I am pleased to announce that the Quarter 4 2026 issue for Exhibit City News is officially live. You can access the edition via the link in the top left corner of our homepage. For those of you who will receive our physical print magazine, look forward to it in the coming weeks.
You may also notice that our digital edition has a new look. ECN has moved to a new digital reader that lets you search the magazine, zoom in, view it fullscreen, jump between sections, and open interactive links directly from the issue. We’ve put together a quick guide to the new reader and its features in How to Read the New Exhibit City News Digital Edition.
Making Waves Into the Future
Don always likes to say that we need to use our past to predict the future. There are issues we’ve faced before that can offer insight into how trends are cycling today. Resilience in the face of past challenges can show the adaptability of not only companies and their people, but the industry as a whole.
This summer, ECN and The Experiential Design Authority (TEDA) hosted the second annual ExSys Awards show at Moss’ headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. During the event, Travis and I hosted a panel where we discussed the future of the industry. When determining the focus, we considered several topics, including technology, labor, and international politics. Ultimately, the same question was at the center of every discussion: “What can we expect in the future?”
We began discussing questions, and in the process, I learned something about the future that I’d never considered before. The scariest part of the future is the unknown. Everyone knows that. However, when we use guidance from the past and turn the unknown into questions to consider rather than leaving it as a vague concept, the future becomes much easier to approach and plan for.
ECN’s Quarter 4 issue is about the future. There are many questions posed within these pages and very few answers, not because predictions can’t be made, but because the questions matter when making a plan. We question social media and its impact (pg. 40), what communication with clients will look like in the future (pg. 16), and how we must adapt on the show floor (pg. 28). We look at hiring (pg. 26) and whether heroics are the right way to keep a business running (pg. 20). We consider which cities will grow in the future (pg. 34), how brand experiences are changing (pg. 42), and the ways politics are shaping the industry (pg. 36).
However, none of these topics offer be-all and end-all answers. As Paco Collazo puts it (pg. 18), predicting the future is only useful as long as we never forget why this industry exists in the first place: human interaction.
The issue completes our I&D Labor Series for 2026 and doubles as the ExSys Awards 2026 issue, highlighting the students and design winner for the year. We consider transportation and the lives of those who work across multiple sectors of the industry. At its heart, Quarter 4 is about more than the future and lofty predictions. It is about people, their stories, and a celebration of all that we’ve done to get where we are.
The future doesn’t have to be that scary when we know we’re all in this together.
