World Energy Congress 2025 | Research & Event Identity

This project was developed as a freelance design researcher for MCI The Netherlands.

The international congress will take place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The Dutch organising committee is striving to involve stakeholders throughout the development of the congress, starting with the event identity. Therefore, I started the development of the event identity with a research phase consisting of 15 interviews with relevant stakeholders regarding their perspective on the congress’ past, future and marketing strategy. The results were transformed into an elaborate insights report, to be shared with the organising committee and stakeholders. This insights report functioned as the base for the development of the event identity.

Event identity & Narrative

This international congress will be hosted in the city of Rotterdam, which highly influences the content and identity of the congress and was therefore incorporated as a key element of the visual identity for this congress. The concept for the identity was called ‘ From blocks to bridges’.

Let’s change the narrative and shift our focus from losing the world as we know it to gaining a better version of the planet we all share. The ‘Congress’ is the bridge between the world we have… and the sustainable world we have to win.

This concept shows that we are bold enough to address current obstacles and differences that are blocking us from moving forward and are not afraid to acknowledge that we need to do better. We believe that collectively we possess the expertise, resources and technology to do so. By bringing these building blocks together we can turn them into bridges that will allow us to reach our goals.

Research
As the interviews took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, we were restricted to performing them online. As it can be challenging for people working outside of the creative field to answer questions about abstract matters like colours and form language, which were part of the marketing section of the interview, we created an interactive tool to guide the interviews using Mural. This was perceived as highly enjoyable and gave participants the tools to express their thoughts. All the interviews were then transcribed and analysed using varying clustering techniques. The resulting insights were bundled and visualised in the insights report.