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.

Environmental Press

 

Whatever our immediate environment, wherever we are, our surroundings make many demands on the mind and body—most of which we aren’t even aware of.  How we respond determines where we choose or choose not to spend time.  We spend our lives subconsciously adapting to sub-prime elements in the places we live, work, and travel.

Environmental press is a term used to describe the demands of the immediate context (physical and psychological environment) and their effects on thinking and behavior.  These factors include lighting, wayfinding, acoustics, mobility, and social sets like crowding, safety, risk-taking, and costs of planning, reciprocity (support), and expectations of costs versus reward.

In general, good design facilitates the usability and payback of a venue: workplace, airport, soccer field, resort, metropolis.  Poor design makes being there more difficult and less enjoyable, leading to scores of problems for the user and the group, and raising the chances that people will spend as little time as possible in less user-friendly venues. 

Good design is based on a solid appreciation of how and why people act within particular spaces, and what their goals are coming, going, and within.  Most of this intelligence operates under our conscious radar and can only be elicited indirectly: by watching how people’s behavior changes as they adapt to the environment, not by direct questions (“What is your ideal space like?”) in surveys and focus groups.  Cultural intelligence - awareness of the human values that drive regular use of space - is considerably more comprehensive, relying on thousands of years of consistent patterns of collective experience and behavior.

Groups in motion

At the start of any trek, visitors’ minds are especially mobile and unsettled, weighing uncertain expectations (and hopes) against what they are experiencing around them, and the way they see others responding.  Characters, props, staging, and especially music, are the cueing devices; there is little room for taking in the precision of print messages, or even verbal instructions.  The needed focus isn’t there yet. 

People are still working to figure out where they are and what is expected of them.  You have to create a break in the form of a platform to deliver messages when people are in fact most receptive to them.  That may not be when you want it to be, or when you would expect attention to be most active.

When people are seated, or standing in semi-darkness, that’s the cue for attention and quiet to attend to a stage or screen.  Which explains why the introductory film at the top of an exhibit or whole museum, like the “Briefing Room” film narrated by the voice of Linda Hunt at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. is an effective mind- and mood-setter (whether dark or light).  Film, of course, is easier for groups (the outfit) to focus on together, versus the divisive force of written language.

Positioning

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen experience venues built with seemingly no idea of how guests take in and processes information into a coherent, compelling experience. We’ve seen exhibits built backwards – the big reveal is the first thing the guest encounters, followed by information support. Every guest intuitively understands that once you’ve seen the fireworks, it’s time to go home. Don’t expect them to hang around to hear the history of fireworks. Now reverse that order: history first, then fireworks = compelling experience.  Think of the crescendo in a music experience, as the finale.

We’ve also seen attractions that violate the implicit agreement of the switchback line (you maintain your place in the hierarchy, knowing you will be served after the people in front and before the people behind). It is the promise of fairness as a hard and fast rule that enables the line to function. Yet we have seen attractions where, after a long and patient wait, guests are dumped into an unstructured holding zone just outside the attraction doors, so that the resultant scramble for new positioning totally violates the sacred social contract of the line.

We’ve seen attractions where a guide-speaker was trying to deliver critical information at the line’s most chaotic point. We’ve seen exhibits that gave guests no critical information at all about where to go or what to expect. We’ve seen attractions that did all of these things in the same venue--all designed and built by top companies in the experience industry.

What we saw was the result of ignoring the social dynamic of experience, the “press” of place. Each guest is exchanging multiple experiences within the social group. The designer’s work is to know at what points the guest is seeking information, rather than trying to share reactions with others, to deliver just-in-time intelligence.   

Standing out

It’s the paradox of theme park communication design.  What’s needed next—just-in-time is preferable—has to stand out in the field of vision for eyes that are scanning a very rich visual landscape, balanced against the demands of the line or walkways.  And they need to be “here and clear” well before the fork in the road must be taken, not after investing a half-hour wait in a ride queue where you suddenly realize that coming up is a coaster or dark ride that you don’t want to hazard after lunch. 

