OTR Comment - January, 2004

Past the Magic Kingdom, past Epcot Center, I exit a highway and make it through a checkpoint to find a small ramble of barracks, trailers, and Quonset huts. I am somewhere within Walt Disney World’s 28,000-acre grounds, far removed from the cheerful hawkers of $2.25 bottles of Coke, flotillas of strollers, and the gaze of 800,000 eyes peering out from sun-pink masks of touristflesh. These impermanent-seeming encampments are the operating headquarters of Imagineering, Disney’s design wing. Even after the security clearance, drifting through the landscaped glades of former Florida wilderness brings on a tingly sensation: I am trespassing. Every parked car’s windshield bears an important-looking permission sticker. Security jeeps float down narrow paths. Laminated ID cards are gator-clipped to the shirts of every man and woman. Meanwhile I am thinking of thrown-aside curtains, ruthlessly revealed gears and toggles, a small man cringing.

Founded in 1952 as WED (that is, Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises, Imagineering is responsible for creating virtually every element of Disney’s theme-park attractions, resorts, cruise ships, and vacation clubs. It currently employs 1,500 “Imagineers” whose job is to ensure that Disney’s paying customers have fun, and gobs of it. I am here today to visit an as-yet-unopened ride called Mission: Space, which I have been told will provide its passengers more fun than most limbic systems can be expected to accommodate.

Whether due to my generosity or mild alarm, I have brought along my mother, a defiantly unretired Florida resident who took me on my very first roller coaster (the American Eagle, Great America, Gurnee, Illinois) way back in 1982. I was, I guess, eight. While the appropriateness of her decision is up for debate, I am not complaining. Mom and I are pants-wettingly eager for a whirl on Mission: Space, a ride that might well signal the future course of all rides, not to mention a few smaller matters such as entertainment, experience, and the future itself.

Statement of the Obvious #1: Disney World is a vexing and unaccountable place, much like the vexing, unaccountable Florida rain that falls when the sky is blue and the sun violently bright. Some love Disney World and some hate it. A place without much nuance, it invites nuanceless opinion. But the things anti-Disney people hate are not worth hating, or at least not worth blaming on Disney; they are and always will be endemic to any large endeavor with mass appeal. The things people love about Disney are either loved with heartbreaking sincerity--such as the couple I overheard in Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Inn Tavern, who found its admittedly tasty fare “the most sophisticated meal” they had eaten, apparently ever--or as winking kitsch, which is less love than cheerfully scrupled disdain. But all such febrile cogitation flies out the window when one sees an ecstatic twelve-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome being led through Fantasy Land by her parents. As a place that can inject happiness into lives of such empirical difficulty, Disney World suddenly seems a difficult place to dislike.

Love it or hate it, few people expect Disney World to be cutting-edge in any area other than devising ways to soak tourists. For years now Disney World’s family-friendly, often numbingly static rides--Haunted Mansion, anyone? No? How about the Jungle Cruise? That’s what I thought--have suffered in comparison to the nation’s less pedigreed theme parks, such as, say, Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, which is graced with not a few near-death experiences that practically include in their queues a last-will-and-testament-notarization center. One or two Disney World rides have attempted to match this trend, the most recent of which is The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. That I very nearly vomited eight dollars’ worth of Liberty Inn Tavern curly fries into the collective lap of the family sitting before me suggests that here, at least, Disney is keeping respectable pace.

But Mission: Space promises to be not only Disney World’s most thrilling ride but a benchmark in an emerging area of design known as Experience Design, an uncanny, theoretically aware mixture of art, simulation, and psychological mischief-making. Experience Design is not, its scholars and practitioners argue, a field of its own but rather a radically different approach to plain old design. Today, examples of Experience Design can be found everywhere from the Internet (the “information architecture” of which seeks to provide its users an “experience” while navigating--indeed, “surfing”--the web), to the mysteries of TIVO, to modern architecture, to theme parks. Experience Design is marked by its consciousness of every element--emotional, physical, tactile--that surround any given experience, thereby heightening the intensity with which that experience is felt. This goes for whether you are buckling yourself into a thrill ride or taking money out of an ATM whose screen fills with oddly friendly chit-chat.

