WXO SUMMIT ANNOUNCES GOC O’CALLAGHAN AS SPEAKER
The World Experience Organisation has invited Goc O'Callaghan to speak at the WXO Summit as part of London Experience Week — a global gathering of the people actively shaping the future of experience design across culture, entertainment, and business.
Goc’s talk, “Beyond The Stage: Building Meaningful Festival Experiences,” takes audiences inside the lived reality of creating and running ArcTanGent Festival, an award-winning independent event known for its unorthodox artistry, fiercely loyal international community, and deliberate refusal to follow the mainstream festival playbook.
Moving beyond the polished surface of “experience design,” this session unpacks the constant balancing act behind the scenes. From navigating the complexities of the independent festival landscape to managing the countless “what-the-audience-don’t-see” challenges, Goc explores how unexpected moments, constraints, and creative decision-making shape the final experience.
A key thread of the talk introduces a neuroscientific perspective examining how thousands of individual touchpoints, emotions, and interactions combine to form a cohesive and memorable whole. It’s not just about programming or production; it’s about understanding how experiences are actually perceived, processed, and remembered.
Blending candid storytelling with practical insight, this talk offers a rare, unfiltered look at the complexity of festival design, curation, production, and management. It also proposes a fresh framework for thinking about experience optimisation — not as a linear process, but as a response to a wicked problem: dynamic, unpredictable, and deeply human.
A wider conversation: the speakers shaping the field
Goc joins a cohort of speakers whose work spans immersive storytelling, large-scale entertainment, neuroscience, and experience strategy, each bringing a distinct lens on what it means to design meaningful moments. A few speaker highlights include:
Joseph Pine, is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. He is cofounder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. Pine’s latest book, The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations was published by Harvard Business Review Press on February 3, 2026. It marks a major evolution in his groundbreaking work, presenting transformations as the highest form of economic value – guiding customers to become who they want to become. With transformations inputs don’t matter, only the outcomes that customers achieve. It shows businesses how to take advantage of this opportunity by getting into the business of guiding transformations.
Jeff Wayne is best known as the creator of The War of the Worlds, a groundbreaking musical adaptation that has evolved from a concept album into a large-scale live and immersive experience. His work sits at the intersection of music, narrative, and technology, pushing the boundaries of how audiences engage with story worlds over decades — a rare example of experience design that has continuously reinvented itself across formats and generations.
Pigalle Tavakkoli, founder of the School of Experience Design, brings a deeply human-centred and science-backed approach. With a background spanning theatre, fashion, and scientific collaboration, her work focuses on designing emotionally resonant experiences that move beyond surface-level engagement. Her frameworks emphasise emotion, transformation, and the orchestration of “storyfeeling” as a core design tool.
Charlie Melcher is the founder of Future of StoryTelling (FoST), a platform and summit exploring how storytelling evolves across media, technology, and live experience. His work connects creators, technologists, and brands to rethink narrative as something immersive, participatory, and spatial — a key influence in the broader experience economy.
Together, this lineup reflects the expanding boundaries of experience design — from large-scale immersive productions and narrative worlds to independent festivals and human-centred design frameworks.
Goc’s contribution sits firmly within this conversation, offering a grounded, real-world counterpoint: not from theory or large corporate budgets, but from the lived complexity of building something independent, resilient, and meaningful — one moment at a time.
