What Expos Need to Remember: Reflections from the ISIE Best Practices in Exposition Design Workshop
Updated: 6 days ago
In Paris, Expo professionals, scholars, designers, and organizers gathered to ask a practical question: how can the knowledge created at each Expo be preserved, shared, and used to improve the next one?
On March 19-20, 2026, the Institute for the Study of International Expositions convened the ISIE Best Practices in Exposition Design Workshop in Paris under the theme Best Design Practices for International Expositions: Past and Present. Hosted at the Serbian Cultural Center in Paris, the workshop brought together a focused group of Expo professionals, scholars, designers, architects, pavilion specialists, operators, and researchers for two days of discussion on how Expos are designed, delivered, experienced, and remembered.
The workshop was organized by ISIE, with the support of the University of Arizona, Expomuseum, and the International Exhibitions Bureau (Bureau International des Expositions, BIE), and included opening participation from Dimitri Kerkentzes, Secretary General of the BIE, and H.E. Ana Hrustanović, Ambassador of Serbia to France.
For Expomuseum, the significance of the workshop goes beyond the event itself. It speaks directly to one of the central challenges in the history of Expos: each Expo produces an extraordinary concentration of knowledge, experimentation, design, diplomacy, architecture, operations, and visitor experience, yet much of that knowledge disperses once the gates close. That loss matters.
Expos are not only large public events. They are complex cultural systems where nations, cities, institutions, corporations, designers, architects, interpreters, engineers, operators, hosts, and visitors meet in a compressed period of time. They are sites of public diplomacy, national representation, civic imagination, technical experimentation, and public learning. They are also places where good ideas can be difficult to document, and where mistakes can easily be repeated because the lessons of one Expo do not always reach the next.
From individual experience to shared knowledge
The Paris workshop began from a simple but important premise: the Expo community needs better ways to preserve and exchange practical knowledge. Many people who work on Expos carry deep expertise, but that expertise often remains embedded in personal experience, internal reports, private presentations, design files, or institutional memory that may not be accessible to future participants.
This is especially important for countries and teams entering the Expo ecosystem for the first time. Participating in an Expo requires decisions about narrative, architecture, staffing, visitor flow, accessibility, protocol, operations, media, programming, digital tools, sustainability, and legacy. These decisions are often made under intense time pressure, across multiple cultures and professional disciplines, and with limited continuity from one Expo cycle to another.
The workshop asked how this situation could be improved. How can Expos move from improvised learning to shared learning? How can successful strategies be documented without turning them into rigid formulas? How can less effective approaches be discussed honestly, not to assign blame, but to help future organizers and participants make better choices?
These questions are not abstract. They shape what visitors encounter inside pavilions, how countries represent themselves, how organizers support participation, and how Expos justify their value after the closing ceremony.
What the workshop discussed
The program was organized in two parts. The first day, Understanding Current Expo Challenges, examined strategic approaches, operations and visitor experience, and the communication of national narratives. Presentations addressed social, environmental, and economic legacy; support for smaller or assisted pavilions; sustainable legacy planning; visitor journeys; operational delivery; sacred space; public diplomacy; and architecture as a tool of national representation.
The second day, From Challenges to Best Practices, shifted toward design, accessibility, engagement, technology, programming, and legacy. Sessions explored immersive narrative design, the Serbia Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, emotionally resonant creative strategies, collaboration with countries while maintaining identity, accessibility as a design and operational principle, pavilion engagement toolkits, Expo 2027 Belgrade, Expo technology and legacy, post-Expo transformation, and the challenge of programming a Specialized Expo as a living system.
The participants brought experience connected to Expo 2020 Dubai, Expo 2025 Osaka, Expo 2027 Belgrade, Expo 2030 Riyadh, Horticultural Exhibition 2031 Minnesota, and other Expo-related projects. That mix gave the workshop its value. It connected people who study Expos historically with those who design, build, manage, evaluate, and operate them.
Beyond architecture as spectacle
One of the strongest themes from the discussions was the need to look beyond architecture as spectacle. Architecture remains one of the most visible and memorable dimensions of Expos. It shapes the skyline, guides circulation, frames national identity, and often becomes the image through which an Expo is remembered.
