It’s about the Magic

 

The real magic of the human condition is that humans share a reality we don’t realize we share – until provided by way of an experience designed to evoke it.  A very early example is the campfire that provided light, warmth, cooking, and safety, the original heart of the home, the hearth—as well as the heat and light that anchored the earliest settlements. 

The first effects of controlled illumination were visible in the faces warmed and colored by firelight, along with the sharing of food, drink, and stories of the hunt, the journey, the battle, and fear and danger overcome.  250,000 years later, romance is still fueled by the hearth and candlelight, just as the outdoor grill and its aromas serve to recall and rekindle the rewards of the hunt, the original human teamwork project.  The gift of fire was the gift of reassurance, social cohesion in bonding, and confidence that we could fend off dark and cold, hunger and loneliness, with our creative crafting of the natural world.

Perfect places

This magic of the campfire has been extended in places so ingeniously designed that, like the fireside, they evoke behaviors perfect to their purposes, as if on autopilot.  No signage is needed, as in sacred spaces, because the purpose of the place is perfectly clear in itself, making intuitive sense.  The most successful places ever built pull this off seemingly without effort.  What their designers did was to understand instinctively, without doing the math, exactly how people behave, where, and why.  Find ways to build in this intuitive knowledge as a conscious act, and the public will visit, and more important, re-visit—the whole secret to public spaces that succeed to survive, prevail, and even turn a profit.

Magic on purpose

But this magic doesn’t just happen, it must be learned at a Hogwarts Academy, that hard place where magic must be earned by the exacting act of learning and absorption, then applied.  Intuition can take you so far, because it comes from the same brain as knowledge.  But there is a science of design as it fits human needs and wants, and that is the work of cultural analysis in centering human-based building.

Familiar spaces are those we know so well, from our homes to the White House, from the office to the zoo, department store to gift shop, as object lessons of problem-solving at its most pragmatic.  But the process of coming up with solutions to place-making problems can’t be explained by the “magic” touted by Disney Company.  We know how to behave in a castle – even a “real fake” one in Disneyland, or in the glitter of a casino, or the awesome majesty of a cathedral, or again, the civil sanctity of the Oval Office (where the most sophisticated guest can choke up on a planned speech). 

Why?  Because each of these places evokes a set of behaviors within each visitor—an inner character and core script close to theatrical.  The ability to cue this acting is the outcome of clear design parameters that set the stage.

This blog will describe various stage sets.  But it will do something more: lay out the parameters of our common cultural equipment that make these stages work, starting in the mind with perception.

For example, how do we know, at any moment, where we are, and what we are supposed to do there?  The answer depends on some heavy brainwork: work that takes in the sensory world, compares it to inner templates of meaning and motivation, and makes almost instant decisions about the appropriate script.   There is a whole rationale for this instant recognition, the built-in rulebook by which people understand and act within the spaces we all know – as well as new ones (hint: we treat the new as an extension of the old by sensing and filing its perceptual cues in the old folders). 

How it works: Rules for human-based design

Once these rules and rubrics are out in the open to demonstrate the dynamics of space use and wayfinding, the task of designing places that work can be an informed one.  Not through some arcane process that defies explanation, but as a deliberate decision sequence that illustrates the logic of thinking and feeling as inspired by design. We should be the sorcerer, not the sorcerer’s apprentice, practicing magic by design.  The better the marriage, the less dependent it needs to be on the magic of romance and more on the harder logic of relationship maintenance and negotiation.

Guidelines

Such decisions include: How much space for how many people?  What colors should dominate for this purpose?  Lighting, furnishings—what styles are best suited to the behavioral theme?  What historic or geographical themes offer the most effective outcomes?  Music, programming, drama, icons and symbols, and “talis” array (the touchstone takeaway objects and images) are all synthesized into creation or re-creation of spaces to promote the purpose. Designers make these decisions intuitively all the time.  But what I’m raising here is a bigger question: how do all these aspects interface with the visitor mind? 

This is the human/design interface.  What is already in this person’s mind?” What template will they use to identify this place when they see it? What emotions are attached to that template/algorithm?  How do we manage those emotions? In what context will the observer be observing- where will they “stand” contextually – solo, with a group, what sort of group – intimate? Strangers? Colleagues? Other?

Much of the rulebook of contemporary retail was worked out by Henry Selfridge from the turn of the last century in his London emporium.  He operated by shrewd instinct to create retailing traditions out of his head that are now industry templates.  He also had his store designers to consult.  But what works can be copied, explained, and replicated for future success.

Purpose

And what is the purpose of any given space?  This is a question more often assumed than analyzed; we think we know this intuitively.  We do—when we see it.  But before we do, someone must know what they are doing in order to create place out of space.  Disney’s original statement about what was in his head was nothing anyone else could relate to: (Iwerks and Kenworthy in Hench, The Art of the Show, p. 2) “…a small amusement park…designed to appeal to both children and adults….something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic.” No wonder, under this rudimentary business plan, that so few people were able to understand his start-up vision by this hazy outline.  What Disney was inventing was a new kind of public space, attuned to an audience he loved and respected—an experience environment.

What Disney and his team designed was far more, but it had to be experienced to be believed and understood a generation later – nearly twenty years after Disneyland—by the handful of architectural critics and practitioners who were, despite their formal training, able to transcend that barrier to grasp what was in Walt’s mind. The first Imagineers weren’t architects, and the initial appreciation for themeing came from the ranks of people trained outside architecture, in animation, filmmaking, theater and interior design, and urban planning.

With the creation of the first park, Disney achieved an institution beyond the user-friendly public space now so widely praised and emulated. In fact, he produced something far greater, a template for the building-scape of our cities and suburbs ever since.  This early innovation deliberately followed a sequence of related thematic stories for a walkthrough environment, a series of crafted experiences to be lived and re-lived in totally immersive 3D; a living movie in which the visitor is the lead actor.

Just as theme parks embody “the art of the show,” we use the wider term “thematics” to encompass the entire built environment and all that visitors “perform” or experience therein.  This domain includes the humanscape of buildings, transportation (from land vehicles to ships and skyways), suburb and waystation, malls, assisted living communities, from major cities to edge cities to villages and small towns; oil rigs, castles, hospitals, airports, warehouses, and golf courses – every node imaginable. 

