United Airlines gathers its most senior 2,200 leaders for a two-day conference built around keynotes, twenty breakout sessions, and the networking that happens in between. LSAV POWERHOUSE designs and produces the environment all of it takes place in.
The standing brief is a balancing act. The space has to be genuinely immersive — this is the room where United’s leadership is meant to feel the company’s ambition, not just hear about it — while staying completely functional for a demanding agenda. Push too far toward spectacle and a leadership conference starts to feel like a theme park. Play it too safe and you have a ballroom with signage on it.
Each year United sets a theme, and the theme raises the degree of difficulty.
The Process
Our approach to a conference at this scale holds steady from theme to theme. One large-scale anchor installation organizes the floor and sets the tone the moment attendees walk in. Breakout environments are designed session by session, so each one feels like the one to go to rather than a room with a different sign on the door. Interactive moments go in the circulation space, so the breaks do the networking work that breaks are supposed to do.
Carnival gave all three a great deal to work with.
The anchor was a full-size Ferris wheel — a striking centerpiece that set the tone instantly and, just as usefully, organized the entire floor around itself. We surrounded it with a series of tents, each one a hub for a different track of breakouts, with décor and layout tuned to the subject inside.
All twenty breakouts across the two days were themed individually. Culinary, government affairs, and everything in between got its own props, its own deck design, and its own presentation environment, so no session felt like a repeat of the last one.
For the circulation space we built nostalgic midway games — ring toss, strongman, the classics. Between sessions they gave attendees a reason to stay in the room, and a reason to talk to someone while they were there.
The Carnival build drew strong feedback from attendees, and the pattern underneath it is the part that repeats. The anchor installation did double duty as spectacle and wayfinding. The individually themed breakouts gave 2,200 people a real reason to choose one session over another, and to stay invested once they were in it. The games turned the gaps in the agenda into the most social hours of the two days.
What United gets from the arrangement is a conference that can reinvent itself completely from one year to the next without gambling on the execution. The theme changes. The standard doesn’t.
