From time to time, a discipline arrives at an inflection point. A mix of cultural change, technological progress, and shifting human expectations creates pressure that pushes it somewhere new. The practitioners who notice this shift early are often the ones who move ahead.
Experience design is at that moment today.
The discipline that spent the last decade making the case for itself, arguing that experience is the economy, that how something feels is as important as how it works, that the feeling a person takes away from an encounter is the most important thing about it, has won that argument.
The future of experience design is not an extrapolation of the present. It is a departure from it.
EDS is a five-day residential programme at Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, from 23rd to 28th October 2026, bringing together 150 curated practitioners and 12 faculty members to do exactly that. It is one of the most serious experience design events anywhere in the world right now.
How emotionalism will define the next era of design?
The word that keeps surfacing in the most interesting conversations happening in experience design right now is emotionalism.
Not emotion as a goal, which most designers would say they already care about, but emotionalism as a design philosophy. A fundamental commitment to treating the emotional response a design produces as the primary criterion by which it should be judged.
This represents a significant shift from how design has historically evaluated itself. The dominant frameworks across architecture, event design, hospitality, and brand have measured success in functional terms. Did it work? Was it efficient? Did it achieve the intended outcome?
Emotionalism does not replace these questions. It reorders them. A hotel lobby that works perfectly but produces nothing in the person who walks into it has failed at the most important thing. An event that runs exactly to schedule but leaves nobody changed has not succeeded. A brand that communicates clearly but produces no feeling in the people it reaches has missed the point entirely.
This is a harder standard than the functional one. But it is the one the most serious practitioners are now holding themselves to. The designers moving into this territory are not abandoning craft or rigour. They are applying both to a harder problem. And the practitioners at EDS 2026 are among the people taking it furthest.
The rise of sensory intelligence
Most designers know that sensory experience matters. Very few know how to design it deliberately. That gap is where the most interesting work in experience design is happening right now.
For years, sensory design existed at the edges of the discipline. Acknowledged as important, rarely treated as central. Sound, scent, texture, temperature: these were finishing details, applied after the real decisions had been made. That is changing. Rapidly.
This is not instinct. It is well-documented. Sensory inputs affect how people feel, what they remember, and how they act – and they do it in ways that visual and narrative design alone are not capable of.
- Scent bypasses the cognitive brain entirely and lands directly in the emotional and memory centres
- Sound changes the perceived quality of a space, the pace at which people move through it, and the kinds of conversations they have inside it
- Temperature and texture affect trust, generosity, and creative thinking in measurable ways
- The sequence in which experiences unfold changes how they are remembered and valued long after they end
- The conditions for genuine awe, one of the most powerful and memorable human emotional states, can be deliberately created
The practitioners at the leading edge of experience design are not treating this as interesting research. They are treating it as a design toolkit. And the experiences being built with serious sensory intelligence are measurably different from the ones that are not.
At EDS 2026, Koert Vermeulen, Designer of Sensory Transformation and Founder of ACT LIVE DESIGN, and Brenton Sizwe Zola, Designer of Sensory Transformation, bring this work directly into the room.
The collapse of the audience
One of the most significant structural shifts in the future of experience design is the collapse of the distinction between audience and participant.
For most of the history of designed experience, there was a clear division. The experience was on one side. The person having it was on the other. The designer controlled the former. The experiencer consumed it.
That model is losing its hold. The work of companies like Punchdrunk pointed in this direction years ago, dissolving the boundary between stage and audience entirely. What is now transforming is the fact that this methodology is no longer restricted to experimental live performances. It is emerging as a fundamental component in the design of experiences within hospitality, branding, cultural tourism, and public spaces.
When the person becomes part of the experience rather than a recipient of it, their presence, choices, and movement through the space all become part of what the experience is. The designer is no longer controlling an outcome. They are creating the conditions within which an outcome becomes possible.
This requires a fundamentally different approach to the design process. One that builds in openness rather than trying to eliminate it. That treats the unscripted moment as an opportunity rather than a failure. That designs for a range of possible responses rather than a single intended one.
Colin Nightingale, former Creative Producer at Punchdrunk and Creator of Immersions, has spent his career at exactly this frontier. His work at EDS 2026 brings the practical craft of this approach into direct conversation with practitioners across disciplines.
Sacred and transformational experience
Perhaps the most unexpected direction the future of experience design is moving in is toward what practitioners are beginning to call sacred or transformational experience: the deliberate use of design to produce genuine change in the people who go through it.
This is not mysticism. It is the application of principles that have been understood in ritual, ceremony, and sacred architecture for thousands of years. The oldest and most powerful designed experiences in human history were not built to entertain or inform. They were not built to inform. They were built to change something in the people who passed through them. Space, sound, light, story, and community – arranged with care and intention – produced genuine shifts in how a person saw themselves and the world around them.
The question serious practitioners are now asking is whether these principles can be brought into contemporary contexts. Into hospitality, live events, cultural spaces, and brand environments. Whether it is possible to design for transformation rather than just impression, without the explicit context of ritual or ceremony but with something of comparable depth.
Monica Dogra, Actor, Musician and Sacred Experience Creator and Co-Curator of Nākaloka, and Paul Bulencea, Initiation Architect, bring this question to EDS 2026 from completely different angles. Two practitioners who understand, in very different ways, what designing for transformation actually requires.
The decade ahead
The future of experience design belongs to the practitioners willing to move into harder territory. To treat emotionalism not as an aspiration but as a standard. To develop genuine craft around sensory intelligence. To dissolve the boundary between audience and experience. To design not just for impression but for transformation.
These are not small ambitions. They require a different kind of preparation, a different kind of conversation, and a different kind of room than most of the industry currently provides.
EDS 2026 is that room. An experience makers conference unlike anything else. Five days at Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, with 150 practitioners and 12 faculty members who are already working at this frontier.
Applications are open now. Write to explore@expdesign.org or visit expdesign.org. Attendance is limited to 150 curated participants.
23rd to 28th October 2026. Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, India.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the future of experience design?
It is moving toward emotionalism, sensory intelligence, the collapse of the audience-participant boundary, and transformational design. The discipline is shifting from solving problems to producing genuine feeling and change in the people who encounter it.
What is an experience design event like EDS?
EDS is a five-day residential programme at Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, from 23rd to 28th October 2026. It is a working gathering of 150 curated practitioners and 12 faculty members, built around serious cross-disciplinary inquiry into experience design.
What is emotionalism in design?
Emotionalism in design puts feeling first. Not how something looks, not how it works – but what it does to the person standing inside it.
What is sensory intelligence in experience design?
The deliberate use of sound, scent, texture, light, and temperature to shape emotional and behavioural responses. It is moving from the edges of experience design to its core as the neuroscience behind it becomes better understood and more widely applied.
How do I apply for EDS 2026?
Write to explore@expdesign.org or visit expdesign.org. Attendance is limited to 150 curated participants.