As Nathan Shedroff, the author of a terrific primer titled Experience Design: A Manifesto for the Creation of Experience, explains, “That my phone rings at inappropriate times is a design problem.” One day, then, phones will be sensitive to their users’ needs, know when a call is not appropriate, and, simply, take a message in silence. The design of a phone and the emotional experiences one associates with using the phone will effortlessly oblige one another. Shedroff stresses, however, that Experience Design is still very young and fragmented along its various potentialities, the most obvious fracture being that which exists between its entertainment and more utilitarian applications. “There’s a lot of bullshit here,” Shedroff says, “and excitement.” The best Experience Design, he maintains, gives one a unique experience using a combination of old and new technology; the worst simply “shove technology where it is shove-able.” In other words, the most profound Experience Design uses all five senses to seamlessly make experience itself a malleable, customizable property. Sometimes it will do so in subtle ways, and sometimes it will do so in aneurysmically obvious ones. One thing it is guaranteed to do is make us question just what it is that constitutes an experience, anyway.

I am standing outside Mission: Space’s outer pavilion with Sue Bryan, its producer; Bob Zalk, its director; Mike Lentz, its executive director; and Mom, my producer. We are marveling at the pavilion’s swoopy, curvilinear façade (there is as much a chance at finding a right angle here, I am told, as there is in finding one in outer space), its massive planetary models, and its handsomely mounted inspirational quotes (from Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Lindberg, and John F. Kennedy, among others). All of this, Zalk explains, is intended to “set the tone and put people in the mood” for their putatively upcoming mission into space. Lentz nods and says that, insofar as telling a story in a deeply immersive environment, “Imagineering is the best.” Mission: Space is not simply a simulation in the manner that the Microsoft golden oldie Flight Simulator is a simulation. Instead, imagine that, before you sit down to play Flight Simulator, everything in your immediate surroundings conspires to convince you that you are not at your computer but climbing into the cockpit of a Cessna, and you will have some idea of what Experience Design is up to as it sends the brain out on safari.

As “creative” people in a corporate environment, there is not a tie or wingtip to be found among my Disney hosts but plenty of soft-collared shirts, sneakers, and baseball caps. They are excited about Mission: Space--all of them mention, with gratified weariness, having spent the last five years of their lives working on this attraction--and their excitement is contagious. I am not talking about me, necessarily (though there is that), but the small, expectant crowd that has gathered around the black barricades partitioning Mission: Space off from its Epcot Center surroundings. “Are you testing today?” some ask eagerly. Alas, no. A family of three disperses only when I hold up my tape recorder and notebook and tell them I am a journalist. Once they leave, Bryan sighs and mentions that, since word got out on the Internet that Disney began testing Mission: Space a few months ago, crowds of people have waited, sometimes for hours, for the fateful tap.

Statement of the Obvious #2: Mission: Space is an example of Experience Design at its most commodified. That does not mean it lacks social value--as an opiate, if nothing else. But Bryan is even more optimistic: “We’ve had kids come off the ride saying, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’” She smiles. “That’s a huge thing for them. They walk in here believing nobody gets to be an astronaut. After, they can start to see their horizons open up a little bit more.” In fact, Mission: Space is so persuasive that when NASA astronauts Roger Crouch and Rhea Seddon experienced the ride with Bryan four months ago, both emerged saying it was at least as convincing as NASA’s own flight simulators.

Theme park simulacrums and “immersive environments” are not new. What is new is the extent to which these environments are now able to penetrate one’s cortex. Disney World itself is one big exercise in a more Paleolithic form of Experience Design, the experience being its attempt to sell you a clean, painless world actually worth living in. Occasionally this is taken to the Outer Limits. Disney/MGM Studios’ 50's Prime Time Restaurant, founded on the increasingly horrifying premise that you are “home” eating, suffers a waitstaff that pretends to be your cousin, demands that you remove your elbows from the table, and offers a menu replete with dishes such as Mom’s Meatloaf and $11.00 selections from “Dad’s Liquor Cabinet.” (When I mentioned to “Cousin Chris” that the striking inventory of booze made me worry that perhaps Dad had a bit of a problem, the act was speedily dropped, and Chris asked if I might not give him a break.)

