In this series, features and series developer Heather Nicholls takes you behind the scenes of some of the most compelling brand activations and events.
This week we meet, Evolve Creative Solutions, the agency behind Norwegian telco’s stand at MWC 2026 in Barcelona.
The Brief:
Evolve has been working with Telenor for a decade. Telenor is about connectivity, people and security and every stand they deliver for them needs to bring these values to life.
The stand concepts have evolved over the 10 years the two have worked together but the design language and core brand values are the same. For 2026, Evolve Creative Solutions wanted to deepen the focus on creating atmosphere and emotion in a space, which has led to this adventurous reimagining of the original Northern lights concept.
This concept has been central to Telenor’s stand identity for a few years now, rooted in their Scandinavian heritage and the idea of connectivity: something vast, atmospheric, and quietly awe-inspiring.
The Telenor team always call their stand ‘the Telenor home’ and as their Project Manager said, “we are expecting guests, so we would like them to feel welcome.”
For 2026, the Evolve team asked themselves how they could take that further. The answer was to move away from the architectural lines of the previous year and introduce something softer and more organic. They wanted to evoke snow, stillness, and the feeling of being welcomed into a Nordic landscape. A real contrast to the rest of MWC. That became the emotional brief that drove every design decision.
The Execution:
As Evolve has a long-standing partnership with Telenor, the development process is genuinely collaborative from the very start. The agency start with the emotional experience that they want to create and work backwards from there, asking questions like what does it feel like to walk into this space?
For this project, the spatial layout came first. Deciding to move the meeting rooms to one side of the stand was a deliberate decision, which made access control easier for the Telenor team and freed up the centre of the stand to become the real art of the design. The centre of the stand was an open, atmospheric atrium that visitors could move through and dwell in.
Once that spatial logic was resolved, the overhead canopy followed naturally as the element that would define the character of that central space. From there, the curved forms, natural timber flooring, planting and lighting palette all built on that foundation.
Elizabeth Haworth, marketing director at Evolve Creative Solutions says: “After a decade together, Evolve’s relationship with Telenor is less client-agency and more genuine partnership – but that doesn’t mean an easy one. Telenor push us hard, and that’s exactly what makes it work. They’re never satisfied with the first design, and honestly, neither are we. That creative tension is what drives the standard of the final result. There’s a high level of trust on both sides which allows us to be bold.”
She adds: “Beyond the client relationship, a project like this involves close coordination with specialist suppliers – lighting, AV, planting, specialist fabrication – and Evolve’s project management team holds all of those threads together so that the client has one point of contact and one team accountable for the whole delivery. The build itself at Fira Gran Via is always a complex undertaking given the scale and the compressed timeline, but the team executed it flawlessly.”
Birgit Felde Sevaldrud at Telenor said: “What I like most about Evolve is the whole team, the people the professionalism, the competence. We are starting as a team from day one.”
The results:
Haworth says: “It exceeded all of our expectations, and I think Telenor’s too. The stand created a genuine sense of place within one of the world’s busiest and most overwhelming trade show environments.”
Ms Felde Sevaldrud, from Telenor said: “We have a better flow in the whole booth. It brings people together and I also think it moves you, in the heart. It’s something else, something different. Look around MWC, there are a lot of black boxes, a lot of colours and we have looked for what is missing.”
Telenor came to MWC 2026 needing to host a significant programme of presentations, pre-scheduled meetings and networking all within one cohesive environment.
The stand delivered on all of that functionally, while also doing something harder to measure but arguably more valuable: it reinforced Telenor’s identity as a brand that thinks differently.
Trends and Learnings:
Haworth says: “At Evolve we are absolutely advocates for ambitious technology in exhibition design – LED walls, immersive content, high-resolution display – but what we increasingly see is that technology alone isn’t enough. The stands that truly resonate are the ones where every element serves a coherent concept. There has to be a narrative, a reason for every design decision. Spatial storytelling. Brand narrative. Design integrity.”
She adds: “When a stand is built around a genuine idea as this one was, the technology amplifies it. When it isn’t, even the most impressive screens can feel like noise. The Telenor stand used a significant curved LED wall as its centrepiece, but it worked because it sat within a space that already had a clear emotional logic. Everything meant something and that is at the heart of Evolve’s commitment to creative integrity.”