About The Experiential Design Index

The industry's work is documented today only in scattered portfolios, award pages, and press articles. The Experiential Design Index makes it a single, structured, openly licensed record of who built what — crediting the full delivery stack on every project: architecture, exhibit design, media design and software, AV integration, fabrication, and more.

The Experiential Design Index is published and maintained by Sitara Systems, a spatial interaction design and software studio. Sitara Systems is itself listed in the index under the same inclusion criteria, sourcing standards, and activity-status methodology as every other firm.

As of this build: 238 firms (143 in the browse directory), 2435 projects, 1823 venues. Last built 2026-07-22.

What gets into the dataset

A firm gets a record when two things are both true: it has at least 3 projects in the experiential design space, and both the firm and its credits can be verified from a public, independently checkable source — a firm's own portfolio page, an institutional announcement, an award record, or press coverage. A firm's own published website counts as a source (it's public even if self-authored); a private claim, a paywalled report, or a page that errors for every reader does not, and the fact it would support is left out rather than published on a "trust us" basis.

There is no fee, no submission requirement, and no relationship prerequisite for inclusion. Firms are added because their work belongs in the record.

Geographic scope: firms headquartered in North America (the United States or Canada) get their own record. This is a participation test, not a residency test — it excludes firms that don't meaningfully participate in the North American industry, not Canadian firms, which count fully alongside US ones. A firm headquartered elsewhere still appears in credits on North American projects it worked on; it just doesn't get its own page until its operating presence here grows.

Why isn't a firm linked or listed?

A name in a project's credits table without a link means that firm doesn't have 3 sourced projects yet — the bar described above. It isn't an error or an omission; the firm is credited correctly, it just doesn't clear the threshold for its own record yet. As more of its work is added, it will cross the line automatically and the link will appear.

Separately, a firm can have its own page and still not appear in the Firms browse list — see "What's browsable in the directory" below for that threshold. Either way, nothing is hidden: every credited firm is named in full on every project it worked on, and the complete dataset, including firms below both thresholds, ships in the open-data export. Corrections to any credit, including a missing one, are always welcome — see "Corrections" below.

What's browsable in the directory

The number above (three projects) is deliberately low — it exists so the dataset can track a firm's progress toward a fuller picture rather than re-researching it from scratch later. But at 3 projects, "does real work in this space" and "did it once or twice" are hard to tell apart, and a directory meant to help designers and museums discover real partners — not just the five firms everyone already has in mind — stops being useful if it lists everyone who's ever touched the space.

So the browsable firm list on this site shows only firms with 8 or more credited projects. Below that, a firm's record still exists in full: it's cited on every project it's credited on, it has its own page (reachable from any of those project pages), and it ships in the open-data export. It just isn't surfaced in the directory's browse view yet. As the dataset grows, firms cross the line and appear automatically — there's no manual promotion step.

What kind of work counts

The index records built, physical, permanent or semi-permanent experiences — museums, science centers, visitor centers, brand experience centers, executive briefing centers, and similar spaces a firm delivered and that persist as standing infrastructure. Several categories are deliberately out of scope, not overlooked:

• Advertising and marketing. Ad campaigns, commercials, and one-off brand activations are excluded — credit rosters for this kind of work are notoriously incomplete and rarely documented publicly, which runs against the sourcing standard above. A firm's brand experience center building stays in scope; its ad campaign for the same client does not.
• Plans without a built outcome. Master plans, feasibility studies, and strategy engagements that didn't result in a built space aren't recorded as projects.
• Ephemeral theatrical and live-event production. Single-run scenic and media design for stage shows, concerts, galas, and conference sets — however well-documented — don't fit the index's persistent-venue model.
• Repeated, templated installation programs. A near-identical build installed across many sites (a standard product line, not a bespoke design each time) is treated like a manufactured product, not a series of credited projects.
• Cruise ships. Not a fixed venue.
• Multi-site programs with no single anchor venue (a citywide signage program, a touring installation with stops in several cities) — the index's one-project-one-venue model isn't stretched to fit these.
• Trade-show booths, pop-ups, and conference installations — even inside the corporate-experience segment, only fixed installations a company maintains as standing infrastructure count. A firm's executive briefing center is in scope; the same firm's trade-show booth for the same client is not.

