Taylor Swift’s wedding may change how couples think about their big day. The celebration reflects a growing trend of designing a day guests will remember how they felt, not what they saw.

Experience-Forward Weddings

Akeshi Akinseye, founder of Kesh Events, says there’s a desire to take the stiffness and formality out of weddings and bring the fun back. The arcade games and raffle at Swift’s wedding make sense in the context of building an experience-forward wedding, introducing anticipation and making guests part of the event.

Julie Comfort, an experience designer, describes her job as executing emotional design, or how a wedding is meant to make guests feel. This doesn’t necessarily require spending more money, but rather being thoughtful, intentional, and generous with how couples host people.

Comfort says experience design is fairly niche in the wedding world but common in other types of events. As online fatigue grows, she believes fewer couples will seek out content creators and look more for who can help them make an event around presence and connection.

The wedding took place at Madison Square Garden, which was transformed into an intimate and small space despite having around one thousand attendees. The guest wrote that a small portion of MSG was cordoned off, devoid of any notion that a basketball or hockey game ever shared that space, and somehow magically, someone created an outdoor garden at a lush countryside retreat.

Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.