The Tech We Want brought The Light House back to Austin for its fourth year built on one thesis: Love is our LLM. Two days at The Belmont alongside SXSW, organized for the people that programming tends to leave out. Instead of panels, they built fishbowls, rooms where anyone could step in. The environment had to carry that argument from the walk-in through the last song at Lights Out.
The Light House exists because the biggest tech gathering in the country is not built for everyone standing in it, and impact work is hard to show. You can feel it in a room, but ask someone to explain what The Tech We Want does and the answer gets thin. So we made the work itself the wayfinding: walls explained the mission, badges explained fishbowls, table graphics explained why each person was there. If a first-time guest could describe what The Light House stood for without being told, the space had done its job.
We worked backward from one question: how do you make an entire movement visible in a single room? That meant treating environmental design as messaging architecture, not decoration. Walls carried the mission, signage explained the fishbowl format, postcards taught people what a circle conversation is, and QR codes turned every surface into a doorway to deeper information. From there the system spread: the Library branding curated by Julia Solano, badges printed with the fishbowl rules, plantable seed cards, Letterman jackets for core team members, the website, table graphics, and the pitch deck launching their network of changemakers. The goal was simple: everyone leaving that room knows why they were there and what they’re part of now.
Judged at full scale, standing in the room.
The Library started the year before, but 2026 was the first time it had to scale. Julia Solano envisioned a quieter, more reflective space where people could step out of the social energy and actually breathe, and we built the container for it: a logo, graphics templates, and a full asset system that let the Library feel like its own sanctuary, stocked with books from community members on responsible tech innovation. In a room built on love as infrastructure, the Library was infrastructure for the people doing the loving.
The wrap party runs on the same design thinking as the daytime programming, which is exactly why it works. The DJ, the karaoke, the bingo, the photobooth are not filler. That night is where an introduction made in a fishbowl becomes something people actually follow up on. We treated it as the closing argument, not the release valve.
The wall runs a map of Austin as its ground with hand-cut lettering laid over it like construction paper. We worked with Caspian on the concept, and their creative director Kara pushed us somewhere we didn't see coming: mirrors beneath each of the four roles, tech leader, organizer, connector, funder, so people would see themselves reflected there. You stand in front of the wall and the question lands differently: What role will you play in building this responsible tech future? Now you're not reading about it. You're looking at yourself doing it.
Most conference merchandise gets thrown out by the end of the day. This does not. Bandanas, pencil pouches, tees, fans, and jackets with custom patches, all built on colour combinations strong enough to carry the brand off-site. It came out of a real feedback loop: The Tech We Want brings ideas, we bring ideas, and we work out together what can actually be made. What you get is an identifier in the wild, a way of signalling which set of ideas about technology you stand with.
“My team and audiences have loved all of the different items, assets, and artifacts that have been created by the Studio J Lorne team also as a result of their really incredible brand work.”
The immersive event playbook is the framework behind work like this, from the walk-in sequence through the last takeaway.
Junior Designer
Glyph Guru
Tell you a random historical fact
Studio Manager
Idea Machine
Tell a Dad Joke
When I drip
you drip we drip.
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