Everything people do within and about these designed worlds is included—working, socializing, buying, selling, browsing, walking, riding, boating, flying, hiking, and biking; learning, adventuring, meeting up, gardening and growing, sporting, worshipping, fair-going, recovering, being born,  grieving, and dying—from birth to funeral, our lives happen within spaces designed for the grand scope of human talent and potential. The gamut runs from hospitals where we now are both born and die, to theme parks that showcase our deepest and dearest motivations.   

Human-based design

The age when designers could dictate their own terms is closing down.  The humanscape is becoming a flatter ecology.  The visitor, user, or guest always did shape place to their own ends.  It is now far more clear that in order to compete in the mass public arena, the audience and their aspirations and perceptions of things has moved up to take the helm of the design agenda.

Architecture and building can no longer operate within the “pure” control of the architect and builder alone; they have to engage with the instincts, tastes, and talents of those who will use the space with their own agendas drawn from the broader cultural mandate.  Rarely are these the same as the private creativity of those who conceive and create these places for their own personal ends as monuments to their own talent.  It has to be about the user as the client, with the architect as a rapt artisan who serves at the client’s pleasure.

The best places are custom-designed for the innate genius of the human brain, body, and behaviors—to fit the cultural (shared belief) program, after Universal Design has been satisfied. This means there are actually two style sheets for place design:  first, what all humans share, and second, the cultural “set” that distinguishes one group from another—northern and southern, French and British and Arab and Asian, male and female, younger and older, upper, middle and lower class.

These categories each come with a unique value system that requires different stylings to promote and underwrite them.  “Family” is code for child, class, and cost, most often in a category by itself that excludes adult, and especially teen, themes (Las Vegas being geared to these two). Both New Orleans and Las Vegas have gone through branding experiments pitching their images to the family market. These failed because people have a mental file folder for both places labeled “hedonism, adults only, and 18 and older.”  These are special “forbidden zones,” escape valves from the righteous and careful ethic of civil society geared to order.  Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has explained the gap in his quip “There is no such thing as fun for the whole family,” because, as our age-stage development chart shows, adults, adolescents, and children have widely segmented priorities.  Many times these are at odds. 

While this is a very general schematic, it outlines the categories key to audience-based decision making in design.  Twenty-five years’ experience in guiding our clients’ focus on what is most critical to their audiences will be clarifying to every designer who needs to create the public space that targets every type of experience.  

We are too often called in to troubleshoot when the issues causing problems could have been addressed, avoided, or solved far earlier in the design process—at the fuzzy front end.  Human dynamics introduced earlier, rather than later, always yield cost and time-saving, up-front economies that go far to prevent the expensive bill for damages to operations and reputation otherwise doomed to happen on the ground.

The Mind of Design

 

“Yes, an architect’s primary responsibility is to shape form.  But there is social meaning inherent in every structure, in every form, in every place, and in every situation, and it does architecture no good to suggest that the act of form-making is separate and distinct from the uses to which a form will be put.”

                                       --Shigeru Ban, Pritzker Prize recipient, 2014

The designed environment consists in every kind of structure, but most are conventional, based on standard patterns that work and have worked for hundreds of years.  At the opposite end of the scale are those experimental artworks, like Buckminster Fuller’s spherical dymaxian house, monuments to creativity – some of which work, some don’t, most erected for looks (like sculpture) rather than designed for function.

Move over to the other side of the equation. The human beings who use the designed environment, from kitchens to Olympic stadiums. These two energies, design and user, can sometimes meet in the middle – but often this meeting is awkward, ill-planned, or off-base, requiring alterations in the design and / or, more often, workarounds by the user.  This is why people are constantly trying to manage their environments – with mixed results.

But if environments, from auto shops to automats, were consciously conceived and executed for the ways of the social brain and the human body, the foundations of a far better world—with less stress, higher productivity, creativity, better quality of life, and far less conflict between where we have to live and what we need to do and our ambitions for how we’d prefer to spend our time, money, and energy. 

This upgraded scenario includes transportation (cars and planes, the bane of modern life), moving to the places we live and work, shop, meet, and learn.

It turns out that we’re old-fashioned - we would usually rather be within walking distance for everything we do.  And on from these sub-prime environments into our prized leisure retreats for recreation and restoration at hotels, resorts, vacation clubs, and theme parks. These places are desirable largely because their design (with lots of walking, as on the golf links) so closely fits the way we enjoy eating, resting, playing, and recharging—mostly in contrast to where we must do these things but don’t especially like to.  

The best places operate on autopilot, meaning that the design is so attuned to what people already want to do that the dynamics between the way the place is built and the way it is experienced set up a self-motivating engine, a virtual cycle, of design and use.  All great design works this way.

Autonomy

At this point a word about autonomy and its place within the mind of design.  Our brains enjoy a certain autonomy of thought; we can imagine, and dream, and daydream, and we do all these things consistently; they inform our lives in the important unfocused scanning of the possibilities of each day and also in reforming and making sense of the past.  However, our brains are also raised on culture, the social brain, so we act and make decisions by social primate thinking.  The way in which we use space is based on a set of rules that follow this social, or shared cultural, agenda.  Context use and perception follows group thinking. 

Context rules

Our normal behavior unfolds in context, and within all of them, follows rules that are often centuries old, based on the basics of age, gender, and group dynamics.

What we do every day is not individually conceived or executed but highly themed to fit each node.  That is the reason we “know” what to do instantly within the built environment—car, concert hall, bookstore, child-care center, art gallery or garage sale.

In all these places (more than in our own homes, where we do enjoy greater but never total latitude), autonomy is minimized as the social agenda asserts itself.  At root, design is about culture - our shared reality - and not about individuals.

Individuals can command a custom-designed home, but since people use domestic space in very similar ways, aside from materials or site, there isn’t that much point—besides vanity--to the exercise of customization. As many a residential architects can attest, every home has a standardized packing list: heat, light, plumbing, ventilation, energy—all keyed to the human machine: our common brain, body, and behavior, as expressed in culture.

