As the global economy continues to undergo rapid change, experience design (XD) is driving everything from the creation of products, goods and services, to the reimagining of the spaces we move through and occupy everyday. From apps to skyscrapers, experience design is driving how we interface with spaces, brands, and one another. As we approach 2025, Downstream’s design leadership offers a glimpse into the future of commercial interior design and five key trends poised to reshape the way we design and interact.
Hyper-personalization: Data Gets Spatial
For decades, we've been talking about dissolving the boundaries between our digital lives and the built environment. With generative AI, this notion is becoming a reality. The core idea is that AI can use information about any guest that they voluntarily share to quickly adapt and “tune” the spaces that guest moves through directly to them; to better anticipate their unique needs, reflect their individual preferences, or offer more specific and tailored (i.e valuable) information and interactions. Picture that moment when you start typing into your Google Chrome browser bar and within milliseconds it’s anticipating and completing your thought for you—predicting your need and offering you a faster way to find what you want. Now picture that happening in the physical space, in near real-time, transforming the architecture and mediascape around you.
This approach doesn’t just offer the chance to optimize client, visitor or employee engagement; it redefines the idea of responsive branded environments that feel custom-fit to each user. Flexible and adaptive spaces help people feel understood and valued; creating impactful experiences. This flexibility can also break down barriers, creating equity by being able to shift content based on any user’s unique accessibility needs, from wishing the signage was in your native language, to adapting to those who may be colorblind.
“Hyper-personalization and AI integration can leverage real-time guest data to customize itineraries, focus content, and create responsive environments.”
- Trent Hays, Technical Principal, DownstreamHow do you design experiences that can be this malleable? Spatial computing technologies like AR and VR are useful design tools, both in production workflows and in the final visitor experiences. These tools help de-risk innovation, giving our clients Red Hat in Boston an “in-situ” preview of how content will look and feel at scale across a space or a user’s journey. This allows us as designers to have a proxy experience to iterate on, and our client to understand how the brand UX will function and feel before the projects are actually built.
“AI allows real-time generative content to be highly personalized, unlike anything created before, and speeds up production, prototyping, and simulations.”
- Sean O’Connor, Executive Creative Director at Downstream
Convergence: The Future is an XD Smoothie
Experience design principles are transcending traditional boundaries, creating a new common language in spatial storytelling across sectors.
That means we’re seeing more experiential cross-pollination—design that blends the experiences you’d expect from one place into another. Offices, sales centers/EBCs and other B2B spaces are incorporating more digital art and interactive installations, turning lobbies into gallery-like spaces. Sports venues are adopting hotel and airline trends by replacing general fan seating with luxury suites and higher-touch hospitality amenities like bars.
“The cross-pollination of experience design principles across sports and corporate spaces not only enhances user experiences in sports venues and their sales preview centers, which traditionally have been more focused on environmental branding, but also showcases how insights from one sector can inform and elevate another.”
- Brian James, Creative Director at Downstream.Experience design isn’t succeeding because it’s new; it’s working because XD can combine many things that we already know and love together in ways that feel both wonderfully novel and functionally inevitable. The future of design is a "smoothie"—a thoughtful convergence of existing ideas and practices creating richer, more accessible user experiences that resonate across industries.
Memories & Meaning: Crafting Designs For Inclusion & Impact
Attention is fleeting, and the attention economy is built on ephemeral behaviors like clicks and scrolls. Experience design does not engineer for micro sub-second impressions, but for deeper exploration and engagement that result in more lasting emotional connections. Multi-sensory or ‘multimodal’ design, where we engage multiple senses, is essential for creating memorable, inclusive environments that resonate with diverse audiences and learning styles.
“When we tap into multiple senses, such as sight, sound, touch, and even scent, it offers visitors diverse ways to connect with the space and the content, and leads to deeper memorability. Creating more immersive experiences, supporting diverse learning styles and sensory abilities, and aiding learning and retention means visitors are more likely to remember information they actively engage with.”
