TOTAL LANDSCAPE

Themeing, discussed in Chapter 3, begins by delineating two ideas crucial for bridging the domains of Themeparking and Themeing: first, the idea that theme park as a material environment represents an extension of the public realm of television, advertising, films, retail and mass-tourism; and second, that for such an extension to work a homogeneous human experience had to be fabricated across multiple scales. The chapter will discuss ways in which Walt Disney created an unknown fusion of the previously entirely separate domains of human experience. If the task of themeparking is to identify all variables in a complex theme park equation and chart their interrelationships, the task of themeing is then to systematically reduce the number of variables in the theater of operations until key variables are identified, until final objectives of the environment are agreed upon, and finally until only one of many possible alternative designs is identified and brought into a desirable configuration. In that sense, themeing symbolically, materially and logistically sustains trade-theater objectives established at the strategic level and sets in motion a frictionless procession of tourists through predetermined ‘spending routes’. The key to themeing is the understanding that designing assumes not only the configuration of material aspects of environment and its operational logic, but a multitude of environmental clues and stimuli that affect the experience of visitors: themeing is de facto a deliberate attempt at designing an environment configured to produce specific behavioral outcomes in visitors. The design of theme park’s layout, phone-answering system, web site, marketing campaign, light fixtures, transportation system, operational budget or staffing scheme are all acts of designing that in different ways contribute to the total quality of user experience and theme park’s overall economic performance.

The theme park environment as a whole will be assumed to operate as ‘theater of operations’ (TOP). TOP is composed of four basic elements of the theme park environment: the internal pattern, the harlequin dress, sensory stimuli, and scores. Within the environmental system established by these four elements, TOP is also configured through a complex arrangement of individual environmental modules such are food outlets, retail outlets, rides, attractions, storage spaces, or offices. Clusters of such modules unified by a concept will be called ‘theatra’; for instance, Adventureland is a typical example of a theatron. Themeing thus produces the theme park environment by defining material attributes of the environment (scale, color, layout, costumes), all sensory environmental stimuli (visual, aural, tactile, olfactory), commodities sold (arts and crafts, food, souvenirs) and the practices of all constituents (both on frontstage and backstage). On the operational level, themeing is concerned with the maneuver and support of field operations that involve a web of constituents including visitors, employees, managers, or suppliers in complex operations such are daily staffing, supply, maintenance or control.

The product of the parallel workings of themeparking and themeing is what I will call ‘total environmental image’. Theme park environments are deliberately designed to operate on the subliminal level, affecting visitors’s emotional states and inducing high affective and low cognitive involvement with the environment. The ‘total experience’ of an environment is always the result of a composite of layered clues, a combination of cognitive and emotional processing. Cognitive processing assigns meaning, whereas affective processing assigns values to our experiences of the environment. Successfully designed interplay of the above clues facilitates perception of the theme park environment as an interrelated, singular image. An environmental image is also an accumulated, layered impression that combines influences generated by the media world with those related to the theme park visit. I will employ the term ‘environment’ to represent the immense complexity of such efforts and the multidimensionality of human experience in the man-made world. It will be argued that theme park environment commonly denotes the totality of circumstances, objects and conditions within which an individual or an artifice is embedded, and the combination of complex external and internal conditions that affect and influence its experience and behavior. The experience of visitors is directly linked to the evaluation of the theme park environment by two variables: how frequently people visit and how long they stay, two variables undeviatingly linked to how much they spend (‘dollar volume’).

What de facto puts the entire theme park apparatus in motion on the daily basis are scores; scores  connect different constitutive elements of the environment into a coherent arrangement of forces in the theater of operations. The score takes into account people, space, time and their mutual interrelations and configures them through a chain of pseudo events, fabricated and heavily scripted performances that occur within pre-determined time-frames and pre-programmed ‘scenes’. Themeing will discuss the rationale for the fabrication of pseudo-events and ways of doing it, including the Rent-an-Event companies that mass produce a variety of performances including wedding ceremonies. Together with pseudo-events, the chapter will close by discussing ways in which theme parks operate as environmental labs and deliberately manipulate sensory clues in order to influence the behavioral responses of visitors. The speculative employment of visual, tactile, aural and olfactory environmental stimuli is also aimed at affecting visitors on the visceral level, much before it can be cognitively interpreted. I will discuss the use of fragrances through mechanisms such is the ‘affect infusion model,’ and also sound patterns as an important aspect of environmental design in terms of stimulating visitors’s affiliative behavior in theme parks. Successful, cumulative layering of emotional and functional environmental clues facilitates the creation of desirable total experiences in visitors, and it directly translates into the creation of optimal environmental images, moods, and traits. –