Augmenting the Performer–Audience Live Participation in Professional Event Productions

Event productions, such as corporate workshops, night galas, or networking events, can reach higher levels of participant experience and productiveness if performer–audience interactions are augmented with possibilities for live participation from mobile terminals. However, it easily happens that polls, backchannels, chat screens and other methods remain as mere activation tricks that fall short from a successful integration to events’ goals and content. Based on a 10-year process of developing live participation technologies, deploying them successfully in collaboration with event producers in over 100 professionally organised event productions ranging from 10 to 400 participants, we analyse techniques that increase events’ value for the audience and the organisers. Building on our experiences and event studies literature, we describe how positive audience participation can be achieved by supporting cognitive (informational), affective (experiential) and conative (behavioural) elements of event participation, thus helping the audience members notice how the event supports their needs.