The staleness of Epcot Center’s futurism makes for Disney World at its most Lynchian, especially within the “World Showcase,” where Indian girls on work permit wear lederhosen in “Germany” and costumed Japanese minutemen carry flintlock rifles in “America.” Disney’s rides, of course, have long trafficked in the immersive storyline, which Disney probably invented. The eventually boring Pirates of the Caribbean became the less boring Splash Mountain became the even less boring Star Tours, “a highly turbulent thrill ride” that borrows Lucasfilm icons. Ten years ago I rode Star Tours and found it an impressively turbulent marriage of pre-shot footage and simulated motion. When you hit an asteroid, your ship rocked; it felt like you hit an asteroid.

Yesterday I rode Star Tours again. It was a sad spectacle, indeed, having been left in the interstellar dust by a decade’s worth of first-person, rumble-pack-enhanced Nintendo and Sony video games. But Disney is also in danger of being outdone by its more immediate competitors. The Las Vegas Hilton has been packing them in with its Experience Design-tinged live-action spectacle Star Trek: The Experience (“Don’t go on a ride. Go on a mission”). Employing actual Star Trek props and sprinkling actors among the show’s civilian guests, Star Trek: The Experience drops one squarely into a space opera whose outcome is determined by the guests’ actions. It is now one of Las Vegas’s most visited attractions. If Disney needs a big new ride, then Epcot Center, Mission: Space’s eventual host, desperately needs one. Walking around Epcot at the height of the summer season, I felt not a little like Clark Griswold at the end of Vacation: the park was practically empty. Some of this is attributable to 9/11 travel willies, of course, but some of it is certainly attributable to Epcot. Its famously huge, round, pocked centerpiece, Spaceship Earth, is looking less like a paean to the future and more like the world’s biggest Titleist ad.

Mom and I are led into Mission: Space’s teeth-shatteringly air-conditioned antechamber while Zalk, Lentz, and Bryan begin to explain some of the ride’s particulars. For one, it is not a roller coaster; nor is it a ride that, like Star Tours, simulates movement via the illusion of film projection and the energetic, up-and-down pistoning of a stationary vehicle. The simulation technology for Mission: Space as it was envisioned did not exist, so Imagineering invented it. When I ask what developing a ride like Mission: Space costs, my hosts furtively glance at one another. “We don’t normally talk about our budgets,” Lentz explains. When I ask if the budget is comparable to a Hollywood film, Lentz nods and says, “Absolutely. Very comparable. To a major blockbuster.”

We drift through empty queues that in months will be heaving with tourists. Zalk tells us that “this is the place where guests are to understand they’re in a working NASA-like facility, where real training is happening.” I smile. But they are all deadly serious about this, so I stop smiling. 140 artistic disciplines, from music to writing to painting to computer programming to architecture, were employed to make Mission: Space watertight in its overall psychological effect. Seven hundred Imagineers worked the equivalent of 175 years to design and build it. Arguments erupted over how to realistically light its various rooms, and what announcements should come over the loudspeakers. Beside us a large rotating gravity wheel--similar to the one used in 2001: A Space Odyssey--turns with forbidding slowness. Above us, in the industrial-space highbay, looms a model of Mission: Space’s specially designed X1 rocket and an actual lunar rover NASA donated to the attraction. Indeed, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory served as steady consultants for Mission: Space, and it is with some pride that Bryan points out that nearly every element within the ride, from its “pre-show” on, “is based on some kind of theory, debatable theory, or actual scientific fact.” When Mom wonders aloud if the ride is as convincing, Bryan tells her, simply, “It’s a physical experience you’ve never had in your life. There’s no way for us to describe it.”

