Who Should Attend the Experience Design Summit? A Guide for the Summit

Every October, a question gets asked of a small number of people working across hospitality, culture, brand, live events, and architecture.

Not a question about their credentials or their job title. A more fundamental one. Does how something feels matter as much to you as whether it works? Do you notice the quality of experience in spaces and situations where everyone else in the room is only thinking about what is practical?  Have you spent your career in the quiet conviction that the feeling a person takes away from an encounter is the most important thing about it?

If the answer is yes, the Experience Design Summit India was built with you in mind.

The Experience Design Summit India is a five-day residential program held at Mundota Palace & Fort in Jaipur, scheduled from October 23rd to 28th, 2026. It will host one hundred and fifty practitioners and feature twelve faculty members. Attendees will enjoy five days at one of Rajasthan's most famous estates. This event is not a typical conference with open registration for the general public. Rather, it is a selective gathering tailored for a specific audience involved in a certain type of work. 

This is a guide to whether that person is you.

Designed for Those Who Believe in the Power of Design

The Experience Design Summit India is not a general industry gathering. It is not built for everyone who works in events or hospitality or design. It is built for practitioners who have moved past the question of whether experience matters. That argument has been won. The people this summit is designed for are asking the harder question that comes after: how do you design experience deliberately, at the level of craft, across disciplines that have historically worked in isolation from each other?

If that question drives your work, this is where you belong.

EDS is built for practitioners who live at the place where making and meaning meet. The ones who cannot look at a space without thinking about what it communicates. Who cannot plan an event without thinking about what it should feel like from the inside. For whom design is not a phase in a project but a lens they carry into every room they walk into.

These are not questions that get answered in a keynote. They get answered over five days, in a room with the right people, inside a space that is itself a study in what the answers can look like.

The Hospitality Leader Who Knows Something Is Missing

There is a version of hospitality that delivers what was promised. Clean rooms. Efficient service. A breakfast that arrives on time. This version is not difficult to produce. It is also not what people remember.

There is another version. The one where a guest arrives at a property and something shifts in them before anyone has said a word. Where the quality of light in a lobby does something to the body. Where the pace of the place communicates care in a way that no staff training manual ever could.

You know the difference between these two versions. You have stayed in both. You have probably built one and spent the years since trying to understand how to build the other.

You have spent your career trying to close the gap between the two. The Experience Design Summit India is where that gap finally has a name, a discipline, and a room full of people working on it from every direction.

The Event Creator Who Has Outgrown the Format

You are good at what you do. The events you produce run well. The numbers come back positive. And yet something does not quite fit. The format you have been working within was never really built for what you are trying to do inside it. 

You have read about immersive conference experiences. You may have attended one or two that came close. What you have not found is a gathering that treats experience design as the primary discipline, where the format of the event itself is a demonstration of the principles it is discussing.

That is what EDS is. A five-day experience summit where the programme, the location, the cohort, and the atmosphere are all part of a single designed experience. Not a conference about immersive events. An immersive event about the discipline of designing them.

The Cultural Curator, the Brand Strategist, the Architect

The question is always some version of the same thing. How do we make people feel something when they encounter what we have built?

For the brand strategist, it arrives when a campaign lands exactly as planned and still does not produce the feeling it was supposed to. For the cultural curator, it arrives when a beautifully managed heritage site leaves visitors appreciative but not moved. For the architect, it arrives when a technically accomplished building feels, to the people inside it, like nothing in particular.

The Experience Design Summit India does not belong to any single one of these industries. It belongs to the question that runs through all of them. And it brings together the people who have spent their careers trying to answer it from every possible angle

What Do the Five Days Actually Look Like?

EDS is a residential programme. That distinction matters more than it might initially seem.

A residential gathering is not a conference with hotel rooms attached. It is a fundamentally different structure. The work does not stop when the scheduled sessions end. The conversations that begin over dinner continue the next morning. The relationships that form on day one deepen across the days that follow. The perspective shifts that start in a session become something else entirely by day five.

Mundota Palace & Fort in Jaipur is where this happens. A 500-year-old estate above the plains of Rajasthan that has been holding people in a specific quality of atmosphere for five centuries. It is not a backdrop for EDS. It is part of the experience that EDS is designed to produce.

Twelve faculty members bring the depth. An Oscar-winning filmmaker. A former Punchdrunk creative producer. A sensory transformation designer. A sacred experience creator. A cultural commentator and trend forecaster. Twelve people who have each spent their careers asking the same question from inside completely different worlds.

One hundred and fifty practitioners bring the range. Curated for what they bring into the room as much as for what they will take away from it.

How to Know If EDS Is for You?

The honest answer is that EDS is not for everyone in the design, hospitality, or events industry.  The simplest test is this: Does how something feels matter as much to you as how it works? Do you notice the quality of experience in rooms and situations where everyone else is only thinking about logistics? And when you encounter something that has clearly been designed around the person experiencing it, you know it instantly. Not because someone told you. Because you feel it. That recognition is exactly what EDS is built for. The instinct that careful work feels different from the inside and that creating that feeling deliberately is worth dedicating a career to. 

Applications for EDS 2026 are open now. Attendance is limited to 150 curated participants. Write to [email protected] or visit expdesign.org.

23rd to 28th October 2026. Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, India.

Frequently Asked Questions

1- Who should attend the Experience Design Summit India? 

EDS is for practitioners across hospitality, luxury, live events, cultural tourism, brand, and architecture who take experience seriously as a discipline. If feeling and function carry equal weight in how you think about your work, EDS was made for exactly that kind of practitioner. 

2- What is the Experience Design Summit India? 

Taking place from 23rd to 28th October 2026 at Mundota Palace & Fort in Jaipur, EDS is a five-day residential programme for 150 practitioners and 12 faculty members spanning hospitality, storytelling, architecture, and culture. It is not a place to sit and listen. It is a place to do the work. 

3- What is an experience summit and how is EDS different? 

Most experience summits are conventional conferences with an experiential theme. EDS is a residential, curated gathering where the format of the event itself reflects the principles of experience design. The location, the cohort, and the programme are inseparable.

4- What industries does EDS bring together? 

Hospitality, luxury, live events, cultural tourism, brand, architecture, immersive theatre, cinema, sensory science, sacred performance, and cultural storytelling. The value of EDS comes precisely from the range of disciplines in the room.

5- How many people attend EDS?

 Attendance is limited to 150 curated participants. This is a deliberate design decision, not a logistical constraint.

How do I apply for EDS 2026? 

Write to [email protected] or visit expdesign.org.