Like our unique ability at creating culture through the art of language, we also shape our lives by creating the very spaces that promote living to our cultural ambitions.  We have been obsessed by the art of place-making for thousands of years; that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.  The nice thing about deep history is that it contains broad clues to ongoing constants that continue to rule the way we do things and our motivations for doing them.  The past therefore indicates how the future is going to unfold.

Symbolic language of space

Our lives as human beings began 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in prehistory with the emergence of language—but also with our ability to abstract spatial relationships, starting with the protected space of the home plot and the physical integrity of the body.  Parallel with language, dedication of various spaces for specified uses created a symbolic environment to suit our emerging abilities and desires.  Place-making allows the world outside to merge with the images and ideas inside our heads, and to provide for our needs and projected needs beyond the immediate present.

Place design presents an earlier way to preserve and transmit knowledge in three dimensions across the generations, before the later achievement of written language.  What is preserved of ancient civilizations, allowing us to know them, is through their sculpting of spaces that have survived the centuries.

It was this received knowledge reserve applied in design that implanted the behaviors made possible by the separation of major life themes—in spaces designed for cooking, resting, working, bathing, socializing and entertaining.  We made the places—then the places made us.

The homes of ancient Egypt show us some of the first themeing of home spaces devoted to specialized behaviors, like rooms devoted just to leisure (the equivalent of the modern media room), adapting the environment to emerging wants as well as ongoing basic needs. 

This collective insight into the advantages of designed space is built into our cultural heritage, at least 200,000 years strong, continuing today as the longest-running invention of humankind.  It is the key to our sovereignty over the earth and our command of time and change, adapting our living spaces to new environments under shifting conditions of climate, habitation, politics.

The earliest signs of design have been discovered in the heartland of human origins – Africa - as fire, jewelry, clothing, art, tools, furnishings, and weapons, marking the ascent of homo sapiens.  Today we are still evolving the ideal design for the things that surround us, for an excellent reason: so that their workings can best support and reflect our collective cultural visions of the ideal life and the ideal self.  

As social primates, we need to move through the built world in formulated ways; which is why design needs to follow a unified field theory of use.  Cultural analysis, based on the fundamentals for a theory of human dynamics, lays the groundwork for such a discipline.  Human-centered planning and building is moving to become the focus of many design disciplines. Place-making may be the most important, because it centers and mobilizes all other human activity.

Theme park, automotive, recreational, church, and dormitory design – just to name a few - all share a basic requirement:  adapting to the human factors always activated by the script of a given place.

The Human Toolbar: Resilience

 

“It’s not that I’m so smart.  It’s just that I stay with problems longer.” 

-- Albert Einstein

“Resilience is the capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain or regain functionality and vitality in the face of stress or disturbance.  It is the capacity to rebound after a disturbance or interruption.”

-- Resilience Design Institute, 2016

 

There is some very good news about talent and native ability.  It applies directly to students just entering college.  On the other hand, it’s a work order that’s open-ended--across your lifetime.  Welcome to your new best secret weapon:  Resilience.

Talent, ability, and achievement receive plenty of attention and reward.  And these do mark the high points on the heroic chart—especially for athletics, the arts, science and technology, business innovation, and academics.  Success is visible, dramatic, and high-profile.  One of the things human beings most love witnessing is virtuoso performance of any kind.

But the backstory to talent and great performance (virtuosity) is far more complex, and largely invisible. A lifetime of thinking and practice is at the root of achievement, tens of thousands of hours of work behind the scenes of every “effortless” career.  This ability to withstand, be tough, and show ego strength on a consistent basis is the essence of success--better even than brains, in fact. Many people, but probably not a majority, have developed these skills in various concentrations.

Motivational factors matter more than cognitive ability for student performance.  Mindsets and self-regulation drive motivation.  Intelligent persistence pays off over brilliance—innate ability.  While brilliance is facile, even glamorous, trudging through a field of reading, writing, experiments, and ever more thinking about it all—it takes serious tenacity to achieve the long-range, big goals like college, professional school, a book, a relationship, a career.  Perseverance is essential to the realization of every creative idea.  As Carol Dweck proposes in her high-concept book Mindset, we are all in the process of becoming—virtually no one ever has it made.    

Resilience is increasingly recognized not as a personal trait but a learned skill for frustration tolerance and living with stress.  How we respond to stress of all kinds is at the core of rebounding from negative thoughts and behavior.  New research in brain science can train people to build and strengthen connections that avoid the fear and disappointment circuits that are so easily self-reinforcing and can take over.  Southwick and Charney's book Resilience is an excellent overview of research done and now in progress. 

Resilience is probably the core human skill set because it allowed us to evolve as far as we have as highly social (and therefore also highly conflicted) animals.  Resilience is individual and keyed to our personal stress limits and the rewards needed to stay engaged.  Several factors seem to be involved for successful resilience practitioners:  facing down fear (getting out of denial); strong social networks with people who "have our back"; regular exercise to defuse our heavy mental and emotional loads; and mindfulness, including meditation.  Dennis Charney says, “There’s not one prescription that works…You have to find what works for you” (Time, June 1, 2015, p. 40).  But the core story here is the human genius for converting pain into growth.

We are researching this promising area for colleges looking for ways to coach students at all levels to survive the rigors of academic achievement.  Such coaching can counter the gamut of school hazards from freshman dropouts to low or slow graduation rates, even extending to Ph.D. dropouts--all expensive derailments of time, self-esteem, and fees.

The dynamics of human evolution, and the history of civilization (the “career of culture”) depend less on invention and innovation and far more on practice over time to create culture.  As humans we are constantly “practicing” the art of our humanity – a complex and formidable mix of intuition, rules, brainpower, sociability, and imagination.  This collective endeavor as culture-building calls for these, of course.  But also fortitude against discouragement, demotivation, and pessimism: the source of solo and collective depression (and the worldwide disengagement in the workplace now widely reported and discussed).

