Part 2: 2036-Predictions 1-7: Attendee Trends in 2036: Badge, Journey, Discovery
Part 2 of 7: Seven predictions about who is coming, how they arrive, and what they need from the room
A note before the predictions. This is my take — a point of view, not a forecast I'm betting the house on. Some of it will be wrong; I've misjudged this industry's timing in every decade I've worked in it, and I'll misjudge some of this too. The point isn't to be right. It's to pull the camera back far enough to see the whole board, and to think it through together. So read what follows as an invitation, not a verdict — and tell me where I'm off. That's the whole idea. For full evidence briefs for paid subscribers go click here:
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Here we go: The attendee of 2036 is not more demanding than the attendee of 2025. She is more capable of comparison, more protected from manipulation by the agent evaluating her attendance decisions, and more conscious of what her time and attention are worth. The event that treats her as a body to be processed through a registration queue and directed toward a content delivery system will not see her again. The event that treats her as the reason the room exists is the event that has earned what comes next.
The Badge Does Not Die. It Migrates.
Biometric entry technology already processes attendees faster and more securely than any badge system, and the adoption curve in sports venues is steep enough to reach conference and trade show infrastructure within the decade. By 2025, 35 percent of major stadiums were using biometric entry, and when the LA Clippers opened the Intuit Dome in 2024, the projected one-in-three fan opt-in to Game Face ID reached 75 percent by the end of the first season, more than double expectations.
But the badge was never only a credential. It was the events industry’s primary tool for making strangers legible to each other in a room: the permission structure that allowed the introvert to approach, the conversation starter that required no social courage, the mutual disclosure system that told everyone in the room who everyone else was. When the lanyard disappears, that function needs to go somewhere or the serendipity architecture of the event loses its most basic scaffolding.
Smart glasses are where it goes. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses sold more than seven million units in 2025, and the company’s internally developed Name Tag feature, which overlays identity and profile information on the wearer’s field of vision when she looks at another person, is in active development. The IDC projects the smart glasses market growing from $1.5 billion in 2025 to $10 billion by 2030. The privacy counterargument is serious: the badge was a mutual disclosure system where everyone could see everyone else’s information simultaneously, while the smart glasses system is unilateral. That asymmetry resolves through the consent framework built into event registration. The organizer who builds this system is not eliminating the badge. She is building the badge that Leonardo would have built if he had known what was coming.
The Attendee Journey Is Redesigned From the Outside In.
The current attendee journey is designed around the organizer’s operational milestones: registration opens, agenda posts, hotel block closes, app downloads, doors open. None of these milestones are designed around the attendee’s cognitive or emotional preparation for the event. The redesign happens when organizers stop asking what they need to run the event and start asking what the attendee needs in order to change something when she returns to her office.
That is a different design brief. It starts eight weeks before the event with curated content that prepares the attendee to use her time on-site rather than orient herself on-site, builds personal agendas around who she is trying to meet rather than what sessions are available, and creates re-entry moments 90 days after the event that let her apply what she encountered rather than lose it to the flight home. C2 Montreal has built its attendee journey as an experience arc that begins weeks before the event and extends after it, with structured follow-through built into the program. Their renewal rates are among the highest in the conference market.
Attendee Discovery Becomes the Industry’s Most Urgent Unsolved Problem.
The events industry is the only major attention economy without a neutral discovery layer between the seller’s marketing and the buyer’s decision. Every other category has independent rating and recommendation infrastructure: Rotten Tomatoes for films, Yelp for restaurants, TripAdvisor for hotels. Conferences have the organizer’s early-bird email and whatever a colleague mentioned in a hallway. The companies that build a neutral discovery layer will restructure power in the market as completely as Yelp restructured restaurants, because the organizer who has been surviving on captive audience loyalty and the absence of a better comparison mechanism loses that protection the moment the comparison becomes possible.
Luma, the events platform, is the closest existing example of a discovery layer for the technology conference market, aggregating events and enabling social proof through RSVPs, but it remains organizer-driven rather than neutral. The neutral version has not been built. The market is waiting for it.
Low Cognitive Load Becomes the Organizing Design Principle, Not a Luxury.
