Why Attend the Experience Design Summit 2026? Here's What You'll Gain

Here is a question worth sitting with before you book your next industry event: 

What actually changed the last time you attended one?

Most professional gatherings make the same promise. Come, learn something, meet people, and go home better equipped. And most of them deliver a version of that. A notebook full of ideas. A handful of business cards. A LinkedIn connection request from someone you spoke to for four minutes at a drinks reception.

Then three weeks later, you are back at your desk, and none of it has stuck. The way you saw it, the people you knew, the possibilities you were working toward: unchanged. 

The Experience Design Summit 2026 is built around a different promise. ie:

What is different about you when you leave? 

EDS has six specific answers to that question. 

Five days at Mundota Palace & Fort, Jaipur, from 23rd to 28th October 2026. One hundred and fifty curated practitioners. Twelve faculty members from hospitality, immersive theatre, cinema, sensory science, sacred performance, and cultural storytelling. 

Here is what those five days give you. 

A Space Built for Human Connection and Creative Growth

Before getting into what you gain, it is worth understanding what kind of space EDS actually is. Because the gains come from the space as much as the programme.

EDS is not a conference with hotel rooms attached. The work and the conversations and the relationships and the reflection are not separate things at EDS. They happen together, across five days, inside one place—Mundota Palace & Fort in Jaipur, a 500-year-old estate above the plains of Rajasthan. The space itself is part of what EDS is designed to do to the people inside it.

At EDS, you do not come to listen and take notes. You come to challenge ideas, be challenged in return, and leave with something that changes how you work. That is the room this summit builds. Everything you gain comes from being inside it.

What Do You Actually Walk Away With?

1. A Shift in How You See Your Own Work

The most common thing practitioners say after EDS is not that they learned something new. It is that they saw something familiar in a completely different way.

Spend five days alongside people from immersive theatre, cinema, hospitality, sensory science, and cultural storytelling, each approaching the same questions from a completely different place. Your own perspective does not stay where you left it. The assumptions you brought in start to look like choices. The constraints you accepted start to look negotiable. The work you thought you understood starts to reveal edges you had not noticed before.

2. Relationships That Do Not End When the Event Does

The professional relationships most people form at industry events are transactional by nature. You exchanged contact details. You follow each other on LinkedIn. You occasionally like each other's posts.

The relationships that form at the Experience Design Summit India are different. They form over five days of sustained proximity, shared meals, late conversations, and the specific kind of trust that comes from thinking hard about something together. They are built on genuine exchange rather than mutual visibility.

• Partnerships that form between people who would never have been in the same room otherwise

• A network of practitioners across hospitality, culture, brand, and architecture who share a common language and a common commitment

3. Strategic Clarity You Cannot Get From a Report

Every industry publishes trend reports. Every conference features a session on where the field is heading. Most of them are useful in the way that reading about swimming is useful. They describe the water without putting you in it.

The strategic clarity that comes from five days at the Experience Design Summit 2026 comes from direct conversation with the people shaping where experience design is going. From James Wallman, cultural commentator and founder of the World Experience Organisation. From Colin Nightingale, former creative producer at Punchdrunk. From Koert Vermeulen, designer of sensory transformation and founder of ACT LIVE DESIGN.

You leave with a sharper understanding of:

• Where experience design is headed across hospitality, luxury, brand, and culture

• Where you need to position yourself and your work within that trajectory

• What the most considered practitioners in the field are actually working on right now

4. Ideas That Become Something Real

EDS is not a place where ideas go to be discussed and then left behind. It is a working gathering. The conversations that start in a session continue over the next four days. The ideas that emerge from one exchange get pressure-tested in the next. By the time you leave, some of what started as a thought has already become the beginning of a project.

Real collaborations. Real partnerships. Real ventures that might not exist yet but whose first conversation happened inside a 500-year-old fort in Jaipur this October.

5. Something Quieter, and Just as Important

The EDS describes it plainly: a reminder of why you create what you create.

Five days away from the operational weight of your work. Inside a space that has been designed, across five centuries, to produce a particular quality of atmosphere in the people who enter it. With 150 other practitioners who share your conviction that experience is the most serious work there is.

This is the part of EDS that is hardest to put in a programme description and most likely to stay with you longest. The personal renewal that comes from being, briefly, in exactly the right room.

The Faculty You Will Learn Alongside

The twelve faculty members at EDS are not keynote speakers. They are working practitioners who are in the room for all five days.

• Barnet Bain - Oscar-winning filmmaker, winner of the Academy Award for What Dreams May Come

• Colin Nightingale - Creator of Immersions, former Creative Producer at Punchdrunk

• Koert Vermeulen - Darkness's Storyteller, Designer of Sensory Transformation, Founder of ACT LIVE DESIGN

• James Wallman - Cultural Commentator, Trend Forecaster, Founder of World Experience Organisation

• Monica Dogra - Actor, Musician and Sacred Experience Creator, Co-Curator of Nākaloka

• Claus Raasted - Wizard of Transformation, Co-Founder of The College of Extraordinary Experiences

• Ferdinando Buscema - Magic Experience Designer at Ferrari, first Magician-in-Residence at the Institute for the Future

• Elizaveta Poliakova - Dancer, Choreographer & Architect of the Unscripted, Co-Curator of the Cloud

• Roshan Abbas - Creative Mediapreneur, founder of Spoken Fest

• Paul Bulencea - Initiation Architect, Co-Founder of The College of Extraordinary Experiences

• Omung Kumar - Space Shifter, Director of the National Award Winning Film Mary Kom

• Brenton Sizwe Zola - Designer of Sensory Transformation

Apply for EDS 2026

Applications for the Experience Design Summit India 2026 close when 150 curated participants have been selected. That number was not chosen because the fort cannot hold more people. It was chosen because the quality of what five days at EDS produces depends on the quality of the people spending those five days together.

If experience is not a department in your organization but a discipline you have built your career around, across hospitality, luxury, live events, cultural tourism, brand, or architecture, this is the gathering that was waiting for you. 

Apply before October. Write to [email protected] or visit expdesign.org.

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

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I gain from attending the Experience Design Summit 2026? 

You leave seeing your work differently. With relationships that were built on something real rather than a business card exchange. With a clearer sense of where experience design is heading. And with the beginning of collaborations that did not exist when you arrived. EDS also describes something quieter: a reminder of why you create what you create. 

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. 

Who are the faculty at EDS 2026?

Twelve working practitioners, including an Oscar-winning filmmaker, a former Punchdrunk creative producer, a sensory transformation designer, a sacred experience creator, and a cultural commentator and trend forecaster, among others.

How is EDS different from other industry conferences? 

EDS is residential and curated. The relationships, conversations, and work happen across five full days inside the same space. There are no stages or passive audiences. The room itself is part of the experience.

How many people attend EDS?

One hundred and fifty curated practitioners. 

How do I apply for EDS 2026? 

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