In the 1950s, Emmy Werner’s study of 700 vulnerable children in Kauai found that good survival of poor family conditions came from tight-knit community, stable role models, and a strong belief in one’s abilities to solve problems.  The researchers discovered that around a third had the resilience quality.  Other studies focus on Special Forces, victims of floods, fires, tsunamis, prisons of war, and survivors of other such horrific tragedies.  “It seems to us that there is enormous untapped capacity of the human brain,” notes Charney.  How we respond to stress is the heart of resilience: the ability to turn off the stress response and return to a useful emotional baseline.  This talent to return to normal can combat the ravages of disappointment, fear, rejection, loneliness, failure, and anxiety and guilt about the future and past.  Frustration tolerance, which can be learned and practiced, turns off our natural fear circuit, which otherwise leads to the repeat cycle of depression and hopelessness. 

Scientists are looking closely at the psychology of courage and perseverance—and engagement in general--in the form of resilience, which is being considered over innate ability as the key trait needed for lasting growth and learning.

Sustained focus over time is difficult for the human brain.  Across the extended time frames of a college education, a graduate or professional degree, and careers, continued focus is especially challenging.  And with our prolonged age span into the 80s and 90s, resilience will become even more in demand to face illness and infirmity, financial downtowns, and finding purpose ranging out beyond work and family responsibilities and the vitality of youth.

Even beyond mental and physical gifts, resilience confers the necessary toughness and ego strength to keep moving in the face of obstacles and setbacks, including our own built-in aversion across the range of natural discomfort, disappointment, and the disorientation of uncertainty.  It might be our first and last secret weapon. Best of all, it’s not something you are born with, it’s something you can learn.

Winning Design

Winning Design

Why does place design, even award-winning design, not always deliver good outcomes? 

Sometimes architectural or system-wide innovation can only be piecemeal, not unified. A well-known example is Los Angeles. No unified design theory can practically be applied, and no naturally agreeable solution emerges from the hundreds debated for the city’s sprawl and variability. Even the airport, LAX, cannot arrive at a completely integrated redesign.  Only Disneyland in Anaheim -- as Ray Bradbury famously pointed out -- is the greater metro area’s “natural” center.  

Portland, Oregon, on the other hand, has to be strictly regulated to keep its “best walking city” Walkscore status. The city must struggle directly against the car-based tendency to urban sprawl that keeps commuting time and costs so high in the rest of the country.  The Mercer study -- a ranking of quality of life across world cities -- positions “good infrastructure” as a leading indicator. Public space—in the US, at least--is constantly embroiled in a contest between the needs of the driver and those of the pedestrian; deciding which will win out as a serious design issue.

Other collateral damages:  places that don’t work or actually spawn crime, waste, boredom, stress (the result of other people as well as a bad environment) and hazards as the price for ignoring human factors in the design equation: useless parks, noisy, crowded, dangerous public transport lounges, waiting rooms uncomfortable to wait in, slow post office lines, scary parking garages, half-empty state capital city centers – I’m looking at you, Baton Rouge--and deserted public squares.  Dani Pipano, founder of Gate 1 discount travel, stresses that safety and security are his first priority when he searches out new and interesting world venues for his tours. Comfort and attractions come in a distant second because without them, there is simply no possibility of a desirable user experience.    

Incremental disenchantment

Less successful places suffer from “incremental disenchantment.”  They just don’t work the way people expect, and the more they are experienced, the more they disappoint.  A micro-example: Americans are trained from birth that traffic moves on the right side of the road. This carries over to how we walk through space. We tend to hug the right side of the aisle in supermarkets as we also hug the right side of a public staircase. As a result, when we approach a public building with double doors, we expect the entry to be the one on the right.

We don’t think about this until we find ourselves in a place where this is not the rule – start up a public staircase in Japan and you will quickly learn to move to the left to avoid everyone coming straight at you on their way down. We understand that things are different in another culture, but they get truly weird when it happens in our own.

Near our home is a chain store with the strangest entryway – it’s your basic double glass door with “Entrance” and “Exit” clearly marked--except, due to an anomaly in the building design, the entrance door is on the left, with the exit on the right.  Even more confusing is a railing installed between the doors to further separate them.  So when you try to enter the right (wrong) side, you then have to back away from the building to step around the railing, compounding the first problem: setting directions that violate the expected right-in, left-out rule.  People are constantly held up, diverted, confused, and annoyed by this odd entry.

People do not like being publicly embarrassed, and visibly fumbling with an action as simple as a store entrance is a public embarrassment. Despite being a branch of a major chain on a heavily trafficked street, the store is the least busy of all its neighborhood branches. There is no way of measuring how many customers simply walked away after being negatively conditioned by this awkward and counter-intuitive experience.

A switched-up entry seems a small problem.  But for the designer of greater spaces, bad design experience (“How many visitors does your design keep away?”) is a hard lesson to learn,  since all that can be measured is the admissions tally. Visitation numbers don’t include visitors who never appear.  And asking the visitors who do show up about their experience—at museums, for example--does not include the responses of the busloads of “under-served” schoolchildren (or as we like to call them, the “uninterested”).  Nor the interested seniors kept away by the sheer noise of those busloads echoing the marble halls.

Even designers who usually get it right can fail if they start with the wrong premise. Disney’s California Adventure was a good idea gone astray – not because of the rationalized answer “Why would anyone go to a park about California when they are in the real California?” – but because the Disney Imagineers did not build the same California people hold dear in their minds.

There is, in fact, a virtual California that lives in the minds of people worldwide based on generations of movies and television programs. You can conjure it all up yourself without any prompting. It’s the California of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Spanish colonial California of Zorro, the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, Rosie the Riveter and swing music, redwood forests, beach parties, and surf music. That’s the California people would pay to see because it’s the one they dream about but and can’t find now in the real thing.

Unfortunately, you can’t build a dream on a discount budget--what management at the time tried to do. They cut corners, they wanted “synergy” with their other brands, ESPN, and ABC, that had nothing to do with California in the visitor  mind. They built an amusement pier because they wanted to use cheaper off-the-shelf carnival rides rather than design the sort of unique attraction experiences Disney is noted for. The result: It wasn’t California, and it wasn’t Disney.

A quick aside: at the time the park opened to a less-than-stellar reception, we asked our late colleague, Senior Imagineer and Disney legend John Hench, what he thought of the place. He just shrugged and said, “It worked better as a parking lot.”  Which is the whole point of designing for the mind of the user – while the parking lot met their expectations, California Adventure did not.    

