See previous discussion here.

I find a lot of professional events fairly soul-crushing and have been thinking about why.

I dislike small talk. Recently I attended Manifest, and noticed that it could easily take 10 minutes of conversation to learn the very basics about a person. There were hundreds of people at the conference, so meeting people felt expensive and haphazard.

My regular time is costly, and conference time should be even more expensive. It seems reasonable to aim for $50 to $300 of value per hour. So if I spend 10 minutes with someone only to find out we don't have much in common, that can easily be $20 to $100 lost (total, between both parties). Add the unpleasantness of slowly losing my voice and being in a crowded atmosphere. I enjoy quiet spaces and my energy reserves quickly deplete in crowded and loud settings.

The badges were incredibly basic. Most people's fashion choices were similarly basic. So there's little to go off of. You sort of have to start from scratch for each interaction.

After the first day I got the idea to use a small sticker machine to at least post some basics about me to my badge.

If you think about it, conference badges are an interesting design opportunity. We could probably get away with larger options than normal—maybe even 10" by 8" or similar. This gives a lot of space to work with. They can feature quite a bit of written and visual information.

I went back-and-forth with ChatGPT to design a few other options. These are obviously rough and imperfect, but I think they suggest some interesting directions. I'd naively expect events to maybe be 5% more pleasant and useful for me with badges like these. (See the end of this post for the mockups)

Practical Considerations

The obvious challenge is cost. Printing fully custom badges for each attendee would run around $40 per badge, plus design time and iteration. For a 200-person conference, that's $8,000+ just for badges alone.

The most practical approach is probably a hybrid system. Give people 3-20 pre-designed badge templates to choose from, then set up a sticker station with a curated selection of options. Recently I went to get a library card and was given 5 different design options. Doing this for event badges seems doable and more practical.

The tricky part isn't the printing—it's sourcing and organizing the stickers. I could easily imagine wanting 50 to 500 different options covering interests, skills, organizations, causes, personality traits, etc. Someone would need to buy all those stickers, sort them, and figure out a reasonable organization system that doesn't create chaos. It might need to handle 6-20 people at once, so require several setups.

A cheaper middle ground would be large overlay stickers that cover the bottom two-thirds of standard badges. These could include 6-10 pre-selected icons or text snippets for maybe $0.50 each. The main technical hurdle here is building some kind of digital interface where people can select their preferences ahead of time—basically a simple badge customization tool that outputs print files.

I'm also drawn to the idea of persistent badges that people own and use across multiple conferences. Security concerns come up immediately, but they seem solvable. You could wear the official conference badge underneath your personal one, or have it hang lower so it's still visible. Or maybe the "conference credential" is just a small sticker that goes on your persistent badge. This approach would let people invest more in their badge design since they'd use it repeatedly.

It would be neat to make certain elements unlockable. Imagine stickers you can only get by working at certain organizations, publishing well-regarded research, or hitting specific donation thresholds. The implementation might be straightforward—just mail qualifying people a few sheets of whatever they've earned to use at future events.

I realize that any of these options adds complexity for organizers and attendees alike. But I think the tradeoffs could work with some thoughtful design. The coordination overhead isn't trivial, but it's still probably cheaper than things like branded hoodies.

Addendum 1: Website Profiles

One obvious question this brings up is, "Can we do this for digital profiles? Why are those so standardized?"

User pages on websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, LessWrong, and the EA Forum are all fairly plain and standardized.

Some of this represents best practice. But I suspect some also has to do with practical challenges online. MySpace gave people much more customization, and a lot of people liked this, but it came with a great deal of complexity that likely wasn't worth it.

I think that LessWrong and the EA Forum would be better with more complex badge and profile systems, though I realize this would be a lot of work.

Example Potential Designs

Here are a few options generated using ChatGPT. They have clear defects, but I think get at the high-level point of what I’m going for.

One important thing is that they’re meant to try to convey certain vibes. I think different people should want to give off certain vibes, and I’d expect that events would be more engaging and effective if this could be done.