Where, what, and how the main material or experience is surrounded by messages, and in what sequence, is a top challenge calling for a complex appreciation of how people use places on the ground or in the air.  In our experience as human dynamics advisors, too few designers and park executives actually walk the parks and ride the rides to see how everything plays out as a system of concepts in motion.  Again, it all happens in the mind—before and after the body behaves.  

 

Getting Attention, Broad and Narrow

The goal of any attraction, exhibit, or any shared experience is simple: to max out the rewards of visitor time and focus to optimize the experience and the memory so important to return visits. 

For Americans, at least, who count and measure time as a form of currency, nothing is worse than the report that an attraction was a waste of time.  Which means money and energy were squandered, which could have been better spent elsewhere.  Part of the value of an experience is how easily it can be found, and then, how easy or difficult it is for people to engage with it.

How do you get and keep audience attention in an attraction / exhibit?  This is the basic question of where and when in the process guests are prepared to receive information.  Not all content is equal (the “what”), and context (the “where and when”) rules how or whether we pay attention.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.  A solitary experience is far different that a shared one – just ask any golfer who hits a hole-in-one with no one else there to see it. The social group is the validator of the experience. The group can be an emotional multiplier – enthusiasm is contagious – or exert a dampening effect. If you think you had a great experience but your companions don’t share your enthusiasm, you will soon start to rethink your own experience.

Contagion

One notable example of this dampening effect occurred shortly after the stage version of Disney’s Lion King debuted on Broadway in 1997. At the time, there was a lot of hostility in the New York theater community to the very idea of Disney even coming to Broadway. We won’t mention the name of the theater critic, but his early review praised the show highly – an opinion not shared by his colleagues. After a few weeks of negative reviews by his peers, he saw the musical again and wrote a second review.  Basically he said that somehow he had been duped by the Disney magic and the play wasn’t nearly as good as he thought it was the first time. His memory of his first stellar experience was sabotaged—retroactively--by colleague negativity.

We are social primates.  So the experiences of the people around us shape our own expectations and experience, and we affect theirs. In order to entertain – and by entertain we mean in the original sense of the word – “to attract and hold attention” – you have to understand what else is going on.  Where is your audience mind being pulled, in which directions, while you are trying to show footage, deliver key information, or display science laws or live animals?

Attention Span

Years ago the Washington Zoo was studied to see how long people would look at the live exhibits in their enclosures.  The answer was an average of eight seconds.  And much of that tiny time slice went to reading the usual fence-mounted signage.  Museums didn’t do much better – under an hour is all that visitors will spend in a North American museum of any size.  In contrast, though, the average theme park stay was eight hours or more, with the highest repeat visits.  This is why the theme park is the gold standard for experience design.  What’s going on here?  How is it that attention is far better in a low-level or no-reading zone?

Signage

First off, the Disney Imagineers who designed the original park worked with images, not words.  They understood that the best designs are those that work with the way people already think and react to the world around them.  That is why there is was very little directional signage in the original Disneyland (aside from stylized “art” signs), and the reason that the park has always been high on the list for international visitors—you don’t have to speak English to understand what’s going on and what you should do.  It also adds to their exceptional export value.  They are essentially artworks that function as total immersive environments.   Immersive experiences don’t work like books (which demand close visual focus and control) – they invite the entire body and all the senses.  And reading divides attention away from the group, into the introversion of eyes and brain processing.

At the other end of the scale, take botanical gardens and arboretums.  These garden environments insist on Latin classification tags and even dense botany-textbook extracts, a kind of technical communication that for any visitor not already an expert, is especially fatiguing to read in public venues. 

Who is your real audience?

These places tend to be treated as research venues with signage by and for specialists. They project the way the people who work there want to be perceived by their colleagues.  But for the casual visitor who just wants to enjoy the majesty of a white oak or the exotic intrigue of orchids, it’s not helpful, and lends a touch of elite disdain to the experience.  The question is suddenly, “Do I know enough / am I educated enough to even be here?”  No such question occurs in a theme park, which deals with our shared history and archetypes, those icons and events we most treasure and identify with.

