The Future of Themed Design

During the 1960s and well into the 1970s, there was really only one sector within themed entertainment: theme parks. That single sector industry began to boom in North America; globalization was not a well-recognized concept; Pine and Gilmore had not articulated the experience economy; and Thomas Friedman had not proclaimed that the world was flat. Today, 40-plus years later, all that has changed. We don’t speak exclusively about creating themed entertainment anymore; rather we speak about creating unique experiences. And while our industry began with theme parks and borrowed liberally from the design principles found in motion pictures and theater, theme park design is now experiential design.

Today, there are many sectors within experiential design. History museums, science museums, children’s museums, zoos, aquariums, art museums, sports facilities, corporate visitor centers, a wide variety of entertainment complexes (including theme parks), hospitals, and shopping complexes are all consumers of experiential design and realization services. Our industry that began with a mouse in Anaheim, California is now everywhere, begging a fundamental question: Who are we?

I predict that the next chapter in the history of attraction design will be a search for identity; for we must determine who we are before we can predict where we are going. Yet it remains imperative that we simultaneously focus on the places we are going. Working globally in different regions and cultures has a strong impact on the way we market, create and produce experiential design.

While it is true that the experiential design industry began in North America, those of us who live here and grew up with the industry must realize that we no longer have a lock on truth, or on great ideas. This means we need to get out of ourselves, embrace different cultures and different styles, and understand design in a much larger context. When the stage on which we play expanded beyond North America and Western Europe, we entered a new reality and many paradigms changed. We now deal with new economies, emerging economies and evolving economies; those realities are just as important as the stories we tell and the experiences we design. Our identity must now embrace urban planning, economic development, public/private partnerships, cultural development, mixed-use complexes, a variety of financing models and, in some cases, nation building. Furthermore, we must work in a variety of regions and cultures, who have their own systems and processes and ideas. Our identity must adapt to them – not the other way around. Centering our identity on a self-serving, parochial, based- in-North America mentality doesn’t cut it anymore. Our new global identity is a far cry from the one based solely on a mouse and a dark-ride.

Experiences alone are not enough

Our identity is also strongly colored by the numerous sectors in which we work today. Let me focus on just one of those sectors: cultural institutions. Many sectors mentioned earlier in this article entered the world through us—experiential designers—storytellers who applied theme park, audience-centric techniques to these emerging sectors (or as some less elegantly phrase it – theme park tricks applied to the worlds of culture).

Certainly some of those early efforts successfully introduced experiential design to a variety of cultural facilities. But that world has now changed too. Experiences alone are not enough. As the need to balance meaningful content with attendance generation becomes more important to many institutions, we must learn to walk the fine line between content and entertainment. This means going deeper than story and design and understanding and adjusting to the fundamental mission and DNA of the institution. We must understand the views and values of boards of directors and institutional leadership. We must be sensitive to the role the institution plays in the community, and the position the institution occupies. Our identity is increasingly based on our ability to make those adjustments—with great storytelling and design being the price of entry. This new sector identity is a far cry from an identity based solely on applying theme parks to the worlds of culture.

But the cultural sector is only one of many where creating experiences is both needed and, when presented appropriately, embraced. Sports and corporate visitor centers present an entirely different set of dynamics, requiring us to rethink our approach to design, process and management. In these sectors, we will remain guided by story. But we do not own that term anymore, for it is now commonly used by urban planners, mega-developers and bureaucrats.

About the Author:
Jack Rouse, CEO of Jack Rouse Associates, a Cincinnati-based experiential design firm that specializes in attraction design—including museum design, theme park design, and visitor center design.