Writing & Ideas

Next week I'll be attending IAAPA Expo 2026 in Orlando.

For much of my career, the easiest way to describe what I did was through theatre: international touring, Broadway, Production Audio, and sound design.

That description has become increasingly incomplete.

Over time, the work expanded beyond designing the sound system for a show into designing the relationships among the systems that allow an entire entertainment environment to function.

Sound became spatial audio and distributed processing. Show systems became network architecture and control. The boundaries between audio, video, communications, security, point of sale, guest networks, hospitality, and operations became increasingly difficult to treat independently.

Eventually I stopped thinking of the show as the complete system.

The venue became the system.

That evolution is one reason I'm going to IAAPA.

Beyond Theatre

Theatre remains an important part of my background, but some of the work I've found most interesting has lived between traditional disciplines.

A guest entering a complex entertainment venue does not experience architecture, hospitality, audio, video, food and beverage, lighting, show control, networking, ticketing, security, and operations as separate departments.

The guest experiences one place.

Yet these environments are often designed and managed as collections of independent systems, each with its own specialists, budgets, metrics, and priorities.

That produces a problem I have encountered repeatedly throughout my career:

Optimizing every component does not necessarily optimize the whole.

A technically excellent audio system can still be wrong for the experience.

A spectacular show can still be wrong for the venue.

A restaurant, attraction, bar, lobby, queue, or transition space may appear inefficient when measured independently while being essential to the value of the overall experience.

The interesting work increasingly happens between those boundaries.

Why IAAPA

I'm attending IAAPA because themed entertainment, attractions, experiential hospitality, resorts, and location-based entertainment confront many of these problems at a scale that extends well beyond conventional theatre.

I'm particularly interested in meeting people working across: attraction and venue development; experiential hospitality; location-based entertainment; integrated show and operational technology; spatial and immersive audio; show control and network infrastructure; guest experience; long-term venue operations; and the design of systems flexible enough to support experiences that may continue changing after opening.

I'm also going to listen.

One of the risks of spending years inside any particular industry is assuming that its way of solving a problem is the only way the problem can be solved.

IAAPA brings together operators, developers, designers, manufacturers, integrators, investors, and technologists from a much broader range of entertainment environments. That makes it an unusually useful place to compare assumptions.

What I Hope to Find

I'm not attending simply to find the next loudspeaker, processor, media server, or network switch.

Technology interests me, but only in relation to the problem it is solving.

I'm much more interested in questions such as: How are people designing venues that must support experiences that do not completely exist yet? Where are creative intent, architecture, technology, hospitality, and operations being considered together rather than sequentially? How are operators preserving flexibility without creating unnecessary complexity? Which technologies are genuinely changing guest experience, rather than simply making an existing process more elaborate? How are developers balancing the experience they want to create with the realities of operating and maintaining it for years afterward?

Those are questions that have followed me from touring productions through Broadway, immersive entertainment, and permanent venue development.

IAAPA seems like a particularly good place to continue asking them.

Let's Meet in Orlando

I'll be at IAAPA Expo in Orlando next week.

If your work overlaps with venue development, attractions, experiential hospitality, integrated entertainment technology, or the broader question of how complex environments become coherent experiences, I'd enjoy meeting and comparing notes.

I'm especially interested in conversations with people approaching these questions from disciplines different from my own.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can discover at a conference is not a new solution.

It is a different way of understanding the problem.