Design & Disney
It’s been quite a while since I’ve had some time to spend removed from the day-to-day design issues of my current job, so the past two weeks spent out of the office were a welcomed break from routine. They also helped to get my mind wandering back into some of the places it spent during graduate school.
The more interesting part of my trip fell on the second week, where I was free from work obligations, and had the opportunity to visit Walt Disney World in Florida. While most people I know have visited Disney-themed amusement parks as children, this was my first time. Not having come to Disney as a child, I felt like I was able to look at things with fresh eyes, and since I was visiting nearly a full year after completing design school, I naturally looked at everything through the lens design—thinking, making, or otherwise. Being immersed from the minute I got off the plane, I found the entire Disney experience from start to finish to be deeply fascinating from the idea as a whole to the excruciating attention to detail throughout.
The first thing I was struck with was the immense amount of area that the parks covered. I never realized that Disney was made up not only of multiple amusement parks, but scores of resorts, a “downtown” area, and a boardwalk. On the first day, while we boarded the monorail into the Magic Kingdom I was wowed by the fact that they had a self-contained transportation system via bus, rail, and boat. I wondered about how they planned the parks, the transportation system, and all the integration points to work for most everyone. It seems like an immense feat, especially when you’re pushing that amount of people through the park each and every day. Not to mention to variety and types people—young, old, native, foreign, disabled, etc… Talk about a wicked problem.
While I don’t know much about the history of Disney or the Disney Park beyond the name being the last name of the creator, my initial reaction to seeing and experiencing the Disney parks is that something of this magnitude and over-the-top-ness could never have emerged from a group of folks looking to increase revenue, growth, or design products purely based on what people say they want or need. The idea of multiple amusement parks and resorts that make up a kid-friendly near-fantasy world is not something that emerges out of a spreadsheet or a an afternoon meeting. In fact, I find it hard to imagine these types of grandiose ideas being entertained for more than a few seconds in most corporations. It would be deemed too risky, overambitious, expensive, and likely not providing a clear way of measuring the return on investment up-front.
So how do ideas like this flourish? How does something like Disney World develop from the insides of Walt Disney’s brain into its current manifestation? And how is it able to sustain its vision long after the person who created it is gone? It would be fun to dig into some of these questions and learn more about the process that people went through to get Disney World created in the first places, and what their process is for creating additional attractions within the parks. It seems to me that Disney is one of those places that’s teeming with insights and lessons about design, since they have a need to create and maintain products at all levels of design, be it communication, industrial, interaction, service, organization, or otherwise.