And this brings up a key point about designing for the mind of the user. There is reality and there is hyperreality and you are building for the latter.  While it is historically true that California had amusement piers – and still does, in the minds of everyone outside California (the entire rest of the world) amusement piers are “owned” by the East Coast as Coney Island and Atlantic City.

Design and purpose

We need to begin at the beginning of cultural time, starting with Jericho, the first recognizable city from the Neolithic age in 10,000 BC with its Temple to the Moon.  Every place ever built was created for a purpose.  And the foundation of every place ever built, from the mud and brick of the first known civilization, Sumer, is set on and around a single platform: the human brain. 

Pylons and plaster are simply the materials necessary to create any structure in 3D, where they can be experienced by the body through behavior along the lines sparked by the mind and imagination of the native builder or professional architect in real space and time.  Oxford recalls England’s 11^th-century origins in its gothic revival landscape and the Renaissance in its Venetian bridges. The Yale campus in New Haven, or the Princeton campus in New Jersey are virtual British elite settings – Downton Abbey for academics.  These places, besides their own local functions, connect us cognitively and emotionally to other times, places, people, and ways of life and the life of the mind. The imperial Romans themed their villas to look like Greece, just as the English themed theirs to recall Rome.

But plenty of structures within the built landscape are just sheds to keep off the rain, wind, and sun, or even vaults with locks to keep the stuff inside from moving or disappearing, commercial or residential.  These are buildings with neither heart nor art.  Meanwhile, the best environments are those we love to live with and within.  The better bedrooms, studios, patios, even basements, along with more public offices, concert halls, and airports.  Far beyond acting as essential shelter, they make hundreds of other functions possible, even easy, as a kind of technology to extend our potential and prowess.

Such artful structures allow us to do more than work, study, practice, produce, dine, converse, sleep, and dream; they energize our plans, remind us of our past, and transport us into the future by igniting the imagination through an act of immersive collective memory. 

At the apex of these human pursuits enabled by well-designed places is the American theme park, invented over sixty years ago.  Or perhaps we should say re-invented. Its precursors were many, from every era and continent: the Cardo – the ancient Roman marketplace whose footprint is still visible in modern mall design; the market towns of Europe and colonial America, royal parks and zoos, promenades and pleasure palaces like the fabled Summer Palace of the Qing dynasty in Beijing in 1750. The follies and ruins of Pompeii made -- and still make -- the ancient world real and tangible to the modern.

Taken as a unified whole, good place design creates the right conditions for something to occur or develop, by priming the minds inside those buildings to think, make decisions, and act in one direction rather than others.

 

The best places of all echo those that live first in the mind. Just as governments prime economies by  controlling spending and money supply, place design with its structures, connecting avenues, aisles, hallways, or walkways can either promote or hamper the growth and exchange of ideas in those places we live, shop, work, and play.

Unfortunately, we value good design for the same reason we value a precious gem – for its rarity.  It shouldn’t be that hard, and yet poor place design is the rule rather than the exception. There is no single reason for this, but one of the key ones is the lack of understanding of how the end-users actually think about space as the move through it.

The next time there is a major building project near you, look at the architect’s model and concept drawings and notice how the people are placed – perhaps a half-dozen figures in a grand plaza – widely spaced and doing nothing in particular except strolling through. We call it architecture porn – the fevered dreams of the designer lovingly rendered as detailed drawings starring the buildings, with people thrown in as an afterthought for scale.

The best, most-loved, places echo those that first live in the human mind. That’s design principle Number One.

The Disney Effect: Sixty Years after Theme Park Design

 

“A triumph of historical imagination.”

 --Richard Snow, Editor

American Heritage Magazine (1987),

on Disney’s Main Street, USA

 

Behavior is belief

We study popular culture – not the “Big C” Culture of the fine arts and great literature, but the “little c” culture of our popular entertainments, consumer goods, pastimes, volunteerism, and all the other experiences and artifacts that people “vote” for in the most meaningful way possible – with their time and dollars.

We do this because these investments are reliable indicators of underlying beliefs and values that have proven worth for the millions. We are searching for the cultural assumptions that drive American decision-making – the subconscious, unspoken, “rules” that everyone shares even though they are unware these even exist. Most consumer research is about “what” people do. We’re searching for the “why” people do them.

Behavior is how culture is truly expressed. In the words of George Bernard Shaw; “What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.”

So we watch what people do in their everyday lives.  One of our core laboratories for studying large groups of strangers cooperating, adapting, and competing for goods and services is the Disney theme parks.

 

Thematics

For 60 years, the theme park devised by Disney Imagineering has shown a leading cultural influence for the design of public spaces and the shared ideals that make them so valued and “viral.” Disney has always been a cultural translator of Old World stories, retold and reinterpreted through American values.

These themes and narratives are tangible expressions of the folktale as defined by Joseph Campbell: “told and retold, losing here a detail, gaining there a new hero, disintegrating gradually in outline, but re-created occasionally by some narrator. It is a democratic art—an art on which the whole community of mankind has worked.”

We defined the theme park for The Guide to US Popular Culture (2002) as “A social artwork designed as a four-dimensional symbolic landscape, evoking impressions of places and times, real and imaginary.” Disney’s theme park and the traditional amusement park were as different as hamburgers and hot dogs – both entertainments but for very different tastes.

The essence of the theme park is its value as cultural invention, channeled by the highly evocative art of thematics (context-based), unlike the kinetic experiences of amusement parks with their thrill rides (effects-based).

As the original theme park, Disneyland was born at the convergence of several social and technological developments after World War II: the expansion of the middle class, California development, the Baby Boom, the national highway system and automobile ownership, and the rise of television as a universal household medium.

Disneyland re-created the park idea as a middle-class destination reachable mainly by automobile rather than public transportation, and to appeal across generations of “guests,” from young children to older adults, conceived by Walt Disney as “a family park where parents and children could have fun—together.”

As the Los Angeles area grew in population and diversity, the park became engulfed by the city, creating a more accessible one-day venue.  In contrast, Walt Disney World in Florida, surrounded by a green belt, featuring multiple parks necessitating a multi-day stay at on-property hotels, remains a total (multi-day) destination resort.