We pass by “mission control,” which, in a cunning bit of double-duty, is both the fake mission control for the purposes of the ride’s immersion and the real mission control for the purposes of its actual maintenance. Finally we come to the “Ready Room,” where Mom and I prepare for our mission. We have just learned this mission is to Mars. Empty astronaut suits importantly occupy lockers. They are not American astronaut suits but suits belonging to the (imaginary) International Space Training Center. (“We have a lot of foreign guests here at Walt Disney World,” I am reminded.) Stamped upon the steel floor is the ISTC’s NASA-ish logo, around which its slogan is wreathed: “We Choose To Go . . .” We step into Mission: Space’s inner bowels. A video monitor blinks on, and actor Gary Sinise begins telling us that we will be given specific duties during our holiday to Mars, and during our flight we will be expected to perform these duties ably. Failure to do so will alter our experience in the X1 rocket. I turn to Mom and predict that Mission: Space will result in more nervous breakdowns than any ride in Walt Disney World history. She shushes me. A spotlight above her turns suddenly on, haloing her in bright, motey yellow. Sinise has just named Mom the mission’s Commander. Shortly I myself am illumed and named by Sinise the mission’s Engineer.

Statement of the Obvious #3: This is all incredibly hokey. So why, then, am I so nervous?

The major philosophical question posed by the species of Experience Design called Mission: Space is attempting to push forward is this: Can a designed experience be so vivid, so cumulatively believable, that it overrules, in experiential terms, the genuine life event it is meant to approximate? That is, if one subtracts the knowledge of physics, astronomy, and math that any given astronaut is bound to have at his or her fingertips and simply reduces being an astronaut to the clenched-fist intensity of blasting off in a rocket at 1,000 miles an hour, what, then, is an astronaut? If Mission: Space is convincing enough to impress actual astronauts, what--other than the physics, astronomy, and math--do they have on civilians who have braved Mission: Space? Of course, astronauts are sitting on several thousand tons of combustible rocket fuel. They are in actual danger. The most pressing worry Mission: Space’s passengers face is whether some asshole dinged the minivan on their way out of Epcot’s parking lot. But such reductionism neglects to explore the emotional aspects of Experience Design. Indeed, human emotion is what its canniest practitioners understand so purely: truly mind-blowing examples of Experience Design will convince one of the danger. Minivan? What minivan?

Virtual Reality once promised to give us the Promethean fire of designed experience. But VR never took off. Various reasons are given for this. In all likelihood, VR is too intellectual, and the illusion of immersion is not yet so convincing that one can block a certain mortified awareness of those dorky goggles. Its world is still largely one of Gumby-quality objects and Roy G. Biv color schemes. In the end, one is never really touching anything or going anywhere. Its lack of tactile reality imprisons one too deeply within one’s mind: LSD without the lysergic acid. As technology advances VR could improve, of course, but it seems likely that it will do so most successfully only in a less inward form. Experience Design is, on the other hand, resolutely un-inward. It greedily incorporates the environment that surrounds it, even though it may have to construct that environment to do so, overwhelming one’s resistance one detail at a time.

Experience Design is not merely the trifling stuff of family vacations. It is the lynchpin of flight simulators used by NASA and combat simulators used by the Department of Defense. For God’s sake, a retrofitted version of the video game Doom has been licensed to the U.S. military to train soldiers to kill with more effectiveness (that is, with less hesitance). These not-quite-real experiences can be highly instructive, uniquely powerful--or evilly inspiring. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the witless assassins of Columbine high school, played a customized version of Doom that allowed for two shooters, unlimited ammunition, and victims who could not shoot back. In my own case, I used to completely freak myself out playing a game called Perfect Dark on my Nintendo 64. Whenever I disarmed a foe, he would beg for his life, reminding me that he was only doing his job. If such “experiences” do not encroach upon some meaningful semblance to real life, with all its moral snares, why did my stomach reflexively turn whenever I went ahead and splattered the walls with these defenseless goons' pixellated brains?

But not all of Experience Design’s ends are geared toward the boyish wonders of flight or violence. The firm Andersen Windows is currently developing windows with photo-quality replications that will allow homeowners to look not upon their backyards but, presumably, the Taj Mahal, lower Manhattan, downtown Cairo, or the Sea of Tranquility. In art and architecture, experiments in postmodern referentiality are now considered about as revolutionary as Pong. The tenets of Experience Design, with its immersive worlds of the fantastic grounded solidly (and deceptively) upon the familiar, has transfused the blood of both: Frank Gehry’s bizarre and beautiful Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is probably the most famous example. The building is the experience, showstoppingly so.