- Annabel Dundas, Managing and Creative Director at DownstreamThis approach doesn’t just cater to functional needs; it highlights the cultural and emotional context of exhibits uniquely. Environmental sounds and scents can create a strong emotional impact, transporting visitors to another time and place, making the experience both informative and deeply memorable outside of just the analytical mind.
We used sound overlays and tactile experiences to create an engaging, immersive visitor experience at the Geelong Sports Museum in Australia. Visual storytelling is enhanced by soundscapes and voiceovers which provide an emotive way of connecting with the visitor. We have also balanced high tech and low-fi experiences. Visitors can interact with hightech rowing machines with a digital overlay, next to low tech experiences which challenge you to tie a series of sailing knots.
Multi-sensory experiences also facilitate collective moments of engagement, bringing people together for moments that matter. Rather than all looking down at our phones, these experiences encourage a “heads-up” and hands-on culture. Whether enhancing the Oregon fan experience at Matthew Knight Arena or connecting 14,000 New York Googlers and their partners to Google’s community initiatives and innovations, group experience that include physical and mechanical interactions can lead to a deeper sense of belonging and meaning.
Greener Pixels: Sustainable Design Practices
Architecture has developed viable global standards for sustainability, such as LEED, WELL, Living Building Challenge and many others. As experience design comes of age, we want to see our industry follow suit, with systems and metrics that make immersive experiences more sustainable from the ground up. This means finding alternative design concepts to AV and compute-intensive moments—leaning into physical and tactile moments that reinforce embodied and sensual awareness. It means pushing designers to adopt and specify eco-friendly materials, prioritize energy efficiency in generative artworks and back-end systems, and craft wellness-oriented spaces.
For HP Inc’s hybrid employee workplace and customer experience center in India, we needed to create high-tech adaptable spaces that could flex in size and use, while helping them achieve their sustainability and employee wellbeing goals. LEED Gold certification was achieved by incorporating eco-friendly features such as real green walls for improved air quality, and motion detection lighting systems ensures energy efficiency by automatically adjusting lighting levels based on occupancy, minimizing energy wastage.
XD as Commodity: Is it Art or Signage?
As experience design becomes mainstream, there’s a risk of commoditization—diluting uniqueness in favor of widespread appeal and scalability. The question for designers must be how to help our clients scale their storytelling and preserve its emotional depth and novelty.
We’re helping Zoom Video Communications do exactly that. They approached us with an ambitious challenge—create the most innovative Customer Experience Center in the world, for their EMEA office and EBC in London. The Discovery Showcase supports dynamic demonstrations and workshops with a world-leading large-scale (20m total) curved LED screen with multi-touch interactivity, offering an almost 360-degree immersive storytelling experience. While a 15m LED film wraps the outside, fully customisable art and signage wall as the EBC entrance. This experience has become their global ‘gold standard’ and we’re helping them scale up and down for others around the world—the next to open in San Jose, California.
In the early days, designing experiences meant highly bespoke, site-specific designs, intentionally focused on creating moments and spaces that were one-of-a-kind. It was expensive, unmeasurable, and unscalable. And it WORKED. Decades on, everyone from museums to retail to airports to corporate workplaces wants experiences. As a result, we now have a delicate balance to strike: Retain the novelty that made XD magical in the first place and systematize it for delivery at scale.
“Experience is becoming commoditized. As designers and practitioners, we have to answer and balance two core demands: Experiences that retain the core values of novelty, emotional connection, and uniqueness—delivered via flexible and repeatable strategies, systems, and frameworks that are easy to operate, maintain, scale, and budget for.”
- David Waingarten, Creative Director – Strategy at DownstreamWhether a corporate HQ that wants to embody brand and culture, a B2B sales center wanting to shorten sales cycles, or a sports venue that amplifies team spirit, businesses are looking to experience designers to create memorable, impactful environments that make every visit, conversation, and interaction more valuable.
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