The last decade of events was dominated by what I call the conference-industrial complex: massive gatherings produced within an inch of their life, that optimised for headcount and sponsor logos.
In the last few years, this has shifted: there's a real hunger for something smaller, more intentional, more human. Events and community are one of the few remaining contexts where real and almost unmediated human connection happens. That makes getting them right more important than ever.
We've still been working off the same tired playbooks, but there have been whispers here and there of people and companies drawing deeply from their narrative operating systems to create human-scale, immersive, authentic community experiences. The most interesting companies, projects, and organisations being built right now understand that community isn't a growth hack, but cultural infra.
This playbook is an attempt to codify what it looks like to treat events as a design problem.
This playbook is currently written from the perspective of an operator working within or alongside a company. But the principles apply just as well to anyone running an independent community of any kind.
About the writer
I'm Sindhu Shivaprasad, a writer and creative operator based in Bengaluru and working in tech. As part of my various roles over the past decade, I've designed and run events of all scales, sizes and intentions. This playbook is a direct distillation of that experience. It's one part of UnderstoryOS, a WIP resource for founders and operators who treat company design as a serious craft.
If you found this useful, I'd love to hear what you did with it. You can find me at sindhu.live or on X at @sindhusprasad. I also write a newsletter called Kindred Spirits on agentic ways of living and making meaning.