The doctrines of Experience Design have inevitably given birth to what the scholar Erik Davis calls “the right wing of Experience Design”: advertising and marketing. (Some will no doubt consider Mission: Space a veritable Oliver North in such a constellation, but I can now say, having spent time with the people who designed it, that too much care went into too many ostensibly pointless flourishes to make Mission: Space a merely commercial endeavor. It was made with love, and as such is a work of popular art, if a really expensive one.) As Davis laments, many slot machines are now equipped with “high-tech smell emitters,” certain scents having been determined to influence how long gamblers will stay shiftlessly put in one place. This is certainly Experience Design, only you are not aware that your experience is being designed. An even fouler example was recently unveiled in New York City’s Times Square. This is the Las Vegas Monorail--unveiled in New York because “more than 2 million New Yorkers visit ‘the entertainment capital of the world’ each year,” according to the monorail’s press release-- which will feature nine “individually-themed” trains all showcasing “the world’s most creative brand advertisers.” For those who have longed to experience riding to work in a giant can of Monster Energy™ sports drink, your Messiah has arrived. “When the monorail system opens,” the press release pants, “riders who board the Monster-imaged train will be immersed in the brand as the entire exterior, floors, seats and walls are emblazoned with imagery and video screens befitting Monster’s active lifestyle.” Monster. Well, they said it.

It is certain that, as it advances, Experience Design will enable us to encounter worlds we never imagined, from highly kinetic experiences (buzzing a giant praying mantis on the top of Kilimanjaro in a Soviet MiG) to quieter, more meditative experiences (looking upon a waterfall in the middle of a desert). This is seductively weird, enticingly unprecedented stuff, and in twenty years’ time crack might seem about as transporting as a spoonful of Folgers crystals. But it seems equally certain that the devices of Experience Design will be used 24/7 to cram equally unfamiliar but highly unwanted worlds down our collective throat.

Commander Mom and I take our seats in the cockpit of the X1 rocket. Large steel safety harnesses descend from the ceiling and clamp tightly across our torsos. We are surrounded by a convincingly huge number of switches and buttons. My investigative pushing of them reveals that most are decorative. Gary Sinise appears, smiling, in our monitor, and reminds us once again of our duties. These duties, thankfully, amount only to depressing two large, brightly lit buttons when Sinise tells us to. Of course, the rocket’s “cockpit” is actually a tight, narrow enclosure with room for four passengers, and the G-force we will experience on blast-off is actually produced by the fact that our cockpit will be cyclotronically spinning during the duration of the ride, though the spinning itself will never be discernible.

Each passenger has his or her own viewscreen. When the screen before my face fills with a highly realistic computer-generated image of the blast platform, I find that I am holding Commander Mom’s hand. We are looking straight up the red scaffold that our X1 rocket will ride along before slipping the surly bonds of earth. Are we tilted back? I cannot tell, though all my weight feels fatly concentrated upon my sternum. On screen, if I am not too mistaken, a bird flies overhead. That, I think, paradoxically roused from this designed dream by its attention to detail, is a very nice touch. And Sinise begins the countdown.

The bad news first. The second half of Mission: Space--the chaotic flight through the cosmos, the avoiding of the unforeseen comet, the arrival on Mars--is the stuff of a solid but fairly straightforward thrill ride. Now the good news. A moment after blast off, Commander Mom and I are screaming. Just as Sue Bryan promised, this lift-off is unlike anything I have ever experienced: terrifying, thrilling, but above all utterly alien. The force has frozen me in place, and the blue sky darkens and deepens to black. Friendly, smiling Gary Sinise has disappeared, my mom has disappeared, Disney World itself has vanished into mist, and for thirty seconds or so my stomach is in my Nikes and my mind is aflame with holy, childlike belief. And I do, I do believe it, I believe I am breaching the troposphere, I am convinced. Jesus Christ, turn around!

Statement of the Obvious #4: A lot of people are going to want to ride this thing, and we are all astronauts now.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea.