Our Role: Delivery Partner   |   Platform: EventsAir

The Brief

The High Temperature Plasma Diagnostics Conference is a specialist scientific gathering that brings researchers together to present and debate advances in plasma diagnostics. In 2026, the event landed at MIT - and Senior Research Scientist Johan Frenje was stepping into the lead organizer role for the very first time.

“This is the first time I'm organizing a conference, and I didn't know what to expect in almost all aspects of the event.”  -  Johan Frenje, Senior Research Scientist and Head of High-energy Density Physics Division, MIT

MIT needed a complete solution: a simplified platform paired with an experienced events team who could facilitate and build the event around it - abstract collection, registration and payment, a public-facing website, and the on-site attendee experience - without asking a first-time organizer to become a systems expert overnight.

On the recommendation of colleagues who had seen EventsAir in action at SOFI 2025, MIT selected EventsAir as the platform and brought in Digital Motion as the delivery partner to lead setup, configuration, and day-to-day support - a team that would turn the technology into a working event.

The Obstacles

Getting a conference of this scale right on the first attempt meant working through several challenges at once:

• No personal benchmark. As a first-time organizer taking on a high-stakes event, Johan had no reference point for what “good” looked like - he needed event experts he could lean on for judgment calls, not just a logins.
• A demanding program. Roughly 380 attendees, 330 poster submissions, and 30 invited talks all had to be scheduled and organized in a way that stayed simple for organizers and attendees alike.
• An open question on the attendee app. MIT wasn't yet convinced a dedicated app was worth the added complexity.
• The risk of over-engineering. EventsAir can support a highly sophisticated build, so the real challenge was keeping the scope something a first-time organizer could manage with confidence. I.e. simple yet effective.
• Payment friction across borders. A meaningful share of European attendees couldn't complete standard online payment, which meant building a manual, high-touch invoicing path.
• A submission process with hidden friction. The original abstract workflow required both a web form and a separate PDF upload - a dual-step design that added confusion for authors.

“I was extremely intimidated in the beginning, because I simply didn't know what to expect. I had to make decisions on things I didn't quite understand, and I didn't even understand the language being used to describe them. For those first few months, I need constant support with most event decisions!”  -  Johan

The Approach

We worked as an extension of MIT's own team rather than as an outside vendor. From the start, two principles guided everything we built: keep the configuration deliberately lean, and stay close enough to MIT's day-to-day questions to answer them fast.

Choosing simplicity over complexity

Rather than reaching for the most feature-rich setup EventsAir could support, we helped MIT land on a leaner build - one that covered everything the conference needed while staying something a first-time organizer could understand and run with confidence.

What we built on EventsAir

• Abstract portal - managing all poster and talk submissions with keyword-based tagging, across the full program of 330 posters and 30 invited talks.
• Registration site - handling attendee sign-up and online payment, backed by manual invoicing for the roughly 20-30 European attendees who needed an alternative path.
• Conference website - the public hub for the agenda, travel details, sponsor recognition, and general information.
• Attendee app - deployed for this conference for the first time, giving attendees the full session agenda alongside sponsor visibility.
• Automated confirmation emails - covering both abstract submissions and registrations, so communication stayed consistent without manual chasing.

“I needed it simple, because that would allow me to easily understand what we were doing. Digital Motion were amazing. They made it nimble, and easily understandable - especially for me”-  Johan

Throughout planning, MIT repeatedly pointed to how responsive the Digital Motion team was - the same team building and running the platform day to day. Events like this always throw up last-minute changes, and MIT told us how reassured they felt knowing Digital Motion would be there the moment they needed it.

The Outcome

The High Temperature Plasma Diagnostics Conference came together as a genuine success - around 380 attendees took part, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

• Guidance under pressure. MIT credited Digital Motion's responsiveness and hands-on guidance as essential to pulling the event off.
• A new standard for the app. The attendee app we built and configured for this conference performed considerably well - well enough that Princeston, confirmed to host the conference in two years, is now looking to bring it into their own event.
• Responsiveness as the standout theme. Feedback consistently highlighted how Digital Motion configured EventsAir for attendees and organizers alike, and how responsive we were across the full journey - before, during, and after the event.

MIT expressed high satisfaction and offered unprompted thanks for the support they received, and have indicated they'd bring Digital Motion and EventsAir back for future events.

“I think we set a new standard here. Princeton is organizing the conference two years from now, and they're already planning to replicate what we’ve done here.”  -  Johan

For a first-time organizer facing a program with hundreds of attendees, hundreds of posters, and dozens of invited talks, our hands-on support paired with the EventsAir platform turned an intimidating undertaking into a confident success - and set a bar high enough that the next host is already following it.

Read EventsAir Case Study Here