How can you use your event’s theme to jumpstart your creativity when it comes to graphics, stage design, marketing campaigns, or attendee experience? I used the 2019 TEDxTUM theme “Dive In” to illustrate how this can be done.

1. “DIVE IN”
TEDxTUM 2019 THEME
EXPLORATION
Find out about how we broke down our theme into its key components
and designed all aspects of the event around them.

2. 05
04
01
02
THE EVENT
DAY
Low and high interaction activities,
we have something for everyone
STAGE &
SESSIONS
Dive in with our stage design,
complete with visuals and sound
THEME
& TAGLINES
Read our theme description
and what it meant to us
EVENT
DESIGN
How we converted the theme
into a visual representation
06
BREAK
ACTIVITIES
Discover a selection of activities
we offered around the sessions
03
PRE-EVENT
MARKETING
Ways in which we connected
with our audience beforehand

3. WHAT DOES “DIVE IN” MEAN TO US?
When was the last time you found yourself on the cusp of something new?
Felt amazed by plunging into an unknown topic and learned something
unexpectedly wonderful? There’s so much to discover in the tiny details and
bigger picture of the world around us, the worlds between us, and the world
within us.
Dive In not only draws inspiration from the individual and the community, but
looks beyond the surface of our social landscape. By exploring the thrill of
technology as well as concepts from bygone eras to shape the world around
us, we can create a space for all of our future ideas. Whether steering the
journey in a certain direction, or just letting the wind guide us to new
discoveries, let’s celebrate how much is still out there for us to explore.
As a first step, we centralized the theme into 3 taglines, each representing an
association we had in creating a unified experience for our attendees.

4. Forget about routines, traditions,
and “the way it’s usually done.” We
don’t want to feed you more of the
same. We want to immerse you in a
world of critical thinking that
jump-starts your mind in unmapped
directions. Go ahead, open yourself
up to the possibilities.
#1
DARE TO
DISCOVER

5. #2
UNRAVEL THE
UNKNOWN
At any given moment, you could be
just one conversation away from
the next idea that sparks big
change. In true TEDxTUM fashion,
we challenge you to burst outside
your comfort zone and shake up a
dialogue with the faces in the
crowd around you. Who knows
what might happen?

6. #3
TAKE THE
PLUNGE
Imagine this: you’re fired up from
the ideas you hear today and
inspired to pull the trigger on a
concept of your own. What’s the
next step? For some, it’s to let the
idea marinate in fear for a solid
decade or two, but we suggest a
different tactic: take action. Your
ideas have the power to not only
shape your world, but the world
around you, too. Convert your
thoughts into impact.

7. EVENT
DESIGN
We started with the rather obvious
image of a diver jumping into water,
but added the concept of diving into
an idea, immersing oneself into new
thoughts and topics, and discovering
entire universes of knowledge. The
diver is bravely jumping into the
unknown, which is risky, but exciting.
Our event logo was customized for
each speaker, with the bottom
section representing the main idea of
each talk. Also, we made a GIF out of
the logo.

8. DARE TO DISCOVER
ABOUT SPEAKERS & TOPICS
Before announcing our speakers,
we posted 5 fun facts about each
of them. In addition, we had a
random fact generator that showed
interesting facts related to the
topics of the speakers.
TAKE THE PLUNGE
TICKET CHALLENGES
The 5 days prior to the ticket sale
start, we posted a puzzle every
day. By solving it, students could
enter our raffle to win a ticket. The
solutions were related to the event
theme. Read more here and here.
UNRAVEL THE UNKNOWN
THEME HINTS
Before our event announcement,
we posted 5 hints for our theme: 5
pictures of famous lakes or
swimming pools. The countdown
ended with the official theme
reveal and event announcement
through our official trailer
PRE-EVENT MARKETING

9. THE
EVENT
DAY
Around the sessions, our goal was to give our
attendees the chance to dive head-first into
interaction and discover something new, while also
offering them the possibility to just dive deeper into
their own thoughts and reflect on the ideas they
came into contact with -- without having to interact
with others.
To make it easy for them to find exactly what they
craved, we divided our activities into “low interaction”
and “high interaction”categories. Both our hosts and
our event website described the options available to
point everyone in the right direction.
“Low interaction”-activities
for people who would prefer
to reflect on their own.
“High interaction”-activities
for people who want to
really dive into interaction.

10. DIVE INTO
THE EVENT
With opening the doors to our event, we wanted
our attendees to dive into a day full of ideas and
inspiration, leaving the day-to-day life behind for a
few hours and focusing on everything we had in
store for them.
We took this idea literally: We designed the
entrance so that the attendees felt like diving into
a quiet, calm world free of their everyday worries.
We used stripes, blue light, and serene music to
create a relaxing atmosphere. Attendees also had
to dare to walk through the curtain to discover the
unknown awaiting them.

11. We wanted our stage to reflect the theme and our event
design, and let ourselves be inspired by an underwater
world. We used blue lights and balloons to simulate
underwater light and bubbles, and added in sound similar
to that of underwater plants.
We named our sessions after our three taglines and
used our the “Dive In” event design to animate each
speaker’s name when they walked on stage.
STAGE &
SESSIONS

12. FOOD OF THE FUTURE
To give our attendees an idea of possible meals from a time to
come, we collected some small examples for them to try. While we
expected it to be quite a dare, the feedback from our attendees
suggested otherwise.
MYSTERY BOX
UNCOVER NEW WORLDS IN VR
We challenged our attendees to face their fears with our box full of
mysterious things. While it might sound scary at first, our
attendees had a lot of fun uncovering the secrets inside our
mystery box and enjoyed guessing what it was they just touched.
With our custom-created virtual reality universe, our attendees had
the chance to leave the real word behind to discover new worlds.
Every VR layer provided a new world, a new reality, and many new
details to unravel.

13. PHOTO WALL
With our “Dive In” photo wall, attendees had the chance to create a
lasting memory and share it on- and offline using our #-Printer.
Posing as a diver, they could fill the universe with the topic they
dared to discover and wanted to dive in.
EXPRESSION WALL
WHAT IS THE DIVER DIVING INTO?
We asked our attendees: “What did you dare to do?” They could
reflect on their past experiences and express themselves by
writing or drawing on our expression wall. Or they could just enjoy
reading the answers of others and maybe, they got even inspired to
take the plunge into something new.
We gave our attendees the opportunity to bring our diver into an
environment of their choice. From fantasy worlds to real-life
challenges, our attendees imagined all kinds of adventures for our
diver to dive into.

14. TAKE THE PLUNGE…
TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE EVENT
As we craft together our main event each year, we keep an eye turned
toward sustainability. We prioritize Munich-based sponsors and
suppliers, choose recycled or recyclable material for all our goodies,
reuse as much resources from last year as possible like our TEDxTUM
reusable coffee cups, and only offer vegetarian lunch.
However, does that really make a difference? We (literally) dissected
the provided lunch to measure the impact of switching from meat to
vegetarian and turned our results into a game to give our attendees
the chance to estimate the impact for themselves.
Check our two blog posts to read more about our efforts for more
sustainability in general and the impact of a vegetarian lunch.

15. http://tedxtum.com
THANKS
Authors: Maria, Dora, and Sarah, on behalf of the TEDxTUM team, whose creativity continues to amaze and delight us.