You may have to make a momentous decision about who your audience really is – who you want to attract, and why.  Expert audiences have quality attention to pay to your holdings or environment, and this is the attention that most curators, researchers, scholars, directors, and many designers actually identify with.  Art museums were originally galleries of painting and sculpture for sale, not improving institutions trying to educate the non-art-collecting public. The public-education impulse dates back to Carnegie and his crusade to lift American taste into the middle class, and continues in grants and evaluation programs for the widest possible audience

But the managerial class for public venues, especially art and history based, is most interested in expert-to-expert communication; that’s where their personal and career reward lies.  Hence the signage in Latin, footnoted exhibit labelling, expert treatises and lectures that need translation for any public understanding. 

The way the mind attends to, takes in, and understands any content is by broad themes, not scholarly documentation—that’s the genius of the themed environment.   

 

The group journey agenda: social psychology in motion

The audience experience is a journey through your design project.  That journey can be understood in many ways, but it always happens through the human toolbar of needs and abilities, the human factors constraint list. Throughout this journey every guest is an adventurer with a different agenda, depending on age, gender, social networks, and their social group or travel “outfit” (to redeploy the old cowboy term), for the duration. 

Even the briefest of visits involves the following concerns, or themes, which your design must accommodate so that your audience can address them as a series of questions: 

·       Purpose:  Where am I going, and why?

·       Goal: What are the goals of my travel group (the “outfit”)?

·       Orientation:  Where am I at any point in the journey?

·       Context:  What is this place, and how do I act within it?

·       Expectations:  What expectations can I have, or take from it?  What am I supposed to do, and how should I feel about it?

·       Story:  What is the story of this experience; what are its leading themes, the affect—emotional tone—and what inner states does it evoke from my own personality, culture, and history, alone and as shared with others?

·       Outcomes: Exactly what am I supposed to learn from this trek, and how does it reward me and those important to me?  This has to be clear not just at journey’s end, but from the start, so that guests can attune their intellect and emotions to what they are going to learn, see, and experience.

·       Wayfinding:  As I proceed from the entry experience, how do I get around and through this space?  This question introduces loss aversion through disorientation, separation anxiety, and flexing time and space within the journey as the group splits up and reassembles for various purposes.

·       Focus:  What do I attend to while I’m here?  This is the big attention question: where does my attention go, when, and in response to what cues?

·       Measuring up:  Experience quality, during and after the journey:  Did I have the experience I was meant to have?  Did my outfit?  Were expectations met?

·       Meaning:  What is the larger story behind this experience, that is, the meaning? Where and how can I now carry forward the meaning of this experience as I fold it into my life?   

Believe it or not, the answers to all these questions can be found anywhere and everywhere; for example, in an everyday round of miniature golf.  This scaled-down game is one of the richest mini-experiences available within a small space footprint, within a period of just ninety minutes, for the price of a movie ticket.  So can walking a labyrinth, a mini-version in symbolic space of the religious pilgrimage.   And so can a shopping trip to the mall.  Or a wedding, a funeral, reunion, sporting event, vacation.  The experience agenda is the unifying mental map of any conscious design program.

Focus

What is the moving audience focused on?  The answer is not your design, but other audience members.  Few people go to events and experiences solo; that’s because the main value of group experience is in the bonding made possible by sharing events.  This is especially true of scary or horrifying negative experiences; surviving them shows what people are made of and what they mean to each other. 

Such is the power behind roller coasters, which are near-death journeys carefully engineered to be safe while giving the impression of extreme danger, all in the space of 90 seconds of sheer terror.  This is the reason that playing with gravity in whole-body total immersion will always be popular, and the reason that parks of all kinds look to include, update, ratchet up, and replace these key experience bases as bigger, faster, and scarier. 

Group dynamics

Much of the experience of places has to do with herding and shepherding the group, from couples to mom, dad, and kids to extended-generational outfits. While groups are walking toward a destination, exploring the territory and its assets, or slowing down to rest and regroup, they are in the process of doing a full list of activities:  Planning, coordinating, pre-planning, re-planning, checking-in, questioning, decision making, considering new ideas and projects, re-considering those ideas and projects in the light of new information, making dates ahead for lunch, the afternoon schedule, dinner, the evening program. 

