TIME100 Africa

The brief

In November 2023 TIME brought the TIME100 franchise to the region for the first time: the inaugural TIME100 Summit Africa during the day, and the first TIME100 Impact Awards Africa that evening. Both at the Kigali Convention Centre, both on 17 November.

The honourees were people whose work had moved their industries and the continent forward — a former head of state, figures from film, technology, climate advocacy and education. The premise of TIME100 is recognition. The event exists so that influence becomes visible.

Cube pitched for the production and was appointed.

The approach

We expected to be handed a specification. A franchise of that standing knows what it looks like, and the reasonable assumption was that Cube would be asked to execute an established format accurately.

That is not what happened. TIME arrived with a clear sense of who they were and an open question about what that should feel like in Kigali — and gave Cube the room to answer it. At several points the instruction was to do more.

So the design question was not how to stage a summit and a gala. It was: how does a room make a person's achievement legible? Somebody arriving at the Convention Centre that morning may not have known who they were about to hear from, or why those particular people had been chosen. If they were still working that out when the first session began, the event had already lost something.

Every design decision that followed traced back to that.

The complication

One space had to be two events in a single day.

The summit ran in the daytime. The gala was an invitation-only evening occasion with an entirely different register — celebratory rather than analytical, and attended in large part by the same people. The room could not simply be reset. It had to read as somewhere else.

The turnaround window was 3 hours.

A second constraint ran throughout. TIME hold their colour specification precisely, and matching it across screens, lighting and physical build — three technologies that render colour differently — took work to resolve.

What we did

We began the event before the room. A delegate arriving at the Convention Centre normally passes teardrop banners and directional signage. We used the approach instead to introduce the honourees so that by the time someone reached their seat they already knew who was on that stage and what they had done. The programme did not have to spend its opening minutes explaining itself.

We made the recognition physical. The Kigali Convention Centre was turned into an immersive environment rather than dressed as a venue: feature areas, screen architecture, a red carpet arrival translated for Kigali, and networking space designed so that moving between conversations was itself part of the experience — delegates walking through screen structures on the way to a drink.

We bought what the design needed. Where existing inventory would have compromised the result, we replaced it. The main LED screen was ordered new and went from the airport directly to the Kigali Convention Centre. The lighting console was new, because lighting carried more of the design here than it does on most events.

We rebuilt the same room into a second event. The turnaround was designed rather than executed. Physical structures placed for the summit were lit differently after dark, changing colour and reading as new architecture. The evening did not look like the daytime room with the lights down. It looked like a different place.