Professor Timothy J. McNeil was among the winners at the 2024 SEGD Global Design Awards Ceremony recently held in Dallas. McNeil received a Merit Award for his book The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook.

This year’s awards celebrated 30 winning projects selected from a competitive pool of 292 entries representing 17 countries. The honored projects span a variety of topics, disciplines, and verticals, illustrating how experiential design can be used to bridge connections between people and the spaces they inhabit. This year’s honorees showcased the transformative power of design in addressing issues ranging from sustainability and culture to cutting-edge digital experiences.

In the book, McNeil, a professor of design and the director and curator of the UC Davis Design Museum, weaves together exhibition design practice, methods and techniques within an historical framework for understanding how the discipline contributes to the expanding role of creating experiences. McNeil argues that today’s multi-modal, participatory exhibitions and attractions are bound by a desire to convey information, excite the viewer, and create social and narrative experiences, and that without design employed effectively, these experiential moments would not become lasting memories that inform and inspire an increasingly sophisticated audience.

SEGD, Society for Experiential Graphic Design, has been the go-to resource for wayfinding, placemaking, and experience design. Policymakers and developers look to SEGD as thought leaders and expert collaborators and its members’ work impacts the world around us. Iconic examples include SEGD Fellow Massimo Vignelli’s NYC subway map; the Universal Symbols in Health Care developed with Hablamos Juntos; the creation of the first ADA White Paper on accessible wayfinding—and in the multitude of ways experience design benefits the wellbeing of our communities.