reached a defining moment as the city prepared to host the FIFA World Cup 2026, bringing together tourism, sports, hospitality, government, business, and community around an opportunity much bigger than any single organization.

At the Conference, Nelson will sit down with Tucker Trotter, CEO of Dimensional Innovations, whose own work demonstrates what can happen when ambitious ideas become experiences people can actually enter, navigate, and remember.

Under Trotter’s leadership, Dimensional Innovations has shaped landmarks across Kansas City and beyond, from the Kansas City Public Library’s giant book façade to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. More recently, he co-founded Atlas9, an immersive entertainment destination in Kansas City, Kansas.

Together, Nelson and Trotter will explore the space where tourism, design, experience, and civic ambition converge. They’ll look at what Kansas City has learned from welcoming the world, from the practical realities of hotel inventory and event compression to the longer-term opportunities created when a city invests in how people experience it, including what comes next as Kansas City looks toward a potential bid for the 2031 Women’s World Cup.

It’s a conversation about return on investment, but also return on experience: what becomes possible when a city stops thinking about individual attractions, events, and experiences in isolation and begins seeing them as part of a larger story.

The Creative Power of Uncertainty

Saturday, October 24 | The Emotional Middle

If Thursday begins with what can happen when a city comes together, Saturday turns toward The Emotional Middle and the more human spaces between certainty and ambiguity, comfort and discomfort, what we know and what we have yet to understand.

It’s here that Lucy Holmes, Founder and Creative Director of Holmes Studio, will close the Conference with a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to exist in the middle?

Designers are trained to find answers: to clarify, organize, resolve, and make sense of complexity. Holmes asks what happens when we resist that instinct for a little longer.

For Holmes, the middle is a liminal space where nothing is settled and nothing is off the table. It can be uncomfortable. It can feel uncertain. But that uncertainty can also create room for ideas that disappear when we rush too quickly toward resolution. Her keynote makes the case for staying there just a little longer and considering what might emerge when we do.

It’s an approach shaped by more than 30 years working with some of the world’s leading cultural institutions, including Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, and the soon-to-open London Museum.

Holmes began her career at Pentagram in London focused on book and editorial design before founding her own studio in 1995. Today, she leads Holmes Studio’s creative vision with a specialist background in typography and an approach influenced by Charles and Ray Eames: zoom into the details, then step back to see the whole.

A Fellow of the RSA, former SEGD Board member, and past juror for the SEGD Global Design Awards, Holmes is a familiar presence in the SEGD community. Her closing keynote brings that experience back to a question that sits at the heart of Meet Me in the Middle: what might we discover if we don’t rush through the space between where we started and where we think we need to end?

What Becomes Possible in the Middle?

From the Collaborative Middle on Thursday to the Emotional Middle on Saturday, these conversations form two very different bookends to the Conference. One looks outward, at a city bringing people, disciplines, and ambitions together. The other looks inward, at the quieter, less certain space inside the creative process.

Both ask us to reconsider the middle as something more than a point between two sides.

The middle can be where perspectives converge. Where assumptions get challenged. Where we sit with complexity rather than flatten it. Where we open ourselves to another way of seeing. And where something becomes possible that no one could have arrived at alone.

It’s a fitting way to begin and end three days together: opening our minds to what collaboration can make possible, and our hearts to what we might discover when we stay in the middle a little longer.