An academic conference consists of internal (organizers, volunteers, reviewers) and external (participants, keynote speakers, sponsors). In this project, the focus was on designing a service for enhancing participants' engagement and experience at a virtual academic, professional conference post-pandemic.

After doing primary and secondary research, the project brief was further scoped down to designing the service for hybrid satellite model to enhance the participants' engagement and experience at a professional and academic conference.

This service design solution was designed for medium/large sized design conferences. For the purpose of this project, a design academic professional conference- India HCI 2020 [1] was studied and tested as a representative conference. The characteristic features of the service design proposed were implemented live during the conference held in November 2020. Some parts of service design solutions have the potential for likely implementation in other academic conference domains.

The goal of this project was to:
1. Identify possible interventions in the organization of a professional design conference (India HCI 2020 was taken as a representative conference for the purpose of studying and testing the conference service).

2. Exploring different conference models to see which one is the most suitable.

3. Building a viable service for better user engagement in a hybrid satellite conference model to optimize all the participants’ experiences.

4. Conceptualizing and designing touchpoints that the participants will interact with as part of this service.

The key elements of the service were prototyped during a professional academic design conference- India HCI 2020 for testing as a proof of concept. This service design prototype was then evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively to get insights and further development of the design.

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• Hybrid Satellite Model for Academic and Professional Conferences......