Taylor Swift’s wedding may change how couples think about their big day. The celebration featured unexpected details, such as arcade games and a raffle, which reflect a growing wedding trend: designing a day guests will remember how they felt, not what they saw.

A Growing Trend

Akeshi Akinseye, founder of Kesh Events, a global luxury wedding and event planning and design company, said, “We’re seeing a desire to take some of the stiffness and formality out of weddings and bring the fun back.” The arcade games and raffle make sense in the context of building an experience-forward wedding, she added.

Julie Comfort, an experience designer who works with wedding planners, 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. For instance, a recent wedding Comfort designed with the couple’s love for karaoke in mind featured a few close friends singing along with music for their first dance.

Experience Design

Comfort said experience design is fairly “niche” in the wedding world, but much more common in other types of events, such as a movie premiere or product launch. As online fatigue grows, she believes fewer couples are going to seek out content creators, people who focus on capturing weddings for the purpose of posting on social media, and look more for who can help them make an event around “presence and connection.”

Where a wedding takes place is the front door into the overall experience, said Akinseye, who planned the wedding of Tobias Harris, a professional basketball player and recent addition to the San Antonio Spurs. What Swift’s and Kelce’s wedding celebration did so well was force guests (and the world) to collectively wonder how an impersonal venue could transform into a place fit for what has been deemed “America’s Royal Wedding.”

Original reporting: KEYT (Ventura/Santa Barbara) — read the source article.