When Anthropic brought its Futures Forum to Parliament House, headlined by a keynote from CEO Dario Amodei, the brief demanded more than a stage and a screen. This was a company at the centre of the global AI conversation, speaking directly to the people shaping Australia’s response to it, and the room had to carry that weight from the moment guests walked in.

Damsel and Sprout helped design and deliver the forum for 130 invited guests, with every element custom built for the day: from the stage set, to the lectern, to the demo pods. Nothing off the shelf.

Client: Anthropic

Year: 2026

Venue: Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra

Format: Morning forum with keynote, in-conversation sessions and interactive demonstrations

Audience: 130 invited guests

What we delivered

• Event concept and multi-zone room design support
• Custom stage set, back wall and lectern fabrication
• Custom demo pod design and build
• AV production, lighting and stage management
• Event styling, furniture and greenery
• Catering coordination
• Venue management
• All Parliament House loading dock logistics + management

Built from scratch, down to the lectern

The design language took its cues from the brand: warm timber, clean lines, quiet confidence. Rather than dressing a hired kit to match, the room’s key pieces were fabricated from the ground up so that everything guests touched and saw belonged to the same idea.

A stage set worthy of the backdrop

The custom stage backdrop, featuring the Anthropic Futures Forum brand, sat beneath the Great Hall’s vast Arthur Boyd tapestry, deep blue lighting against the timber and eucalypt tones of the hall. A purpose-built timber lectern carried the brand right to the speaker’s fingertips, ready for a keynote from one of the most influential voices in technology.

Demonstrations that invited a closer look

Custom timber pods and demonstration stations ran through the room, each with its own live experience: the Anthropic Economic Index, where guests could explore the data for themselves; The Lab, which drew crowds around live sessions all morning, and Agents at Work, where guests watched a team of AI agents build their idea from scratch. They turned the forum from a presentation into an experience, giving guests something to do, not just something to watch.

A morning designed to flow

Seen from above, the Great Hall read as a landscape: theatre seating at the stage, islands of boucle armchairs on soft green rugs across the parquetry, demonstration stations along the walls, cocktail tables set with branded notebooks and pens, and morning tea threaded with greenery. The program moved the same way, from keynote to fireside conversations on stage to hands-on time at the demos, so the room shifted naturally between listening and conversation all morning.