There’s a moment in almost every brief now where the conversation quietly changes. It usually happens right after the client has finished describing what they want a guest or a customer to feel, and just before the budget and logistics get discussed. Someone, often with good intentions, says something like, “and we’ll need a moment for the grid.” That single line reveals one of the biggest tensions in experience design today, because it is often the point where the brief begins to shift from the person experiencing the space to the person encountering it through a screen.
I don’t say that as someone who dismisses content. Content matters, and I understand why every brand wants proof an event happened, reach beyond the room, a return on what is usually a significant spend. But the moment shareability gets written into the brief as a requirement, rather than left as an outcome, something shifts in how the entire experience gets designed. You stop asking how someone will move through the space, what will make them pause, participate, discover, connect or remember, and start asking what will make them reach for their phone. Those are not the same questions, and they rarely produce the same experience.
Here’s what actually gets lost, and it’s a business cost, not just a design one. A photographable moment is built for a single angle and a few seconds of attention from an audience that isn’t even in the room. A felt moment is built for the person standing inside it, over the course of an entire evening. When a brief prioritises the former, budget and creative energy concentrate into two or three “hero” moments engineered purely for capture, while everything around them, pacing, sensory detail, the small rituals that make an experience feel considered rather than produced, gets treated as filler. Guests can feel that imbalance even if they can’t name it. They’ll take the photo. They just won’t remember much else, and neither will the brand’s actual return once the initial spike of impressions fades.
What suffers on the brand side is not necessarily reach, but the depth of what that reach creates. An installation can generate thousands of photographs without necessarily building stronger brand recall, because people may remember the image without remembering what the brand made them feel. The distinction is between reach, recall and return. Reach tells you how far an experience travelled. Recall tells you what stayed with people. Return, whether that means advocacy, loyalty or repeat behaviour, tells you whether the experience created any lasting value. The three are connected, but they are not interchangeable.
I often think of the hero moment as the punctuation mark in a story. It can be spectacular, memorable and absolutely worth photographing, but it shouldn’t be the entire story. If the experience is designed only around that one moment, everything that leads up to it and everything that happens after it starts to feel like a means to an image. The better question is: what is the guest experiencing before they reach that moment, and what do they carry with them after they leave?
That’s the real trade-off. Digital content often has an immediate, measurable lifecycle; experiential memory works differently. A genuinely felt experience can continue shaping how someone talks about a brand long after the initial content cycle has passed. Reach and loyalty are built through different mechanisms, and when shareability moves to the front of the brief, brands risk optimising for immediate visibility at the expense of longer-term memory.
We have seen the broader version of this happen repeatedly: an experience can generate an enormous amount of content during the event and still have very little staying power afterwards. Everyone has photographed the hero moment, but a few weeks later, there may be very little recall of what the brand actually stood for or what made the experience distinctive. I wouldn’t point to a specific client and call the event a commercial underperformance without access to their business data, but the industry pattern is clear enough: reach is not the same as recall, and recall is not the same as return.
That is why I think the better question is not simply, “How many people saw it?” but, “What did they remember?” If the content disappears from the feed in a week but the experience continues to be talked about, recommended and remembered, the value is very different.
The creator economy has accelerated this considerably, but I don’t think the pressure comes from creators alone. It is the ecosystem around them. Brands want reach, creators need content, and platforms reward ideas that are immediately understandable and visually arresting. Everyone is responding rationally to those incentives. The problem begins when those incentives start determining the experience itself.
As creators became a standard part of experiential budgets, briefs increasingly began to account for content deliverables, angles and moments designed for capture before the emotional narrative had been fully resolved. That is a legitimate part of modern brand strategy, but it is a different discipline from experience design. The two should work together without collapsing into the same brief. The experience should be designed first for the people inside it; the content strategy should then determine how that experience travels beyond the room.
We saw this clearly while designing a first-birthday celebration. The parents came to us with a very contemporary brief: they wanted it to become one of the most Instagrammed celebrations of its time. Rather than translating that into a series of staged photo opportunities, we asked a different question: what would make people instinctively want to take their phones out?
We built the experience around bringing a child’s imagination to life, using spatial storytelling, technology and interactive moments to shape how guests moved, discovered and participated in the world around them. Instead of designing designated content moments, we designed behaviours: reasons to stop, explore, interact and share something with the people around them.
This is also where ritual design becomes important. Some of the most memorable parts of an experience are not objects at all, but actions: the way someone arrives, a collective gesture, an exchange, a reveal, or something guests participate in together. An installation gives people something to look at; a ritual gives them a role within the experience. The latter is often harder to reduce to a single image, but much easier to remember.
That is the distinction we try to hold onto: we don’t have a problem with creating something photographable. We have a problem when the photograph becomes the reason the experience exists.
That distinction is important. Shareability should be a consequence of a compelling experience, not the organising principle behind it. When people genuinely feel something, the algorithm often follows.
You can usually hear the shift happening in the brief. The conversation starts with, “What do we want people to take away from this?” or “What should the guest journey feel like?” Then it becomes, “Where is the hero moment?”, “Can we have a really strong photo opportunity?”, “What’s the Instagram moment?” or even, “We need something that will break the internet.” None of those requests are inherently wrong. The shift happens when that question comes before the question of what the person in the room is actually supposed to feel.
None of this is an argument against ambition or spectacle, those still matter and always will. It’s an argument for sequencing. Design for the person in the room first, understand what you want them to feel, build every touchpoint around that. Let the content strategy follow the experience, not lead it. Brands that get this right don’t have to choose between a great feed and a loyal audience. They get both, because the feed becomes evidence of something real, rather than a replacement for it.
For me, there is also a very simple test for whether we’ve crossed that line: take away the camera. Would people still stop? Would they still interact? Would they still talk about it? If yes, you’ve created an experience. If no, you’ve created content. There is room for both, but they are not the same thing.
