What feeling do you remember? Not what you saw last — what you felt, and where you were standing when you felt it. For most of us the honest answer is a room. A kitchen at a certain hour, a hall full of strangers laughing at the same moment, the particular hush of a place that held something for us. We almost never name a feed.
I think about this more than my work strictly requires, because the thing I do for a living rests on it. When I was seventeen I spent my Sundays at a small comedy club off Oxford Street, near Marble Arch, with my sister and the man who would become her husband. This was the early Facebook era, when the screen was supposed to be where everything moved next. And yet what I remember is the room — how important laughter was when it was shared in the same air, how a stranger’s reaction changed the way I heard the joke. That was where I learned that being of service through experience was a real thing a person could feel, not a phrase. It is, in a roundabout way, why I do what I do now.
A feeling needs a body to land in
There is a quiet assumption in how we live now: that an experience and the record of an experience are roughly the same, and the record is more efficient. You can send the photo to more people. You can count who saw it. But a feeling is not information, and it does not transmit the way information does. It needs a body to land in — yours, in a particular place, at a particular moment that will not repeat.
At WONU, the agency I run, we build physical experiences for a living, and the longer we do it the more convinced I am that this is a psychological fact before it is a creative one. Nothing replaces in-person engagement. Not because screens are bad, but because belonging is a thing the body decides, and the body needs to be somewhere to decide it.
We once built a dinner inside a room in Chelsea walled on four sides with LED — gorgeous, luminous, and entirely the wrong shape for a meal. No kitchen flow, no service infrastructure, none of the quiet machinery a seated evening leans on. The easy move is to fight a room like that. We did the opposite. We brought the meal into the room’s strangeness and let people eat surrounded by light, slowly, in each other’s company. What we watched happen is the part you can’t engineer and don’t forget: people stopped performing the evening and started living inside it. By the end the story we’d come to tell had landed in a way that felt more lived in than reading a product card. It lived in them because they had been there — in that light, at that table, with those people.
You cannot scroll your way into that. You can only be in the room.
The thing I learned by getting it wrong
I’ll be honest about a time it didn’t work, because I think presence is most worth defending precisely where it’s hardest to control. We took on a project that asked us to bring something to life across several spaces at once, on a timeline that never gave the careful part of the work room to breathe. Things we’d made kept getting damaged after we handed them over. We stayed accountable through every repair, but it stung, because we like to get it right the first time and that time we didn’t. It was disappointing. You learn from it. You’ll survive.
What it taught me wasn’t about logistics. It was that presence is fragile in the same way intimacy is fragile — it asks for time and attention you can’t compress, and the moment you treat it as a thing to rush, it stops being the thing at all. The room only gives you the feeling if you give the room your full care first.
What the body keeps
We have built a culture that measures itself by reach — by how many people technically encountered a thing. I understand the appeal; reach is easy to count. But it measures the wrong thing. Sentiment beats impressions. A thousand people seeing your face is not a thousand people feeling anything, and the part that actually changes a person — the warmth that survives the week, the memory you reach for years later — is almost never the part that scaled.
So here is what I’d offer, less as someone who stages experiences and more as someone who has spent twenty years watching what people keep. Pay attention to the rooms. Go to the thing. Sit at the table that was awkward to get to. The photograph will fade into the thousands of others, and the count of who saw it will not visit you when you’re old. But the feeling you carried out of the room — the one that needed your body there to exist at all — that one stays. It always was the point.
Jade Akintola is the founder of WONU, a New York experiential marketing and brand-activation studio whose work spans clients including Nike, Fendi, Hennessy, Fresh Beauty, and GE Aerospace.
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