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Participants at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) annual meeting network, work, and hang out in the multi-story staircase in the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit building. (Alabastro Photography)
Along with thousands of audiologists, speech-language pathologists, researchers, and students, I traveled to Seattle in early December, headed to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) annual conference.
ASHA 2024’s in-person attendance approached 12,000, beyond the capacity of the Seattle Convention Center’s original Arch building — accommodating meetings of that size and had convinced local leaders more than a decade ago that Seattle needed to add more convention center space. With no space available adjacent to the Arch building, Seattle constructed a second convention center building — the Summit — a block and a half away. It was an out-of-the-box solution, and I had come, as a guest of Visit Seattle, to see how ASHA’s events team would piece together a large meeting with a lot of moving parts using both buildings.
Krista LeZotte
Krista LeZotte, CMP, CSEP, DES, ASHA’s senior director of conventions and meetings, has been at the association for two years, and while she wasn’t part of the original team that selected Seattle as the site for ASHA 2024, she embraced the challenge, she told Convene. Because of the size of ASHA’s meeting, she was used to thinking of the space needed to accommodate it in terms of a campus, she said, “but usually with a convention center, and maybe one or two hotels that are a stone’s throw away. This was the first time that we had two convention centers.” Both convention center buildings have the advantages of lots of natural light, access to green space, and are embedded in Seattle’s vibrant downtown. But the Summit building, a six-level glass-walled building filled with reclaimed wood, gorgeous textiles, and art, is a star — since its opening in January 2023, the building has won a slew of awards, including a 2022 World Design Award and 2024 Metropolis Magazine Planet Positive Award.
‘Navigating the unknowns’
LeZotte and her team wanted to make sure that the Arch building wasn’t overlooked, and one of the first decisions they made was to distribute the meeting’s anchor elements between both buildings, to give participants multiple good reasons to spend time in each. Education sessions were held in both buildings, and plenary keynotes were held at Summit, where the meeting’s trade-show exhibits and special interest group lounges also were located. The Arch held ASHA’s popular electronic poster sessions and LeZotte made use of the building’s light-filled atrium to create “Elevate Atrium,” where participants could pick up their conference bags, cuddle with therapy dogs, and take selfies and photos in front of an illuminated “ASHA” sign.
It was a quick walk between Seattle Convention Center campus buildings during ASHA 2024. (Alabastro Photography)
“It took a lot of brainstorming and creative thinking on our team’s end to navigate the unknowns,” LeZotte said. “We didn’t know what patterns the attendees would have going between the buildings and we didn’t know what the weather would bring.” The distance between the buildings was more psychological than physical — my walk clocked in at about four minutes even counting the time spent waiting for a traffic light. But to make sure that attendees easily found their way back and forth, Visit Seattle stationed pathfinders holding bright green umbrellas, at strategic corners, so that the path was clear.
Results from the post-event surveys weren’t yet available when I spoke to LeZotte, but she said she’d heard of only a few complaints about moving between the two buildings. What she and her team heard much more often was that attendees appreciated how the two buildings “allowed the crowds to spread out a little bit and not be so intimidating in a lot of ways,” LeZotte said. ASHA’s meeting is always going to feel like a lot, she added, but attendees said this event “felt more customized and relieved the anxiety of feeling like a small fish in a big pond. So that actually worked to our benefit.”
There was one more important reason that Seattle’s convention center campus was a good fit for ASHA. Attendees like to sit on the floor, “even in session rooms,” LeZotte said, “when there are seats available.” That made the Summit’s Hill Climb, a wooden staircase that rises along one side of the building and is furnished with cushions and outlets, a great fit for the group, providing networking space or just a relaxing area for people to get away, she said. “I loved that staircase. It was beautiful, but it also added some of that additional soft seating outside of the session rooms, which you don’t always have at convention centers. That’s pretty hard to find.”
I knew going in that a major part of ASHA’s mission was to make speech and language accessible to everyone. But as I visited the meeting’s exhibition hall and poster sessions, it opened my eyes to the diversity of the communities that ASHA’s more than 200,000 members serve, which include neurodiverse individuals, those affected by trauma, and individuals living with dementia and other challenges. “You either know somebody who’s used our member services or you yourself have used them,” LeZotte told me, “because that’s just how much they touch the lives of everyday people.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor at Convene.