 

Effects

After six decades of operation and many millions of visitors, Disneyland has influence as a high-profile cultural institution that pervades every aspect of the built environment as a mainstay of the Experience Economy.  According to Peter Blake in his essay “The Lessons of the Parks” (1973), in terms of design applications, Disneyland acts as an urban lab for the testing of design and building technologies.  The theme park is now considered an idealized urban center “unattainable” by ordinary design strategies, a “very serious, very creative experiment in urban design.”

As the engine of theme park design, thematics is a compendium of techniques borrowed from animation and filmmaking rather than architecture: the familiar storyline, identifiable archetypal style that architect Phillip Johnson terms “organization of procession,” stagecraft, iconography, special effects, audio-animatronics (3-D animation), and color palette coordination.

As impressive as the technological innovations of a Disney park are, they are not what makes these places important. It’s the story they are used to tell. Every story needs a hero – and technology is not the hero.

The late Imagineer legend John Hench, who worked for the Disney Company for over 60 years, described how these features are all led by the concept of “story,” “show,” and “enhanced reality,” tightly focused to evoke specific times and places with strong cultural resonance. These distillations – from musical cueing and food to landscaping, lighting, scaling, signage, sounds, surfaces, textures, and smells – play off perception and collective memory to create “instant moods.” 

These are achieved by high-profile motifs, layered detail, and multi-sensory environmental designs, favoring images over signage to tell stories and give direction.  Inherent in theming’s sense of place as theater is the legacy of style revival or nostalgia in latter-twentieth-century design, and the multi-media assemblage of art forms and styles from many eras, traversing the range from crafts to high-tech (as in filmmaking). Overall, these techniques serve to convey an integrated pastiche of collective memory and American shared values.  In Walt Disney’s words, “Disneyland would be a world of Americans, past and present, seen through the eyes of my imagination.”

 

Beyond the berm

The adaptive use of technology to solve human problems in the built environment made Disneyland, according to architect James Rouse, “the outstanding piece of urban design in the U.S.” to exert broad and lasting effects on the American city.  The Disney Effect can be seen in towns of “authentic” American design: Celebration, FL, Reston, VA, and Columbia, MD recreate the small-town ideal as showcased by Walt Disney in Main Street, USA.

In the theme parks, Disney’s Imagineering design team pioneered the total-control governance of utilities and building process; integrated design, and computer-controlled information, communications, and operations (a byproduct of the space program), prefabricated modular construction, sequestered infrastructure, and ecology-minded development.

Disney also organized crowd behavior in the form of switchback lines to minimize the feel of waiting in line, the pedestrian mall and the psychology of way-finding, multilevel, multiform mass transit (favoring rapid transit over the automobile), and the concept of “guests” to replace  visitors or customers. The techniques perfected at Disneyland are featured in banks (line theory), food courts (theming), airports (people movers), museums (total-immersion exhibits), and customer service (“guestology” training, which even includes hospital patients).

 Most important, the mind of Imagineering sees every component within a bordered system (the park itself is a recap of the animation art form), with synergistic subsystems. “The one thing I learned from Disneyland,” Disney said, “was to control the environment.”  He was also referencing the immediate retail, accommodation, and transportation circling the park itself.

 Accordingly, Disney’s famous integrated marketing links built space with the formats and content of film, television, video, and merchandising. Although Disney is famous primarily for his animated characters, it is the theme park that is his greatest contribution to public life.

According to historian Richard Snow, even the National Trust’s adoption of main streets across the country as “sacred spaces” was inspired by archetypal Main Street, USA. Snow himself was inspired by his childhood visits there to make the past his profession (history).

 Out of the distilled imagination of American history Disney created a townscape in Main Street, USA, possibly the most important 4D artwork ever created. It is a streetscape instantly recognizable by its stylized capsule iconography. At the opposite end of the time scale, Tomorrowland’s prefabricated all-plastic Monsanto House of the Future (1957-1967) was like nothing ever seen before—yet instantly recognizable to all as a “Futuristic” dwelling.

Over a half century after Disneyland’s inception, it is safe to say that few urban spaces remain untouched by the Disney Effect. This effect constitutes a radical shift from one type of design and design vision to another: from effects-based (materials, physics, engineering) to context-based (human perception and values).

 

Cultural values

The Disney parks’ enormous success is based on the way they operate as a “national trust” of mainstream cultural values. For this reason alone, they must be considered a category completely distinct from amusement or thrill parks, whose value is in the immediate gratification of successfully challenging physical and mental limits.

The Disney theme parks offer a ready-made index to American culture. The historic draw of Disney parks lies within the themes and stories from many times and places, recreated as based on core American values. 

For our work, Disney parks make an excellent lab for studying group behavior because the power of the themed environment lies in embodying critical shared cultural values as embedded in history, innovation, adventure, and fantasy. This is “entertainment” in its original meaning: that which engages the attention.

Theme parks are remarkable and even unique in their ability to resolve the inherent conflict between individual and shared values and create an art form – the “Art of the Show,” as Hench’s (2003) title puts it, as a platform for shared experience that works across generations and subcultures.  It models an international language suited for global export.

As a master communicator in image and symbol, Walt Disney did what all great artists do: he made the invisible and abstract concrete, in a form that can be experienced directly. Disneyland made the popular imagination visible in a way that few other landscapes, including Greenfield Village – Henry Ford’s pastiche of the American past – have been able to do. For that reason, it is not hard to understand why Walt Disney World, the amplified, expanded version of the Disneyland prototype, is the world’s leading tourist destination.

First Technology: The Invention of Fire

 

 

 

“1.5 million years ago…a band of hominids kindled a fire on the African savanna and realized it was a good night light as well as a heater.”  --US News, “Lighting the Way” (May 26, 2001), 47

 

I.

We think of ourselves as living in an age of life-changing technological advances. But do they really change our lives?  The Internet may enable us to cheaply and instantly communicate worldwide, but it was the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago that made such communication possible. The Internet just adds more speed to the equation, as did the telegraph and the telephone before it.

