Empathy means imagining more than one attendee at a time.
principle — attributed to J.B. Miller
Miller's empathy discipline is operational. Put yourself in the attendee's shoes. Consider more than one perspective. Design for the jaded native of New York City who has seen everything, and for the person just relocated from the West coast bringing different preconceptions. These attendees will have very different experiences of the same event. The implication is that single-persona design produces events that work for one type of attendee and miss the others. Multi-persona design produces events that hit different notes for different types. The discipline requires the producer to imagine multiple specific attendees, not a generic audience.
For event producers, brand experience leads, and conference programmers thinking about audience composition. The principle is most useful as a check against the temptation to design for a single mythical average attendee.
empathy, multiple-perspectives, jaded-native, newcomer