Designing Disney Imagineering and the Art of the Show by John Hench

Designing the Guest's experience is what Walt Disney's Imagineers came to telephone call "the art of the bear witness," a term that applies to what the Imagineers did at every level, from the broadest conceptual outlines to the smallest details, encompassing visual storytelling, characters, and the use of color.

Today is eighth and terminal session of Summertime Term Two of the 2013 GsD plan with Applied Guestology 201 , a review of some of the leading organizations who evangelize exemplary Guest Experiences with application to ChurchWorld.

As I conclude this cursory expect at Applied Guestology 201, information technology'due south simply fitting to come full circle to where we started: Walt Disney and the worlds he created.

The Imagineers design intention is e'er to give satisfaction to the invitee.

John Hench, Imagineering genius and Disney team member for 60+ years

Walt Disney realized that a visit to an amusement park could be similar a theatrical experience – in a discussion, a show. Walt saw that the Guests' sense of progressing through a narrative, of living out a story told visually, could link together the great variety of attractions he envisioned for his new kind of park. While traveling through their stories, Guests would encounter, and even interact with, their favorite Disney characters, and who would be transformed, as if by magic, from their two-dimensional flick existence into this special three-dimensional story world.

As designers, the Imagineers create spaces – guided experiences that take place in advisedly structured environments, allowing the Guests to see, hear, smell, bear upon, and taste in new means. In consequence, Imagineers transform a infinite into a story place.

Ultimately, the Imagineers gave Guests a place to play, something Walt believed that adults needed every bit much as children. The design of the Imagineers gives power to the Guests' imagination, to transcend their everyday routine. Walt Disney insisted that Guests should "feel better because of" their experiences in Disney theme parks, thus establishing the art of the show.

For the Imagineers, that meant considering everything inside and relating to the parks as pattern elements. To build constructive story environments and assure Guest comfort, the designers realize that they always had to assume the Guests' position and bespeak of view, and just as Walt did, to have the Guests' interests to center and defend them when others didn't think it mattered.

Information technology is up to the designers to provide Guests with the appropriate sensory data that makes each story environment convincing. This means that design considerations become across the attractions themselves to the service and operations staff, transportation, restaurants, shops, remainder rooms – even the trash cans.

Initially, the Imagineers used the knowledge gained from their experience in films, but they presently found that their Guests themselves would teach them what they almost needed to know well-nigh theme park design and performance.

To pattern nigh effectively for Guests, the Imagineers learned that they had to detect them up close, waiting in lines with them, going on attractions with them, even eating with them. The Imagineers paid attending to Guests' patterns of motility and the means in which they expressed their emotions. They were able to get an idea of what was going on in their minds.

When designers come across Guests in their natural states of behavior, they gain a improve agreement of the space and time Guests demand in a story environment.

Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar, who retired in 2009 as the merely Disney employee to take participated in the opening of all eleven theme parks around the globe, is noted for many things, simply one of the most cherished has to be his creation of "Mickey's Ten Commandments."

During his 54-year career, Sklar was involved in all facets of the theme parks – from concepts to design to operations. Along the way, he developed, refined and practiced key principles of leadership based on what he learned from Walt Disney and other Disney Legends, especially designer John Hench. He crystalized these "learnings" into the first of what he called Mickey's Ten Commandments:

1. Know your audience – Identify the prime audition for your attraction or prove before you lot brainstorm design
2. Wear your Guests' shoes – Insist that your team members experience your creation just the way Guests do
3. Organize the catamenia of people and ideas – Make sure there is a logic and sequence in our stories and the way Guests experience them
4. Create a wienie (visual magnet) – Create visual "targets" that will lead Guests conspicuously and logically through your facility
5. Communicate with visual literacy – Make good use of color, shape form, texture – all the nonverbal ways of advice
6. Avert overload – create plow-ons – Resist the temptation to overload your audition with too much data and too many objects
7. Tell ane story at a time – Stick to the story line; good stories are clear, logical, and consistent
8. Avoid contradictions – maintain identity – Details in design or content that contradict i another confuse an audience about your story or the time period information technology takes place in
9. For every in one case of treatment, provide a ton of care for – Walt Disney said you can educate people, but don't tell them you're doing it. Make it fun!
10. Go along information technology upward! (Maintain it) – In a Disney park or resort, everything must work. Poor maintenance is poor testify!

Exceeding Guests' expectations is Disney'south Guest Service strategy, and paying attention to every detail is the tactic by which information technology is accomplished.

Course dismissed.

Awarding for ChurchWorld

Really? If you are involved in Guest Services at your church in any capacity, and can't run across the immediate and powerful application of Mickey's X Commandments to your ain Invitee Services process, may I kindly advise you are serving in the wrong ministry area?

"Be Our Invitee" has been the invitation to Disney visitors long before the song from Beauty and the Beast became a box office hit.

It underscores an important element in the Disney vocabulary, that customers are not referred to as such, merely rather as Guests. In the Disney nomenclature, the word "Guest" is capitalized and treated as a formal noun.

What's the divergence between treating someone like a company, and treating someone like a Guest?

The obvious illustration is that we do things differently when we bring Guests into our home. We clean up the house. We wearing apparel up. Nosotros set up something special to eat. We host them. Nosotros accept care of their real needs.

Disney expects Guests

At Disney theme parks around the world, they look Guests – and programme to exceed their Guests' expectations every time . What nigh you lot?

Are you lot expecting Guests?

Recommended Reading for this session:

Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Fine art of the Bear witness, John Hench

Dream It, Do It: My Half-Century Creating Disney's Magic Kingdoms, Marty Sklar

(for a complete reading list, run across The Essential Guest Experience Library)

Guestology – the fine art and science of knowing and understanding your guests – is a term originated by Bruce Laval of the Walt Disney Company. The apply of GsD is a tongue-in-cheek acquittance that organizations that really want to understand and evangelize a WOW Invitee Experience need to study the all-time practices and principles in use today, and then adapt them to the context of their ain environment.

the GsD (Doctor of Guestology) journey: 2^nd Term Summer 2013

taylorsmill1968.blogspot.com

Source: https://guestexperiencedesign.com/disneys-imagineers-designing-the-total-guest-experience/

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