Mom in particular is watching the clock, the budget, and the kids’ faces, as well as the husband’s body language, for signs of distress or dissatisfaction, in order to gauge how well or poorly things are going.  Each person is mentally comparing their private expectations against what is going on and has just happened.  How good are these experiences, and what will they mean in the future?  Is this a worthwhile use of my time, energy, money, and planning? 

And of course woven in and out of all this mental activity in reading the landscape of time and attention is the need for bathroom breaks, hydration, snacks, and interactive stock-taking in the form of verbal outputs and feedback. 

There is also another layer: the social media of texting, cell phoning, internet searching, and photo-taking, which must fit within and around the non-media activity.  No wonder it is difficult to get (and keep) anyone’s attention – it is already commandeered by dozens of other demands.

Altogether, group outings are loaded with competing agendas both social and internal.  These agendas require constant reading, calibrating, feedback, and monitoring.  Just to get included as part of this ornate communications network, the design of exhibits, signage, and oratory (live or recorded verbals) must be tailored to fit an incredibly complex sight-and-sound- scape.   

There is nothing simple about designing even the most basic exhibit, walk-through, or tour. We saw just the rudiments in the one-day charity tour of TV’s Downtown Abbey. Designing for optimal experiences is of course an even more sophisticated endeavor.  The question comes back to this:  How do you get people to pay attention to X or Y when you want them to?  The answer relies on deep knowledge of how people experience things together in motion.

 

College Life as a Village

Recently we spent several weeks at a small liberal arts college to take a measure of their leading cultural values.  At the foot of a picturesque mountain and alongside its own mist-covered lake, we listened to students, staff, and faculty talk about what they believed made the school special and how that quality could be translated to the world in better ways—one of them through the ever-popular branding channel. 

We also watched –eavesdropped, actually—a lot. As Yogi Berra famously opined, “You can see a lot by just looking."

And we saw and heard a lot. Among our observations: 

Selling points

The campus is set in the woods between a lake and a mountain; no one is walking into town for a pizza from here. This school is not for everyone. Even its most ardent supporters use the word “isolated.” That isolation has been a workaround topic for decades.

You would think this would be a drawback, but we saw it as a unique selling point. Let me explain.

A college campus is an experience environment, just as a neighborhood is – and needs to be seen and planned around that reality.  This is where all the action happens (except for on-line remote degree-getting).  For 1500 resident students, and the day-to-day interactions with their teachers and college staff, this is home, the stage where everything takes place.

The faculty may go home in the evening, but for the students, this IS home. It’s the setting of the overnight stay, which has been identified by marketers as a leading factor in the student’s decision to enroll. It’s the very inability to cross a street and stroll into town that turns a college campus into what it really is – a village with its own close sense of community.   

As a selling point, that actually makes isolation important to incorporate into the brand.  The most successful students are those who spent their growing-up years camping and hiking and climbing in just such settings—the value of the place is, for them, already sold, because they are already home. The same goes for kids from small and mid-sized towns and communities. They already know how to maximize limited resources and make their own fun—and they do it by building strong social bonds.

Add to that the urban kids who want to get away from the distractions and negative side of big- city life. Altogether that’s a pretty good-sized pool of potential students who would thrive in that environment.

For urbanite types and kids with their sights set on the big state schools, this isn’t a place they would thrive in anyway.

So don’t sell to them; they aren’t appreciators, and will never be converted.  Target the 20% of the 80/20 mix who are already on board.  This logic follows our advice to clients who ask “How can we drive sales?” to ask the larger question, “What are people already prepared to buy?”  Good marketing is not about educating the consumer, or talking them into doing something they aren’t already predisposed to do.  This is key to good marketing. This shouldn’t be a secret, but judging by much of the marketing work we’ve seen over the years, apparently it is.