 

The fact is that all our personal technology are just tools to speed up behaviors that we have been doing since before modern humans walked the earth. We’re so fascinated by the ethnographic dazzle that we don’t think about the fact that you have to track back millennia to antiquity to find a truly life-changing innovation.   

 

Back in 2013, the November issue of The Atlantic asked a panel of 12 experts - scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others - to list innovations that have shaped the nature of modern life. All qualifiers for the list had to appear after the widespread use of the wheel, about six thousand years ago.

 

That ruled out fire, which our hominid forebears started controlling about 350,000 years ago. That’s pre-modern human. We don’t think about fire very much these days, but we should, because it was literally the first “life-changing” innovation. It did more than act as a “night light as well as a heater” because the very mastery of fire itself changed us from hominid into human.        

 

Fire grew our brains. It allowed us to cook our food, which meant we could eat and absorb more protein. Bigger brains meant we could now dominate the planet and invent civilization through mastery of technology and science.  Not bad for openers. Of course we can think of fire as the gift we gave ourselves just by borrowing and controlling a natural force bent to the human will and purposes.

 

Fire made us who we are in creating a new world that crossed from day into evening through the night, providing the light and warmth of the communal hearth.  Cooking, energy, defense against man and beast, the communal hearth, taking back the night.  This proto-invention turned homo erectus into homo sapiens, the only surviving species of the primate tribe Hominini.

 

Fire was our first keystone technology--the creative platform for every other to follow that jump-started our collective mastery of tools, nature, and the arts.

 

II.

400,000 years ago, in the Low Acheulian period, homo erectus controlled fire in a gradual process of progressive mastery, like culture itself, that marked the earliest homo sapiens.  In fact, this was mankind’s first tool, and it was an awesome one: literally a force of nature.  It was the proto-invention that from that time on made all others possible.  Control over fire and water, the twin elements of human survival, were the first achievements of the brain and body that carried the human race forward to dominate the world. 

 

We think of technology as electronic attributes of the modernity.  Yet the greatest inventions came far before, through the ancient world, and in the case of fire, pre-homo sapiens nearly half a million years before that.

 

My partner once flew southeast east from London to Nairobi crossing the Sudan on a moonless night. He described the ground lighting. Below was just blackness, no cities, no roads, no sign of life. Except for one thing. Even from 35,000 feet you couldn’t miss them.  They were like bright orange embers embedded against the blackness.   They were like nothing he had seen before from the window of a jetliner.  They were campfires alight across the vast plain of the Sudan. Each one an island of light and warmth and safety in the cold black desert. 

 

Here was the ancient and original lighting: thousands, maybe millions of years old, and still lighting up the night to protect from predators, provide warmth, and most important, provide the center for the “circle of life” – our earliest ancestral sites of safety, disclosure, unburdening, sharing of ideas, plans, hopes, dreams, fears, and the future. 

 

Campfires are among the earliest of all human relics.  The oldest are, like the ones visible from the air, on the African plains, the birthplace of human history.  Campfires have played and continue (in other formats) to play a central role in our lives as the focal point of human life, as the most social of all primates. 

 

David E. Nye’s book Technology Matters (2006) elaborates on the origins of technology in the first adaptations of fire that made it a human talent.  The long human evolution of tool-making began with this single element by the makers of fire.  In the creation of fire control, Cicero pointed to man’s ability to “create a second nature.”  All of science, and the understanding of the physical world, arose from the first flame of the campfire.  

 

Like the power of writing much later, fire was transformative, the original power-tool transformer, external to the human brain and muscle.  The terms hearth, health, heat, and heart do not just invoke one another by sounding alike; they are all linked together in language, the shorthand for abstract thinking to express these closely connected concepts.

 

The earliest evidence of fire under the hand of humans is in scorched stone remains and in the remnants of habitation flooring. Outdoors, proto-humanoids had found a magical circle, that of the communal campfire, from which to view their world, their circle, and the skies, stars, and planets at the same time.  The stage setting of the circle of life is in faces lit by the fire’s warmth, looking out through the glow into other faces. 

 

The lighting industry tries to duplicate the original low lighting of the campfire with dimmer switches and LED candles.  Low lighting is a signal of safety, calm, intimacy, connection; it heightens awareness, dilates the eyes, making them appear more interesting and alluring, especially across the sexes, and awakens the senses in general, including touch, taste, and hearing.  The dimming of auditorium lights signals the start of a new mode of thinking with the first words of the speaker on the podium; it refreshes attention and attitude, relieving the action cast of mind tuned to direct sunlight at midday.

 

Associated with night in a protected situation, the campfire is the heart of the introverted human soul, keyed to connection and contemplation over extended periods of time.  It recalls the seminar, for deeply connected thinking with others, as well as in-depth introspection possible only under the solo thinking style.  It is introspective in its energy, and at the same time the essence of the bonding glow between people, relaxing their guard in a common focus of warmth, light, and security.

 

The campfire galvanized the deep ties between food and sociability.  Social occasions far into the future would include warmth, light, and food – the aromas and visual stimulus that feature in carnival and ceremonies, from the most exuberant to the solemnity of oaths taken by torch or candle.  The light of religious faith as votives, and candlelit dinners for romance.

Shopping… Or Buying?

I.                 Shopping as Experience

A recent article, “Mindful Shopping,” (Rosemary Counter, Real Simple, March 2016) featured advice for women on how to become shopping-resistant, or at least to resist buying things in general.  These suggestions covered impulse buying, shopping addiction, peer pressure, emotional issues--anything that would indicate that “you’re not thinking practically.” Thinking, that is, to evaluate material acquisitions carefully and in the context of their long-term value in order to rule out “temporary desires.”  

Although the article keeps referring to “shopping,” what the writer is really talking about is buying – and this is a critical distinction often poorly understood, even by experts.  For example, retail anthropologist Paco Underhill’s bestseller Why We Buy should have been entitled How We Shop. You can read through the book a dozen times and learn a lot about shopping behavior and how to more efficiently position your product in front of the shopper.  But learn absolutely nothing about what makes people decide to actually purchase a particular product.