But the workshop also raised an important caution: a pavilion or Expo site cannot succeed through visual impact alone. The most meaningful Expo experiences are not always the largest, most expensive, or most technologically complex. They are often the ones where visitors feel welcomed, challenged, moved, or invited to participate.
This means that Expo design should not be measured only by form, novelty, or attendance figures. It should also be measured by what visitors understand, what they remember, how they feel, and whether the encounter changes their perception of a country, a theme, an issue, or their own role in a shared future.
Authenticity, inclusion, and human connection
Another recurring concern was authenticity. Expos ask countries to tell stories about themselves, but those stories can become generic when they rely too heavily on familiar tourism imagery, standardized digital displays, or outsourced narratives that do not fully reflect the people being represented.
Authentic participation requires more than a polished pavilion. It requires a country to recognize itself in its own presentation. It requires respect for cultural specificity, real human presence, meaningful storytelling, and opportunities for visitors to encounter more than a simplified brand message.
Inclusion was discussed in the same spirit. Accessibility is not only a technical checklist, and it should not appear at the end of the design process as a correction. When accessibility and inclusion are built into planning from the beginning, they improve the experience for everyone. They also make Expos more faithful to their own purpose as public events meant to gather people across countries, generations, languages, abilities, and backgrounds.
The same applies to visitor experience. Visitors are not passive receivers of information. They navigate, compare, interpret, wait, listen, touch, ask questions, take photos, become tired, feel surprise, and carry memories home. The full visitor journey matters, including arrival, queues, transitions, staff encounters, wayfinding, programming, and departure.
Operations are part of interpretation
A valuable point from the workshop was that operations should not be treated as separate from design. In an Expo, operations are part of interpretation.
The way a pavilion manages entry, crowd flow, staffing, accessibility, hospitality, programming, and daily maintenance affects the story being told. A brilliant narrative can fail if visitors cannot understand where to go, if staff are unsupported, if accessibility was added too late, or if the pavilion cannot sustain its intended experience over months of operation.
This is why design, storytelling, operations, and strategy need to be integrated early. An Expo is not a static exhibition. It is a live environment. It must work every day, for many types of visitors, under changing conditions, and often at a scale that tests even strong concepts.
Legacy is more than what remains on site
The workshop also returned often to the question of legacy. Expo legacy is usually discussed in terms of buildings, infrastructure, site reuse, and urban development. These are important. But they are only part of the picture.
Expo legacy also lives in professional knowledge, institutional relationships, cultural exchange, public memory, changed perspectives, and the capacity built among participants. A pavilion that disappears physically may still leave an enduring legacy if it changed how visitors understood a country or if it helped a team build expertise that carries into future cultural projects.
For Expomuseum, this is one of the most important lessons. The material history of Expos matters, but so does the intangible history: the decisions, debates, experiments, misunderstandings, improvisations, and moments of connection that shaped the event while it was alive.
Why this matters now
The timing of the workshop was important. Expo 2025 Osaka has provided new examples of pavilion design, visitor behavior, national storytelling, technology, and operational realities. Expo 2027 Belgrade is approaching. Expo 2030 Riyadh is moving through major planning and delivery phases. Horticultural Exhibition 2031 Minnesota adds another case for thinking about how formats, themes, and regional contexts evolve.
If the Expo community wants future Expos to be more meaningful, accessible, authentic, and effective, it needs stronger knowledge transfer. It needs spaces where practitioners and scholars can speak to one another. It needs documentation that is useful to both first-time participants and experienced teams. It needs to preserve not only official narratives, but also the practical lessons that determine whether an Expo works for visitors and participants. The Paris workshop was one step in that direction.
A contribution to Expo memory
Expomuseum has long been interested in the history, documentation, and interpretation of Expos. The ISIE Best Practices in Exposition Design Workshop aligns with that mission because it treats Expo memory not as nostalgia, but as a resource for the future.
To study Expos is not only to look backward. It is to ask what these events have taught us about design, diplomacy, technology, cities, culture, and public imagination. It is also to ask how those lessons can help future Expos become more coherent, more inclusive, more human, and more worthy of the global attention they seek.
The challenge now is to turn the workshop’s discussions into shared tools, frameworks, publications, and continued conversations. If Expos are meant to help societies imagine the future, then the Expo community must also learn how to remember better. That may be one of the most important best practices of all.
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