Few markets have escaped unaffected by the pandemic and the ISE conference programme will not only reflect the huge changes that have occurred in many areas, but also help to make sense of the longer-term impacts. Sessions will look at what’s changed and whether these changes are here for the long term, explore how best to respond and highlight where the opportunities lie.

Few markets have escaped unaffected by the pandemic and the ISE conference programme will not only reflect the huge changes that have occurred in many areas, but also help to make sense of the longer-term impacts. Sessions will look at what’s changed and whether these changes are here for the long term, explore how best to respond and highlight where the opportunities lie.

The theme of the Smart Building Conference – ‘Smart, Safe, Sustainable Building Technologies’, shows just how much the thinking around the buildings we inhabit and how they should respond to its occupants has changed.

Conference Chair Bob Snyder explains: “As office and retail buildings started to reopen following the lockdowns, property owners and corporate tenants were forced to rethink the way buildings are operated. Delivering peace of mind and confidence to employees and visitors is a top priority. It’s a fact that investment in smart building technology rose during this pandemic.”

This theme will also be picked up in the Smart Workplace Summit, where massive changes to where people work and what they expect from their workspaces have been felt over the past couple of years. Smart hybrid offices, the technology within them, the benefits they offer and how to navigate the post-pandemic smart workplace will all be discussed in depth.

Control rooms, which have always been at the forefront of AV technology usage, are dealing with similar issues, and a human-centric approach to their design is being encouraged. The Control Rooms Summit will look at how to go about designing a new critical control room, including the people considerations that need to be taken into account.

There’s no doubt that the pandemic massively accelerated digital transformation within higher education and, while many have been eager to return to campus, the potential of hybrid learning has now been realised. The challenge is how to deliver effective hybrid learning at scale, how to ensure equity for remote and in-person students, and how to ensure successful learning outcomes. Technology will be at the heart of hybrid learning and the Digital Learning Summit will share success stories of universities developing creative solutions to deliver hybrid learning at scale as well as exploring the tools enabling a successful shift.

While the education sector experienced rapid changes during the pandemic, the live events sector largely shutdown across the globe. Innovation continued, however, and remote mixing came to the fore with audio engineers finding themselves mixing a show from a remote location for audiences watching from home. The Live Events Summit will explore how this could affect future workflows, look at the opportunities for remote mixing and ask what the future could hold for the sector.

Interestingly, in many sectors, pandemic-enforced changes have also fed into a growing focus on sustainability. Remote mixing, and its ability to reduce the number of people needing to travel to venues, is one example. But this is also being seen in other sectors and it will be explored across the ISE conference programme.

Digital signage, for example, has seen a huge focus on green signage. Florian Rotberg, Conference Chair and managing director at invidis consulting, explains: “What has changed, especially during the pandemic, is that there’s a greater consciousness around environmentally friendly, sustainable digital signage solutions.”

This will be addressed in the invidis keynote that kicks off the summit, while end users will also share their experiences of sustainable solutions.

Even the world of the superyacht didn’t escape the influence of the pandemic, but this time the effect was more positive. “The pandemic has changed owners’ perceptions, instead of a party location, a holiday space, yachts are now viewed as a safe sanctuary. The consequence of that is it has pushed a real spike in yacht ownership,” according to keynote speaker Feargus Bryan of Watermark Yachts.

Superyacht Technology Summit will explore the longer-term impacts on superyacht design and delivery, and the importance of an impeccable and safe user experience. Click here for more details and to register.