“You can have the world’s best idea, but if it doesn’t fit on the back of a truck then it’s a nonstarter,” says Ray Winkler, who’s been loading concepts onto the backs of vehicles for near 30 years now.

Winkler is the CEO of Stufish, the place he leads a crew of architects who take designs for mind-blowing stage units from drawing boards to live performance halls and stadiums all around the world. He’s exhibiting WIRED across the firm’s central London workplace/workshop/studio—it’s affected by plastic scale fashions; a highlights reel of a number of the greatest bashes in current reminiscence.

There’s the Union Jack–streaked set for the Coronation Concert and a mini troupe of dancers tiered up the steps for Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella slot. Across the room, a balsa prototype of the long-lasting, spiderlike rigging used on U2’s 360° tour leans off an easel spattered with inky sketches. That tour, which ran from 2009 to 2011, held the title of the highest-grossing jaunt in historical past for a decade. In 2023, Elton John’s epic five-year farewell took the highest spot. And the mannequin for that stage—a burnished gold body, embossed with the hallmarks of the Rocket Man’s lengthy profession—is right here too.

Winkler opens one other door, revealing a batch of 3D printers laborious at work (they run 24 hours a day). “This has become my obsession,” he says, fizzing with the passion of a child unwrapping their first Meccano set. The days when fashions had been painstakingly constructed by hand don’t appear that way back. “It was a bit of a faff,” says Winkler. “You were basically sitting in a room sniffing glue all day.” These days, in addition to plastic, the crew makes use of 3D digital re-creations to place artists on stage months prematurely of the actual factor. But these usually are not the devices Winkler needs to speak about at this time. “It’s this,” he says, gesturing to the smartphone in his hand.

The swaying area of little screens that typifies crowds at a contemporary stadium present signifies that corporations equivalent to Stufish at the moment are designing units not only for the 1000’s that may pack out Wembley Stadium or the O2 Arena, however the potential thousands and thousands—if not billions—ready to expertise it vicariously on TikTok and Instagram. Winkler and his crew had to consider what the stage appears from a grassy patch 60 yards away, with the view partially obscured by a tall man in entrance of you—however now they think about the way it may look as soon as it’s been pinged throughout the net onto a smartphone display a foot from somebody’s face.

“Every single person in that stadium has a slightly different point of view, and every single one of them is the curator of the content that they are about to share with the rest of the world. Any show is basically judged by the moment that somebody hits the Send button on the picture that they took a millisecond prior to that,” says Winkler. “So you have to make sure that what it is that they point their camera at will look good—on camera.” In the business they name this the Instagram Moment. And removed from the perfectionism related to the photo-sharing app, the Instagram Moment has to work “in some of the most unflattering conditions.” People usually are not good at taking photographs at concert events.