Together Conference
Together Bay Area x Ft Mason Conference Center
San Francisco, 2025
Built with locally sourced flowers and green material from the Presidio, the installation created a physical place for participants to process what they were hearing, connect ideas across the gathering, and consider what new possibilities might emerge in their own work.
Gathering Focus
Together Bay Area brought people together from across the region’s conservation, climate, and community networks around the theme of possibility.
Like many conferences, the gathering asked a great deal of participants: listening, networking, presenting, exchanging ideas, and moving continuously between people and programming.
The labyrinth offered another kind of space within the conference: somewhere participants could step out of that pace for a while and decide for themselves what they needed.
Design Response
I created a full-scale botanical labyrinth in a room just off the main conference activity, using locally sourced flowers and green material gathered in part from the Presidio’s pruning and compost streams.
The installation was designed as a quieter counterpoint to the conference outside. Participants could walk the labyrinth, sit, learn to draw one, or simply spend time in the room without needing to accomplish anything.
The locally gathered botanicals also connected the installation materially to the Bay Area landscape and to the conference’s environmental context. Materials that had been headed toward compost became the substance of a temporary space for reflection and possibility.
What It Made Possible.
People used the space in ways I could not have prescribed.
A presenter came in while grief was rising for her and took time to collect herself before returning to the conference. Another participant shared that social anxiety made the constant networking difficult; the labyrinth gave her somewhere to regulate between sessions.
A writer who came into the room learned how to draw a labyrinth and told me he planned to incorporate the practice into his daily writing routine.
These were very different needs, but the same space was able to hold them.
The labyrinth became a place to grieve, regroup, make, think, and step temporarily outside the social and intellectual demands of the gathering. For some, possibility was connected to the conference’s larger questions. For others, it appeared in a much smaller and more immediate form: finding enough space to meet the next moment differently.