EXPERIENCE STUDIO
Dancers in silhouette inside a glowing blue network of light

A summit about itself.

Turkcell Technology Summit

2019 · Stage design

Red Dot Award 2019 winner

Every year the Turkcell Technology Summit has seven minutes before its first speaker: three thousand people in the hall, half a million on the stream. For the tenth edition the theme was the Summit’s own story, and the brief followed: every speaker, and the opening itself, had to feel part of the stage, not in front of it. Working as BİŞEYLER, OKYU’s founding team, who designed the Summit’s stage, opening and visual content for five editions, built a space to move through. A three-tier podium wrapped in angled LED. A hidden walkway that carried one performer across the full width. Then the central screen parted, and a live dance appeared inside the stage itself. The work received a Red Dot Design Award that year.

A space to move through rather than look at.

The full story

Türkiye’s largest technology summit opens once a year: three thousand people in one auditorium, half a million on the live stream, and seven minutes before the first speaker to tell them all why they’re there. For the tenth edition, those seven minutes began with the Summit’s own memory.

Since 2010, the Turkcell Technology Summit has been the platform where future theories, technological innovation and research meet an audience of nearly ten thousand each year — its stage shared by names from technology, the arts and philosophy: Michio Kaku, Marco Tempest, Anousheh Ansari, Stuart Russell, Rodney Brooks.

The tenth edition turned inward. The Summit’s own story was the year’s theme, and the brief followed from it: every speaker, and the opening performance itself, had to feel like part of the stage — not in front of it. That called for a spatial answer, not a backdrop.

Working as BİŞEYLER in Istanbul, OKYU’s founding team designed the stage, the opening performance and the visual content for five editions of the Summit. For the tenth, the team built the stage as a space to move through rather than look at. A three-tier podium wrapped in angled LED; a moving walkway hidden in the top tier, so a single performer could carry the story across the full width of the stage; and at the end of the first movement, the central screen parted — revealing a paperscrim room and a live dance inside the stage itself. The wall closed, the screens returned, and the third movement brought the brand forward.

Red Dot recognized the work that year — stage design and opening performance together. The Summit continued, and continues; the editions the founding team opened set what the room feels like when the lights go down.

Disciplines
Opening show design · Stage design · AV & event content · Show direction
Client
Turkcell
Event
Technology Summit 2019 — tenth edition
Venue
Haliç Congress Center, Istanbul
Date
April 10, 2019
Scope
Stage design · Opening performance · Visual content — five editions
Stage
Three-tier podium · 480 m² angled LED · 140 m² opening central screen · 24 m performance line
Recognition
Red Dot Design Award 2019 · Brands & Communication Design, Spatial Communication
Studio
BİŞEYLER — OKYU’s founding team

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