The Comeback of Small Conferences

Why we need to be in the same room again

A few nights ago I found myself in a crowded karaoke bar in Shibuya, singing my heart out with a group of designers from around the world.

My mom was there too.

She had joined me on a trip to Japan after I was invited to speak at the inaugural Tokyo Design Forum. She wanted to see the country, and I thought it might be fun for her to experience this strange little world I spend so much time in.

During the trip I realized I hadn’t travelled alone with my mom since I was five years old.

I didn’t have many concerns about bringing her, but I was still surprised by how it all went. She met a whole group of wonderful people from all over the world. She attended the panel I spoke on, practiced her English while tasting sake at an izakaya, and yes, she came along to karaoke.

After-conference karaoke with my mom

In many ways, she was with me at work, much like I had been with her when I was growing up.

Watching her interact with everyone gave me a strange outside perspective on something I’ve spent much of my adult life doing: traveling to conferences.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve gone from the freezing Arctic to the busy streets of Shibuya to participate in two very different events.

Something new is happening.

Why Conferences Matter

In an era where nearly all information is available online, it’s reasonable to ask whether in-person conferences still matter? Talks can be recorded, tutorials can be watched on YouTube and communities exist year-round on Discord, Slack and social media.

Moving yourself physically thousands of kilometers to spend a few days listening to talks and talking to strangers might not seem worth the cost, time and effort.

You can run a business, grow an audience and connect with people online.

Covid almost destroyed conferences and now it seems like knowledge is just a prompt away. So why are we seeing an increase in smaller conferences?

Tokyo Design Forum, Shibuya, Japan

The Return of Small Conferences

It is increasingly clear to me that in a world that is always on, temporary shared experiences are rare.

A conference is one of the few places where a scattered online community briefly becomes real.

There’s a realness that comes from meeting your peers face to face. All of the fluff that so often surrounds online discourse falls away. There is no hype, just passion. No engagement hook, just curiosity.

Instead of making followers, you make friends.

I touched upon this last year when I wrote The Power of Community. But the past few weeks made the idea much clearer to me.

Just days before arriving in Tokyo, I was standing in the cold in Oulu, Finland, at Arctic Conference. A group of developers had gathered for the northernmost developer conference in the world, and I was invited to give an all new talk there.

Arctic Conference, Oulu, Finland

It could not have been more different from Shibuya. And yet, it felt exactly the same.

People travelled long distances to be there. Not just for the talks, but for everything around them. The conversations. The shared experiences. The feeling of being part of something, even if only for a few days.

Then I saw it again in Tokyo.

Different city. Different industry. Same pattern.

I have seen it happen several times in the past few years, but back to back in two different industries made me finally realize that these aren’t isolated cases of talented organizers making great events. They’re the response to something that’s happening around us.

We’re living through one of the biggest technological transitions humanity has ever faced.

The uncertainty of where we are headed, and the speed at which we are getting there, makes people ask questions.

These conversations happen online, but the environment in fragmented communities on platforms that are designed for reach often produce more anxiety than closure.

For all the good online communities have done to our careers, I believe people crave something real. Something they cannot experience in a feed.

What we need is not more information. What we need is perspective.

Small events optimize for this. Fewer people. More conversations. Less noise. More signal. Perspective is hard to get through a screen. It is easier in a room.

We are seeing more conferences because in a fast-moving, always-online world, people crave real-world connection and shared experiences that digital spaces cannot provide.

The Conference Playbook

Seeing this pattern so clearly made me start writing some of these observations down.

Originally I thought this would just be another flarup.email post, but as I started writing I realized I had more to say than would fit in a single article. Fifteen years and more than a hundred talks at conferences across different industries start to leave a mark.

I started collecting those thoughts in a living document I call The Conference Playbook.

It’s an attempt to put words to what makes a good conference, in the hopes that we will get more of them. It’s a long read, but if you’re curious (or if you make events) you can read it below.

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Watching my mom experience all of this made it even more clear.

She did not care about the talks or the lineup.

She saw something much simpler.

People coming together to make sense of the same things. To make friends.

That is why we’re seeing more conferences.

Because we’re all looking beyond our feeds for something that feels real.