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October in Rajasthan has a particular quality of light. The heat will soften. The air carries something ancient and unhurried. And this year, inside the stone walls of a 500-year-old fort above the plains of Jaipur, something else will be in the air too.
Some things are worth doing because of what you learn. Some things are worth doing because of who you meet. And some things, rare ones, are worth doing because of what changes in you while you are there.
The Experience Design Summit 2026 falls into the third category.
One hundred and fifty people. Twelve faculty members. Five days. Five days at Mundota Palace and Fort in Jaipur this October. One hundred and fifty practitioners. Twelve faculty members who have built careers at the frontier of experience design across cinema, immersive theatre, sensory science, hospitality, sacred performance, and cultural storytelling. A 500-year-old estate above the plains of Rajasthan that has been shaping the people who enter it for five centuries.
This is not a gathering you attend to collect CPD hours or fill a networking quota. It is a gathering you attend because something in the work needs to move. And you are ready for it to.
Here are five reasons this October is worth your time.
Benefit 1: A new way of seeing your own work
Not with new information. With new eyes.
The shift that practitioners consistently describe after EDS is not that they learned something new. It is that they saw something familiar in a completely different way. Assumptions they had carried for years started to look like choices. Constraints they had accepted started to look negotiable. Work they thought they understood started to reveal edges they had not noticed before.
This happens because of who is in the room. A room where a filmmaker thinks alongside a hospitality leader, where a sensory designer challenges an architect’s assumptions, where a sacred experience creator and a brand strategist discover they have been working on the same problem from opposite ends: your own perspective cannot stay where you left it.
This is the benefit practitioners talk about most. And it is the one that is hardest to get anywhere else. This is what genuine cross-disciplinary exchange produces.
Benefit 2: relationships that outlast october
There is a version of professional networking that involves badge scanning and elevator pitches and LinkedIn requests the next morning. It produces contacts. It does not produce the kind of relationships that shape careers.
The relationships that form at the Experience Design Summit form differently. They form over five days of shared meals inside a fort that has been holding people since the sixteenth century. Over late conversations that started as a debate and became something closer to a friendship. Over the particular bond that forms when people think hard about something that matters to them in close company with others who feel the same way.
What comes out of this:
- Collaborations that begin as dinner conversations and become real projects within months
- Partnerships between practitioners from industries that rarely share a room
- A peer group across hospitality, brand, architecture, live events, and cultural curation that speaks the same language and holds the same standards
- Relationships that shape the direction of careers, not just individual projects
Benefit 3: access to twelve of the most interesting minds in the field
The faculty at the Experience Design Summit 2026 are in the room for all five days. Not to present. To work alongside you.
Here is who is at EDS this October:
- Barnet Bain – Oscar-winning filmmaker, Academy Award winner for What Dreams May Come, Cinematic Philosopher
- Colin Nightingale – Creator of Immersions, former Creative Producer at Punchdrunk
- Koert Vermeulen – Designer of Sensory Transformation, Founder of ACT LIVE DESIGN
- James Wallman – Cultural Commentator and 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 National Award Winning Film Mary Kom
- Brenton Sizwe Zola – Designer of Sensory Transformation
Benefit 4: strategic clarity on where the field Is going
By the end of five days at the Experience Design Summit, you will leave with a sharper sense of where the discipline is going than any trend report or industry conference could give you.
Not because someone told you. Because you spent five days in direct conversation with the people actively deciding it. You will understand:
- Which directions in experience design are genuinely significant in 2026 and beyond
- Where the opportunities are across hospitality, luxury, live events, cultural tourism, and brand
- How the most serious practitioners in the field are positioning their work right now
- What it will take to be where you need to be in the next two to three years
Benefit 5: a reminder of why you do the work
The most important benefit of attending the Experience Design Summit 2026 is also the hardest one to put on a list.
It is the change in the work that comes after. Not a specific skill or a specific piece of knowledge. The shift in how you approach the work. The slightly different questions you ask at the beginning of a project. The higher standard you hold your own outputs to. The expanded sense of what is possible that comes from having spent five days inside a space where the most serious practitioners in the field were working at the edge of what the discipline can do.
Every serious professional gathering produces some version of this. The best ones produce a version of it that lasts. Five days at Mundota Palace and Fort in Jaipur, with these people, at this level of depth and intentionality, is built to produce a version that lasts.
How to secure your place at EDS 2026?
Experience Design Summit registration for EDS 2026 is open now. Attendance is limited to 150 curated practitioners. This is a deliberate design decision: the quality of what happens in the room depends on the quality of who is in it.
Hospitality, luxury, live events, cultural tourism, brands, architecture: if any of these is where you work and experience is how you think about that work every single day, there is a room waiting for you this October in Jaipur.
To apply for or inquire about Experience Design Summit tickets, write to explore@expdesign.org or visit expdesign.org.
23rd to 28th October 2026. Mundota Palace and Fort, Jaipur, India.
Frequently asked questions
1- What are the top benefits of attending the Experience Design Summit 2026?
You come back seeing your work differently. With relationships that formed over five days of genuine exchange rather than a drinks reception. With direct access to twelve of the most interesting minds in the field. With strategic clarity on where experience design is heading. And with something that is harder to name but easier to feel: a different relationship with the work itself.
2- What is the Experience Design Summit?
EDS is a five-day residential programme at Mundota Palace and Fort, Jaipur, India, running from 23rd to 28th October 2026. It brings together 150 curated practitioners and 12 faculty members from hospitality, immersive theatre, cinema, sensory science, and cultural storytelling.
3- How do I register for the Experience Design Summit 2026?
Experience design summit registration is open now. Visit expdesign.org or write to explore@expdesign.org. Attendance is limited to 150 curated participants.
4- Where is EDS 2026 held?
Mundota Palace and Fort in Jaipur, a 500-year-old estate sitting above the plains of Rajasthan. The location was chosen not because it looks remarkable, though it does, but because of what five days inside it produces in the people who are there.
5- Who attends the Experience Design Summit?
Founders, architects, experience designers, cultural curators, luxury hospitality leaders, event creators, storytellers, destination developers, brand builders, and creative strategists. Anyone who designs experiences that move people.
6- How do I get Experience Design Summit tickets?
Write to explore@expdesign.org or visit expdesign.org to begin your application. Attendance is curated and limited to 150 participants.
