We’re all a bunch of babies.

My client and friend, Amy Bennett, and I, are in the brand experience business, so it may not surprise you that we are obsessed with feelings. Sensory-triggered feelings, to be specific. We’ve been bantering about sensory and the art of experience design since early last year, but it wasn’t until today that Russell Brand said something that made me finally want to write about it. Let me explain…

Months ago, Amy came to me with one of her (many) passionate points of view; this time on the role of sensory stimulation and the event industry’s complete lack of attention to it. In her own nerdy, research-based monologue, she, unsurprisingly, fired me up! (If you know Amy, you know this is like being on the receiving end of chatGPT, with no “stop generating” feature.) Not only was she “right,” she had this ADHD motormouth at a loss for words. 

I could not believe we experts of our industry had missed the elephant in the room the whole time.

Of course we had intuitively practiced the art of sensory response in our experience design, but we had never intentionally planned, researched or articulated it. What an opportunity! 

We then sketched out some plans.

Taste, Touch, Smell, Sight? Too easy.

Within minutes we were ordering books on feng shui, reiki and color theory, and googling for scientific studies that would cement our gut instinct on the impacts of stimuli. See what I did there? Gut instinct? That comes from your senses too.

Which brings me back to Russell Brand.

[Edit: After this post, Brand was accused of sexual assault. We thought about taking down this post but decided its better to tell you how we feel. It boils down to this - we are deeply disappointed and we believe, and stand with, the victims. With that in mind, we hope you can still enjoy the larger story here and focus on the sensory learnings!]

I learn something every time he opens his mouth. This morning he opened it wide with the release of his book “Recovery  - Freedom from our Addictions”. It’s fucking brilliant mate. And it's not just a book for addicts. Brand’s POV is that we, in developed nations, are all addicts of one kind or another. I agree, that’s the whole damn point, but a topic for another time. 

Moving on…Russell tells a story of traveling in Australia and when the door closes behind him in his hotel room he experiences being trapped…he writes: 

“ Now I hope I’m not trying to dress up a tantrum as an epiphany here,but I felt trapped, that I had no way back to nature, nature like the sky inside, there was no way to breathe, to be human. Suddenly I felt I had to scramble to have access to natural conditions. In one jarring moment I felt the g-force of the rapid journey from hunter gatherer to hunted and gathered”

And there it was. Now, I hope I’m not dressing down his epiphany into something you perceive as trivial (see what I did there?) but I am going to make the connection you knew was coming. 

What Russell described is how our senses pick up on signals that are not limited to our five senses. His whole body (body, mind…the inexplicable soul) actually felt, in this example trapped. 

Imagine now the senses picking up and dropping down awe, inspiration, joy.

What about signals that tell the brain “this you love” or “you’re going to remember this.”

Even when unconscious one's body responds to invisible stimuli, it's primal. We humans can be triggered into fight or flight, consciously or subconsciously by the closing of a door, and the awareness that the air we are breathing is recycled. You feel me? We can be triggered by the closing or opening of a window.

So sensitive. 

Babies. We’re all a bunch of babies.

Let me bring this home.

The opportunity for sensory application in event and experience design, across the breadth of our industry, it’s limitless.

We are finding out now, in small steps, what happens when we alter the Air… Space..Scents..Colors…Textures…Tastes. When we move vs. sit, when we speak vs. listen. Design pathways. Lower lighting. Pump up the volume. 

We are designing human experiences with intention, and attention to the senses, magic is happening here.

You want to have a conversation about it? Inquire within getsmart@thestrategyschool.com