The average professional attending a major conference makes approximately 200 discrete decisions over three days. Each decision withdraws from the cognitive budget she brought to the event. By the time she reaches the first session she intended to attend, she has already spent resources that should have been available for the content, the connection, and the conversation. Low cognitive load is not a comfort argument. It is the baseline condition under which an experience, as opposed to a spectacle, can occur at all. XOXO festival in Portland, deliberately small, single track, invitation-only, no concurrent sessions, has been consistently cited as one of the most valuable professional experiences in the technology and creative community despite offering a fraction of the session count of comparable conferences. That is not a coincidence. That is a design philosophy.
Joy Becomes a Measured Outcome.
The events industry measures attendance, session utilization, and net promoter scores. It does not measure whether anything happened to the person who showed up. Joy is not a soft metric. It is the primary output of the gathering economy, and the industry that cannot measure its primary output is not a mature industry. The experience sampling methodology developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, pinging participants at intervals and asking them to rate their current emotional state on a validated affect scale, produces reliable data without requiring continuous engagement from the participant. The organizer who calls 50 attendees at 30, 90, and 180 days after the event and asks three specific questions about what changed is building the measurement infrastructure that no competitor currently has and that the AI agent will eventually require before routing attendance recommendations.
Neurodiversity Becomes Baseline Design.
Corporate clients are beginning to hold events to the same accessibility and inclusion standards they apply to workplace design. The event designer who cannot spec a sensory-safe environment is behind in the same way the architect who could not spec wheelchair accessibility was behind in 1995. The Orange County Convention Center has pursued sensory-inclusive certification, adding quiet rooms, sensory kits at guest services, and trained staff. The corporate client with a neurodiversity inclusion mandate in its HR policy is already writing RFPs that include sensory accommodation specifications, and the venue that cannot answer those specifications loses the booking to the venue that can. The baseline shifts when the buyer requires it. The buyer is starting to require it.
Tribal Personalization Replaces Demographic Segmentation.
Demographic segmentation tells you who someone is on paper. Tribal personalization tells you who someone is in relation to the thing they care about. Nicole Peck, Executive Vice President at Clarion Events, designed an entrance for an event where attendees chose at registration whether they were salt people or sugar people. Two entrances. Two completely different arrival experiences. Two self-identified tribes that immediately had something genuine to talk about with every stranger they encountered, because the choice had told them something true about themselves before the first handshake. The tribes are not the destination. They are the entry point to cross-tribal encounter. The event that uses tribal identity to route people toward each other, rather than to sort people into separate experiences that never intersect, is the event that has understood what Nicole Peck built and why it worked.
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Next: The Experience. The goosebump effect, the Event Forge, facilitation, serendipity engineering, and the predictions that will generate the most argument in the industry.
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Fifty Years in the Room: The Prelude to 44 Predictions for 2036
I came to the events industry through the back door of Washington society journalism. A month after I graduated from American University I launched Washington Dossier, a magazine that covered the soft power of the nation’s capital: the dinners, the embassy receptions, the charity galas, the private gatherings where the real decisions got made in rooms t…
This is a strong framework, particularly the distinction between an attendee becoming more demanding and becoming more capable of comparison. That feels fundamental. The event is no longer competing only with another event; it is competing with every other possible use of someone’s money, attention, energy, and increasingly, the recommendation of that person’s AI agent.
The low-cognitive-load prediction may be the most immediately actionable. We often confuse abundance with value: more tracks, more sessions, more app features, more choices. But an attendee who has spent half her mental bandwidth navigating the schedule, transport, queues, food, and introductions has less capacity left for the actual experience.
My one challenge is the specific migration of the badge to smart glasses. I agree completely that the badge’s social function survives, but I suspect the lasting layer will be attendee-controlled identity rather than one dominant device: contextual, consent-based information surfaced through glasses, phones, wearables, or AI assistants. The privacy asymmetry you identify is not a minor design issue; it may determine whether the system produces connection or ambient surveillance.
I would also add climate and physical comfort to the cognitive-load argument. By 2036, shade, water, air quality, accessibility, sensory refuge, and transport may be as central to attendee experience as content and networking.
The larger thread here is compelling: the future event is not a content-delivery system. It is carefully designed infrastructure for attention, belonging, discovery, and change.
Thanks David, very insightful. I'm working on 3 ;)