What is experience design, and why does it matter?
I’ve often been asked to recall the most memorable wedding I’ve ever been to. I’ve been to over 250 weddings, from beaches to ballrooms, backyards to rooftops. I’ve been to huge spectacles ripped from the pages of a magazine, and intimate elopements in the mist of a waterfall in the middle of the jungle. I’ve worked with some of the best planners in the business, and attended some of the sweetest DIY gatherings. But the wedding that sticks out most in my mind is one where nearly everything went wrong.
It was the beginning of the rainy season in Costa Rica, though you could usually count on a few dry hours in the afternoons most days. This was not one of those days. There was a torrential downpour that began once everyone was already gathered on the beach, a very long walk from any kind of shelter. But rain was not unexpected, so everyone had been given a white umbrella. When the bride and groom came together, the 40 or so guests closed in around them with our umbrellas, creating a canopy that we all huddled under together. We were all united in this moment, everyone working together to create a protective bubble around this moment. There was something special about that feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together. Everyone had a shared purpose, and the closeness made us all a part of what was happening. We were not a mere audience, but an active part of the emotional ceremony. It was a moment of extraordinary togetherness. Everyone there was a stranger to me, but I felt nothing but pure love to be squeezed into this place and moment in time with them.
When weddings aren’t designed for experience, they tend to feel pretty much the same. The only way for a life experience to be truly memorable—to stick to our bones—is for it to diverge from our expectations, but while the details, locations, and people may vary, most weddings fall very close to our expectations of what a wedding should be. That rainy day wedding definitely shattered those expectations. It was an experience that everyone who was there will never forget, and while it wasn’t designed that way, it could be.
Experience Design is a design practice focused on human engagement. With careful thought towards what you might see, smell, hear, and, most importantly, how you will feel, the goal of experience design is to take someone on a journey. It has a lot of applications but the aim is essentially to connect us with what it means to be human. The trick is to move people, and this comes down to three things: guiding their attention, surpassing their expectations, and engaging them emotionally. What this means for weddings, is that rather than designing solely for the way things look, our approach is driven by the way things feel.
The move towards Experience Design is part of a much bigger shift in society, a shift of what we value and how we make meaning — away from things and towards connections and experiences. As society gets ever more complex, we are constantly seeking out experiences that affirm our shared humanity that will have a lasting impact on our lives.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
We all crave new experience. Something different, outside of our ordinary day to day, to jog us from our inertia, pull us from our numbness and apathy. We are hungry for connection. For joy, surprise, tenderness. What if instead of just designing weddings that showcase style and taste, we find ways to truly engage people and design for presence, awe, and connection? To apply that quintessential Maya Angelou quote to my point, I’d say that people will forget what the flowers looked like, they will forget what you served for dinner, they will forget what song you danced to, but they will never forget how a wedding felt.
At the end of the day, we all just want to feel something. We want to feel loved, delighted, cozy, and important. Whole, glamorous, nourished, and grateful. Thrilled, elated, playful, free. To be reminded of the magic of this wild world. We want our attention to be grabbed. We want to be stopped in our tracks. To be stunned, invigorated, seen.
As an Experience Design company, everything we do at Comfort Studio is in the service of delivering the emotions we are craving. Engagement follows emotions, so our approach is to start with the feelings and work backward to design a way to spark them. Warmth. Surprise. Romance. Wonder. Oneness. Boldness. Aliveness. Unity. We do this by finding touchpoints throughout the entire wedding experience—from the first moment people hear of it all the way through until a few months after and they’re reminded of it—where we can add moments, rituals, or experiences that trigger the emotions we’ve targeted as our goal. To build in surprises, or wow moments. We don’t need a monsoon to bring people together in a shared moment of unity, we can design those moments. For example, I’ve attended another wonderful wedding where the officiate invited everyone to surround the couple at the end of the ceremony and send them their love and support.
“To design meaningful and engaging experiences, one must fundamentally be designing ways to drive our attention to here and now. In other words, presence is the emotional base note of all meaningful experiences.”
The ability to bring people into the present moment through an experience is the access point to profound meaning and connection. It takes a lot of imagination and curiosity to create something that we haven't experienced before, that we will remember, that will resonate deeply, that will grab us by the collar and not let go. And that’s what people want. To be grabbed. To be completely caught off guard. To get goosebumps. The work we do is to create a foundation of purpose and meaning, and then on top of that build an extraordinary experience that transports guests to a temporary magical world.
And that’s not to say the details don’t matter. They absolutely do. The flowers, the food, all of the magic you create for the senses is a big part of the overall experience. It just isn’t everything. I will dive into this deeper in another article, but there are three pillars of a pleasurable experience: Sensual, Emotional, and Meaningful. Too many weddings stop at the first one and miss the potential to create an emotionally uplifting, meaningful experience for everyone involved. Remember that weddings are a once-in-a-lifetime event for the people held most dear in this world, including the couple. It’s an opportunity to completely shift expectations, and kickstart marriage from a place of profound community, meaning, and magic.