Because there is a real distinction to be made here, key to understanding this primal human behavior, which is the critical differences between buying as opposed to the shopping experience. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors understood the difference. Shopping is gathering – and most of what is gathered is information.  Actual buying is much more like hunting – a dedicated search to isolate a single prey with the intent of bringing it home. Buying can involve shopping but shopping isn’t dependent on buying.

Online “shopping” is often more like hunting. This is borne out by the fact that 3D store retailers complain that people shop their stores, then once the buy decision is made, go online to make the purchase. Basically the online hunting behavior of the quick, most efficient, kill—after gathering information about the main options on the ground.

What is shopping?

The Dalai Lama once said, “Shopping is the museum of the twentieth century” which, for a guy who eschews material goods, is very on-target.  We subconsciously scan our environment every waking moment – it’s how we determine, among other things, our place in the social hierarchy. Shopping is simply a dedicated application of that primal process. We are also a tangible species.  Meaning we need to touch things to feel the weave of a fabric, the heft of a camera, or the motion of a car. It’s been calculated that picking up and holding an item makes an emotional connection that increases likelihood of buying by 60%.

There’s a reason that 68% of consumer decisions are made at the point of purchase – we need the validation of our senses to make a final decision. When you consider that these are simply outcomes of automatic subconscious processes of our brain, it’s little wonder that shopping in stores and malls is the top leisure experience for Americans, and has been for the past century.

Opportunity

Shopping gives us a massive amount of information about our physical and social environment in a tightly condensed and edited package. We’re searching out many kinds of opportunities here (shopping), not a single item to be checked off the list (buying).  Making selections and purchasing may be one of the goals of shopping as experience, but not by any means the primary one.  Many a productive shopping trek takes one to many stores over several hours, yet the outcome isn’t a purchase, but a wealth of ideas that may take time to germinate and blossom into eventual purchases down the line. 

Shopping for cars, for instance, does not start in the showroom. Our research determined that people start noticing the difference between their car and other cars on the highway at least six months before they even realize they are in the market for a new car. Overall, the car-buying process involves at least 18 months spent in scanning first the highways, then the ads, then the showrooms in order to funnel down to the best fit to our latest driver identity.

II.               And many other priorities are at work in the shopping universe

There is a strong gender component, of course. Women tend to be far more detail-based and relationship-oriented than men. Hence the inter-gender issue of the wife dragging the husband along for a long and frustrating experience that men are generally not wired for.  (Suggestion to retailers; provide day care for husbands – if only comfortable armchairs and a TV off in the corner, otherwise he will soon amble up and mutter “OK” – which every woman knows is male code for “I’m done here. Let’s go.”) On the other hand, the wife or girlfriend in the sporting goods store with the male shopper, even without any intention to buy, wants more time to look around.  It’s hunting versus gathering.  This is the fundamental style difference in how people relate to the world for sale: buying versus shopping.

Shopping is also a social experience. Women tend to shop with friends or relatives. They validate each other’s decisions. It’s all part of the social hierarchal process that runs beneath our conscious horizon. The exception is grocery shopping, with the significant other hauled along for heavy lifting and paying (in the trade, supermarket workers refer to husbands as “wallet carriers”).

Most important, shopping gives us a valuable index to what other people are thinking about and valuing.  As tastes change across the seasons and over the years, shopping is the landscape showcasing those shifts in taste, in styles, in materials, color palette, and design.  This landscape scanning always helps us to position and scrutinize our own preferences alongside and in contrast to those of others.  We are social primates, which means constantly comparing our own thinking and behaviors to that of others and to benchmarking against a group norm (these groups change out mentally, depending on what life arena we’re thinking about—family, school, work, community, future, aspiration). 

Shopping (typically in malls) offers a secure, inviting public space for solo or group excursions, offering food, entertainment, restrooms, and affluent décor.  It is the mandate of high-end malls, especially, to design for an environment that makes shoppers feel affluent while they stroll, socialize, and dine.  In shopping people can bond as they deliberate and speculate on the many objects of culture on display, in an exercise identical to, as the Dalai Lama pointed out, museum-going.  The museum shop, we find, is the best way to index what’s on offer in the galleries, and the ideal start, rather than finish, of any museum visit.  No buying is generally involved.  But museum shops offer the value of amulets or souvenirs so important to marking and recalling expeditions, which visitors have just completed.

Imagination

Window shopping is the fine tradition of a form of imaginative projection.  As we scan the display of jewelry, candy, clothing, shoes, cameras, pens, or perfume, we are invited to project ourselves into an array of thematic worlds.  There we can savor the potential keyed by simple objects or ideas. We can enjoy glimpsing a life featuring these “props” as active agents in a lifestyle or story starring our own hopes and ambitions.  Marketing and advertising students are actually taught that they are “creating desire,” which is nonsense. Desire pre-exists in the brain of the shopper. They can’t tell you what they want. They may not even be aware they want it. But they will recognize it when they see it (Steve Jobs said people decided to buy once he showed them his products, not before).

The job of marketing and advertising, then, is to tap into what’s already in the mind, and remove any obstacles that might block shoppers’ recognition of value.  In other words, buying can’t operate without full consent and cooperation from the shopper. 

Americans are very good at understanding and creating shopping environments. We’re not so good at creating buying environments. We know that picking up an object signals an increased tendency to buy, but we don’t know what made people pick it up in the first place. In fact, most new products, and their advertisements, fail by a ratio of nine to one.  We’re selective about what we actually take home and even more choosey about letting products into our lives by regular use.  Ask anyone about how many unused or underused products are taking up space in their home (and how hard they are to manage, store, or get rid of).  Professional organizers have built an industry out of this problem of productive buying versus imaginative shopping.  Yet the answer to matching strict buying behavior to the benefits of scanning and projecting desires is not to limit imagination but to recognize these activities as distinctly separate, each with their own ethic, ideals, and goals. These imaginative impulses are embedded in the culture and can only be activated by sellers, not created.   

Shopping isn’t about procurement. It is closer to surveying, exploring, dreaming, goal-setting, identity fantasy—the deliberate process of creative re-creation of the world to explore and match up to the many potentials of the self.  To understand how shopping works, we need to look at the brain that runs on the agenda of cultural values.