The first question
you should ask yourself – did
you follow your design program?
In the complex and costly business of theme
park development, few things are more critical to the success of your
project than sticking to a solid design program. Occasionally overlooked
and often misinterpreted, accurate and thorough design programming
can mean the difference between a park that succeeds and one that fails.
No one understands this better than Norm
Doerges. In the early 1970s, Norm and a handful of industrial engineers
pioneered the field of design programming for the Walt Disney Company.
Over the course of his 30-year career, Norm built an extraordinary
resume that encompassed operations management, design, engineering,
construction, and attraction development. Best known for his instrumental
role in the planning and development of the enormously successful
EPCOT, Norm led a work force of over 6,000 people, holding complete
operating responsibility for the US $1.3 billion exhibition in Florida.
Prior to his vice-presidency
at EPCOT, Norm served as a Vice-President of Walt Disney Imagineering
(WDI) where he was responsible for creative and design support
for Walt Disney World. As the Executive Vice President of Disneyland
he led the development and implementation of the marketing program
for the Indiana Jones Adventure and the 40th Anniversary of Disneyland.
Under Norm’s direction,
this program set a new forty-year annual attendance record of over
15 million visitors.
A pioneer in the theme park industry and
co-founder of Apogee Attractions (www.ApogeeAttractions.com), Norm
shared with us his insights on studying your markets, listening to
your guests, and why your design program is critical to a successful
park.
Q Most professionals within
the theme industry recognize the importance of market research and feasibility
analysis. Yet a real understanding of how the design program fits into
the development scheme often seems a bit more elusive. How would you
explain the design program?
Doerges The
short answer is that the design program is the quantification
of everything having to do with a theme park. A more involved answer
is that it’s a living,
dynamic tool that takes observed data, derived from actual operating
experience, and mathematically applies it against different levels
of attendance extracted from market research.
Q So take us back to the beginning.
How did you first come to develop the design program concept?
“There’s got to be a
better way to do this”
Doerges When
Disneyland California was originally built in the 1950’s, it was built by a group of
designers from Walt Disney Studios. These were very talented people,
designers who had been responsible for the success of Walt’s
classic feature animation. But they had never designed a theme park
before. Of course, a true theme park didn’t exist at that time,
so these guys were both inventing and learning as they went along.
The first configuration of the park was ingenious in many ways, but
there were a lot of things that simply didn’t work. When Disneyland
opened to the public in 1955, there were numerous problems that required
a lot of retrofitting. Walkways weren’t wide enough; long lines
led to attractions that needed more capacity. Certain locations were
terribly crowded and guests were frustrated. In other cases there was
too much capacity – attractions, shops and retail venues were
underutilized and therefore didn’t make a good profit as a
standalone operation.
Ten years later when
it came time to build the first park at Walt Disney World, the
management decided to try a new approach, putting together what they
called the “project
development” team. The goal of this group was to provide an operator’s
input to the designers, and in a lot of ways they were quite successful.
Q So they had learned from their
mistakes.
Doerges In
terms of lessons learned, the overall experience of developing
the Magic Kingdom in Florida was certainly better than those first
years with Disneyland . Still, when we opened the park in Florida
we found ourselves very much in the same situation as before – and it was costing millions of dollars
a year in terms of retrofitting. In fact, some problems couldn’t
be corrected because they were just too expensive. This caused a real
rift between the design organization and the operators. Finally the
senior executives said, “You know what, there’s got to
be a better way to do this.” So they pulled me from the Magic
Kingdom where I had been operating as General Manager, and teamed me
with a fellow by the name of Bruce Laval, who was the head of Industrial
Engineering. He took the best of his industrial engineers and told
them, “We’re going to build a lot of theme parks in this
world. We’ve got to figure out a better way of doing this.” This
was in the early seventies, and for the next several years our little
group gathered enormous amounts of data. From this we worked to develop
methodologies, a system that would allow us to design a park and
get everything the right size.
Q So the design program was really
born out of a need to have the experience meet the needs of the guest?
Doerges Getting
everything the right size is the key to the success of a theme
park. This principle holds true on many levels. If the size is right,
the guest feels comfortable – they
feel cozy in the spaces that are meant to be intimate, they feel a
sense of grandeur in the spaces that are meant to be awe-inspiring.
Size is essential to a successful guest experience, and the guest should
always be your first concern. But size is also a critical part of the
economic equation. The capital investment in a true theme park is so
large that it has to operate properly to achieve its profit potential.
So for a park as a whole you want to capture high rates of return in
each line of business – each attraction, each restaurant, and
each retail shop. The last thing you need is to have spent too much
money in one place and not enough in another; one attraction too big,
another too small. When this happens you have to retrofit and put additional
capital in to fix things. That’s wasted money. Once the park
is built, you want your additional capital to go into marketing and
new attractions to drive attendance – not to fix things that
don’t work because they were designed wrong in the first place.
What’s important to understand is
that these two considerations – the guest experience and the
economics – are inextricably linked. Simply put, if you design
to meet the needs of your guest, your operation will be profitable.
Q So where do you begin?
. . . to
be continued
(c) copyright 2008 Apogee Attractions