Identify the function

This campus is not, as had been traditionally thought, a university with student housing. It is a village with a university.  It supports all the fondest aspects of a small settlement –the cohesion, closeness, tolerance of differences, deep knowledge of its inhabitants and their personal business.  There is a price to all this snug close living, of course – in privacy, ability to separate oneself, autonomy, metropolitan lifestyle.  It’s about living within the boundaries of a small, and yes, isolated place, and making it your own – bringing it inside the circle of the personal.  There are plenty of faculty who wish they taught elsewhere, someplace with a wider purview, restaurants, the theater, more intellectual choices, and a few more subcultures. 

Yet, in the New England landscape, this was the original American settlement model, and living a college lifetime through its village strictures (or box) creates a toolbox of skills: the ability to work with and appreciate others at close quarters, to be entrepreneurial within a set of resource, space, and dollar limits; to be self-reliant outside city life, developing networks of relationships like those aboard ship, on the space station, or even in a research station like those in the Antarctic.  There are developmental advantages to contending with sub-prime dormitories, harsh winters, limited menus, classrooms and equipment that are a tic behind state of the art.  College X is the acid test to distinguish between what is fundamental to a great learning environment and what is window-dressing expendable luxury.

This is in fact the virtue of places we think about as “privileged” in livability because they are set apart from the mainstream, including gated communities, resorts, and exclusive residential enclaves within cities or in upscale suburbs. 

Linking In

But such places are also “un-linked-in,’ except by internet and the auto – and they need better infrastructure to provide those links, such as: 21^st- century post office that takes Amazon deliveries, 24-hour cafeteria as the hearth of the campus, pool, track, and gym open late, places to have coffee (Starbucks islands), all-hours pizza (study groups and cramming sessions don’t respect the 9-to-5 clock). All these fixes are geared to promoting food, sociability, and the outreach we all crave as the highest-rank social primates.  The rule here is that campus design in general needs to assume very high values for whatever is social and collegial.

These are the same virtues we seek out in our after-college lifestyles.  As I walked the 60-year-old campus, bathed in the greenish light of a rainy June late afternoon, I noticed other things: facing benches and outdoor tables inviting dialogue. There is seating everywhere, providing venues for the original form of teaching and learning: the dialogues we spontaneously construct at unplanned moments of day or evening, those moments in which a community of two creates the true education, the kind wrapped in mutual respect of one mind for another.  It’s the way culture is forged across thousands of years, linking us through the generations through the mind-melding that happens most iconically at college. 

Beginning with preschool, this is the way people have always learned—far more than clocking classroom hours, which are more like check-in exercises to see how our book learning is progressing.  As one of our interview subjects put it, “Here I was, walking and talking with my professor about something I was reading when it suddenly hit me—this is what college was supposed to be about.”    

The faculty have another view, and it’s one they come by honestly—they want to be able to identify as sophisticates, whatever their discipline, and that calls for the traits of grading, filtering, and protecting their personal environment—consisting of faculty office,  meals, meetings, classroom, library, and yes, parking.  At more urban campus, my group was involved with design-upgrading a lab space into an art collection and faculty club.  At a busy medical school, this was the single space where collaboration across specialties could be eased into happening.  At this University, a club space would provide another kind of upgrade—to show status and support of leadership for colleagueship.  This is something praised in catalogues but barely acknowledged on the ground, in real facilities. 

Plus-It

We think that there are other tweaks and upgrades that can maximize the defined Village value – an operation outside athletics (for which the school is well recognized) – a mini-golf course right on campus.  Maybe themed to the state or the college namesake, it can provide outdoor recreation on a very accessible scale for the whole community—almost anyone, including kids, can play.  Eighteen holes provides about 90 minutes’ playing time, as a solid study-break for dating, collegial bonding, conversation (the primacy of dialog again), parents’ weekend, and even donor entertainment – Clemson University has discovered what a great investment their full-size golf course and club have been for fundraising.  Study-Break Mini-Golf can be run as a project by interns in the business school’s Sports and Recreation program. 

Just one more design question to be considered in the process of place-making.  First, find out what business you are in – then, as Walt Disney put it, “plus it,” or what the theme park ops call Enhancement.  But before you design, have a solid idea of what the design intention is, or decide what it could be.  That’s the cultural piece, and it’s the basis, conscious or not, of every place that performs to or even above expectations.