Design the Experience Before the Building: Alina Hernandez on Experience as Infrastructure

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Alina Hernandez, founder of the Wellness Innovation Hub and co-chair of the Global Wellness Institute's Mental Wellness Initiative. Hernandez calls herself an experience architect, and her central claim is that the experience should be designed before the building rather than bolted on afterwards. She came to the conversation with a clear method and a low tolerance for guesswork. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Start with who you're building for

Hernandez treats experience design as a kind of infrastructure. Before anyone draws a floor plan, she said, you have to be clear about what the business is for and, above all, who it is meant to serve. Whoever uses the business is the one paying the bills, so the work begins by understanding their needs, their wants and the value they are looking for. Skip that and you have a faulty start. She means the employee as much as the guest, because the two are linked. A miserable employee cannot give a guest an experience that means anything, so she designs for both at once.

She is strict about keeping her own assumptions out of it. Design decisions, she said, should not come from what she or her team happen to think, however informed, because assumptions are expensive. Building on them and retrofitting later wastes enormous amounts of money and material. The alternative is to co-create, which means starting from who the place is really for and working backwards from there. This matters more now than it used to, she argued, because life has sped up. We are, in her phrase, analogue beings living in a fast digital world, and what people need and want is changing faster than ever.

Her quarrel is with how the industry chases personalisation. Every hotelier wants to hyper-personalise, but few can say how. You cannot do it by deciding what you think matters to a guest, she said. You have to ask them, and technology now makes that possible. In practice she gets all the stakeholders into a room, from the chief executive down to the general manager and the senior team, and then brings in the frontline staff. They stand around a flip chart rather than sit at a table, and she asks them what happens in their jobs. The buggy driver who collects guests as they arrive at a resort turns out to be the first point of contact, and often the first chance to understand and help a guest, which her clients had not noticed was being lost. She likes to point to the early Pixar building, designed so that even senior people crossed paths with others on the way to the restrooms, starting conversations that would not have happened otherwise.

What wellness really means

Simone asked her to define wellness, a word he noted everyone uses and few pin down. For Hernandez it is a state of being that takes in the physical, mental, emotional, somatic and spiritual sides of a person. By spiritual she does not necessarily mean anything New Age. She means whatever belief system connects someone to meaning, to purpose and to a sense of something larger than themselves. These elements are rarely all in balance at once, she said, and shift through the course of a day.

She went further, into territory she knows is contested. Humans, she argued, have far more than the familiar five senses, and some people have a sharper perceptual sense, an ability she described as seeing around corners. That is sometimes labelled neurodiversity, but she does not treat it as a deficit. It is more that the rest of us have not yet learned to perceive what those people already can. Part of it is cognition, she said, but part of it is something a machine cannot copy, because for now an AI cannot be embodied the way a person is.

ROI and ROX

Hospitality, Simone observed, is obsessed with ROI. Hernandez talks instead about ROX, return on experience, and she draws the line between them as the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. ROI is math. You take a certain amount of space, work out the yield, and calculate what a guest produces over a stay rather than just the room rate. ROX is the softer, intangible side, and her point is that those intangibles can be worth a great deal. They feed customer lifetime value and loyalty, which is close to a prediction of how the business will do, and they create the emotional connection between a guest and a place. More and more, she said, that counts for more than the transaction. The difficulty is practical: a colleague of hers, Dr Laszlo, has built metrics for it, but bolting those into the systems hotels already run on is hard.

Keep critical thinking in charge

On AI, Hernandez is calm about the tool and watchful about the user. A tool, she said, can only do what its creator builds into it, and the expertise that goes into designing an AI shapes what comes out. Simone pointed out that different models already give noticeably different answers, almost like different personalities, which she agreed is a reflection of who built them. The part she cares about most is that people bring critical thinking to all of it. Lose that, she warned, and we make a string of mistakes that eventually show up on the bottom line, never mind the cost to the people involved.

She wants the industry to think in systems rather than in silos, mapping how different effects interact instead of working it out in any one person's head. Experts, she noted, can become victims of their own expertise, so vertical in their field that they miss the very things that would solve their problem. Simone connected this to The Wisdom of Crowds, the idea that a room full of the best minds in one industry will eventually agree on everything, and that real disruption needs an outsider's eye. Hernandez had her own version. In her work, she said, you design for the average and the extremes, and you test at the extremes, because the new thinking arrives there first. Dismiss the extreme as an oddity and you will be too late to design for what it was telling you.

Both ends said connection

For the HumanX question, Hernandez was clear that the future is not a choice between technology and humanity. It is not binary, she said. The train has left the station, and the task is to take it somewhere useful for people rather than let it carry us wherever it goes. She had run a workshop at the summit on nature, technology and wellbeing, and asked people to place themselves on a line with nature at one end and technology at the other, then explain why they stood where they did. What came out of it surprised her. People at both extremes named the same thing as what nature and technology each give them, and that thing was connection. Step into nature and you connect with it; pick up a phone and you connect with each other. Seen that way, she said, the whole question stops being good against bad and becomes something far less binary.