Ranked lists

Rankings are published per delivery-stack role ("Top Exhibit Design Firms," "Top AV Integration Firms," …) — never as a single cross-role master ranking. The roles in the schema describe different crafts serving different buyer decisions; ranking an architecture firm against a fabrication shop would manufacture a comparison that doesn't exist in practice. Per-region and specialty (venue-type, technology) lists are published the same way.

Scores are computed entirely from the open dataset by a fixed formula, with no subjective or reputational input, so any reader can reproduce any list from the published data:

• Eligible work: completed projects only (status: completed), with year_completed in the trailing five years. Announced and in-progress work appears in the index but never counts toward a score.
• Recency-weighted count: each eligible project where the firm holds the list's role scores 1.0 if completed this year or last, 0.75 if 2–3 years ago, 0.5 if 4–5 years ago.
• Sourcing bonus: +0.1 per project (capped at +0.5 per firm) for projects corroborated by independent sources — at least two distinct source domains not operated by the credited firm.
• Ties are broken by most recent status_verified date — never by editorial discretion.
• Rank eligibility: a numbered rank requires at least 2 eligible projects — one project is a data point, not a track record.
• Display cap: the ranked table shows at most the 10 highest-scoring firms. Every other firm with eligible activity is still listed on the same page, alphabetically and unranked, under "Also active in this category" — a "Top" list that ranks everyone isn't a top list.
• Minimum depth: a role gets a ranked list only once at least 8 firms are rank-eligible in it. Below that, we publish an unranked "Firms Working In [Role]" roundup instead — a small dataset ranked is a false signal.
• Role identity: a firm appears on a role's list only if that role is one of the disciplines the firm itself offers as a standalone, engageable service (the roles on its firm record). A project credit in another capacity — say, an architecture firm's in-house team producing media inside its own larger commission — stays on the project page but doesn't place the firm on that role's hiring list.
• Technology lists count only the credit(s) attributed with the technology on each project — the firm(s) that actually delivered it, per the project's cited sources — not every firm credited on a project that happens to feature it.
• Venue-type and cross-role lists (venue-type specialization, most-awarded, largest reach, annual most-active) count design-discipline credits only (exhibit design, interpretive planning, media design, architecture, master planning, landscape architecture, environmental graphics, lighting design), held in a role the firm offers standalone — never a cross-role master ranking. Fabrication, AV integration, and consulting credits stay on project pages and count toward their own per-role lists.
• Active firms only: firms with an inactive activity status never appear on ranked lists or count toward minimum depth — a list answering "who can I hire" can't include firms that no longer exist. Their records, credits, and directory presence are unaffected.
• Coverage honesty: counts reflect work recorded in the index — coverage depth varies by firm — and a position on any list implies no judgment of design quality.

Weights and thresholds may be revised as the dataset grows; every revision is recorded in the repository's history. Every list runs the same formula against the same open data, including Sitara Systems' own record, and carries the self-inclusion disclosure above inline whether or not Sitara places on it. Some ranked-list families (most-awarded institutions, platform lists, small-studio and certification-based lists) aren't published yet because the underlying data isn't dense enough — their absence isn't a ranking signal either way.

Activity status

Every firm record carries an evidence-based activity status — active, activity unclear, or inactive — with the basis and a verification date stated on the record. Inactive firms are not removed; their credits remain part of the historical record, but status is displayed prominently so a reader is never misled by a portfolio from a studio that no longer exists.

Corrections

Every factual claim carries a source on the record. Anyone can submit a correction by opening an issue in the project's repository; corrections from credited firms and institutions are prioritized and typically resolved within two weeks. Corrections that change credits are noted in the record's git history, which serves as the public changelog — nothing is quietly edited. See Contribute for how to submit one, and how to help your own firm's projects get recorded accurately in the first place.

How the dataset grows

New records come from two ongoing processes, run on a rolling monthly cadence: sweeping industry award archives (SEGD, AAM, TEA, GACEP, and others) for newly eligible work, and following the credit graph outward from firms already in the dataset — reading each one's own published portfolio for projects and collaborators not yet recorded. Both processes are subject to the same sourcing and scope rules described above; nothing gets a shortcut past them for being findable by one method versus the other.

License

The data and written content of The Experiential Design Index are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license — use it, build on it, cite it, with attribution to The Experiential Design Index. Full license text: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. Open-data exports (JSON and CSV) are available at /data/.