Event design can create opportunities for emotional involvement. The meaning of those encounters develops through the people who enter them, bringing histories and interests the host cannot fully anticipate.
When I was a child, an occasional stop at the Cabazon Dinosaurs outside Palm Springs carried a particular kind of excitement. The dinosaurs were impressive from the road, but discovering that I could enter them changed my relationship with what I was seeing. I remember climbing through the Brontosaurus’s tail into a world concealed inside its enormous body. Someone had built an attraction; I was discovering that an apparently complete object held another possibility. Looking back, I recognize an early encounter with something that still interests me as a host: the moment an environment gives a person a reason to become involved.
My response belonged to that encounter, including the child I happened to be. Another visitor could have entered the same structure and found it amusing, uncomfortable, or simply a place to buy something. The attraction supplied possibilities that we encountered differently. At STUDIO 4707, that relationship raises a question beyond whether an event offers guests choices: how much of an experience can we design, and where does the guest’s own understanding begin? I believe we can take considerable responsibility for the conditions while recognizing that personal meaning emerges through someone else’s life.
Event Design Meets a Person Already in Progress
Mary Jo Bitner’s servicescape framework examines how the physical setting of a service influences the people within it. Her model connects environmental conditions with cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses, while accounting for personal and situational differences (Bitner, 1992). For a host, the useful implication is that the environment’s influence passes through a person. A dimly lit lounge may offer welcome privacy to one guest and uncertainty to another. Changing the light changes a condition; understanding its significance still requires attention to who is there and what they need.
Research in museums makes this relationship particularly visible. Studying 217 adults visiting a science exhibition, John Falk and Martin Storksdieck found that prior knowledge, interest, motivation, social interaction, and features of the physical setting all influenced learning; no single factor adequately explained outcomes across visitors (Falk & Storksdieck, 2005). Their subject was learning, so the findings cannot simply be transferred to emotional responses at a party. They do, however, offer a useful discipline for thinking about designed encounters: the visitor arrives with resources and circumstances that the exhibition did not create.
Consider a song played during a celebration. A producer can select it for its tempo or its place in the evening’s story. A guest may hear something else entirely: a person they miss, a summer they remember, or a life they once imagined. The selection remains consequential, although its significance exceeds the intention behind it. Even two people dancing together may be participating in quite different inner experiences. A moment intended to express uncomplicated happiness might become moving because it brings someone into contact with a more complicated feeling. I would hesitate to call that a failure merely because the response departed from the brief. Hosting requires enough confidence to make a deliberate choice and enough curiosity to accept that its importance may arise somewhere we could never have planned.
Participation Has an Interior Life
An emphasis on individual response can sound as though people simply choose their feelings. That would place an unreasonable burden on the guest and give the host an easy excuse. People can exercise agency over aspects of their participation without commanding every emotion that occurs. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s account of self-determination offers a more careful understanding of autonomy as a sense of volition, compatible with connection and dependence on others. Their review also identifies choice and opportunities for self-direction as supports for intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Applied to hosting, I take this as a reason to make involvement available without demanding a prescribed response.
At STUDIO 4707, the relationship between interiors and patios gives us physical possibilities for accommodating different kinds of involvement. Someone may listen closely without moving nearer the stage, or spend much of a celebration talking with someone they rarely see. The planning task is to give the spaces useful purposes, with routes and service that allow people to remain part of the gathering as their interests change.
Christian Grönroos and Päivi Voima make a related distinction in service research: value emerges through the customer’s use, while co-creation depends on interaction between provider and customer (Grönroos & Voima, 2013). Their conceptual analysis helps me distinguish what we provide from what becomes valuable to someone. We can arrange a beautiful dinner and serve it attentively. A guest may remember the conversation it allowed, perhaps for reasons unknown to everyone serving the table. Our contribution matters because it supports that encounter, even though we cannot claim authorship of everything the guest finds within it. I would also resist turning this recognition into an obligation for guests to help produce the event. They may arrive wanting to be cared for, entertained, or left to enjoy the company they brought. Their participation in making meaning does not require them to take on the host’s work.
I am interested in participation broad enough to include that interior activity. A theatre audience can become deeply involved without altering a performance. Watching, interpreting, and recognizing something of oneself can give an encounter personal significance. An event that measures involvement only through visible activity risks overlooking what its guests are actually receiving. Photographs of a venue in use can help a prospective host imagine an occasion, but they leave the guest’s interior experience largely unavailable. The image records an arrangement and a moment; a conversation with the person may reveal something else worth understanding.
The Host Remains Responsible
Recent scholarship gives this relationship a contemporary expression. Bernd Schmitt and Shuyi Hao conceptualize immersive experience as arising through an evolving alignment between service design and participants’ psychological engagement (Schmitt & Hao, 2026). Their theoretical framework treats immersion as something emerging during an encounter, including personal journeys and shared interpretation. I find that more useful than imagining an experience completed in advance and delivered intact. An event has a plan, but the experience continues developing as people enter it. A host needs to observe that development, including moments when the room’s actual use departs from the drawing.
Such attention depends on practical capacity. At STUDIO 4707, built-in lighting and sound, catering facilities, and production access provide resources for coordinating the conditions around an occasion. A conversation area becomes useful only if the sound permits conversation and guests can find it. A carefully prepared room still needs service that reaches the people using it. These are responsibilities we can discuss with a client, plan with their team, and evaluate during the event. Personal meaning remains uncertain; the quality of our preparation and attention should be open to scrutiny.
I want the planning conversation to include the guest who needs more information or a different way to take part. That inquiry makes a promise of welcome more concrete. Afterward, I would want to ask guests what held their attention and what got in their way, allowing answers that differ from our intended story. Asking only whether they enjoyed the event tells us less about how they actually encountered it.
The ambition I return to is an environment worth entering on one’s own terms. My memory of the dinosaurs has endured partly because discovering their interiors became part of how I understood places and their possibilities. I can recognize the contribution of the attraction without assuming that every visitor carried away the same thing. When we plan an event together at STUDIO 4707, I want to understand what the host hopes to make possible and whom the occasion must welcome. We can then build and operate conditions worthy of those intentions, leaving room for guests to discover meanings we have no reason to expect.