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Brendan Walker - Professional Thrill Designer

Written by Matt Sinclair for pingmag.jp

Do you remember how, as a child, some jobs seemed so cool you couldn’t believe people got paid to do them? Like working in a chocolate factory, being a test driver for Ferrari… or did you ever dream about designing roller coaster rides? British Brendan Walker actually does just that! After designing jet fighters (!), he now develops rides for some of the world’s top theme parks. PingMag talked to Brendan about the delicate science of thrill when calculating arousal and pleasure.

Brendan Walker in his “Thrill Engineer” guise. Seriously! © Brendan Walker.

You’re a thrill designer! How on earth did you get there - was it the fireworks?

Yes, the home-made fireworks… I think they got me my first job as an apprentice at British Aerospace! Everyone else in the interview was talking about the differences in performance of various aircraft engines, whereas I spent the whole time describing how I built three-stage rockets by taking fireworks apart and rebuilding them. Maybe that should have been a warning, because I wasn’t really suited to do computational fluid analysis. I got frustrated at how long it took to design a plane: Typically it can be twenty years, which is why I left and went to study Industrial Design at the RCA.

What happened then?

When I applied I had a fairly standard idea of what ID was, but I was tutored by Anthony Dunne who messed my head up a bit by convincing me that industrial design can be about experiment and performance. So when I left the RCA, I was already tending towards art projects, particularly large-scale kinetic and electromechanical sculptures. What really interested me was observing how people reacted to the work. I was getting excited by watching other people watching what I had created. At the same time I’d been reading about these guys in Australia whose hobby was climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge illegally, and I started to realise that everyone experiences products differently - often in ways the designer never intends or predicts. So my work began to move towards investigating the psychology of how people experience objects.

Was that to do with the genetics of people who are thrill-seekers?

Partly, but that was already a well-trodden route. It might be interesting to know that five percent of people have a defect in the D4DR gene, which means they have to go to greater extremes to find their thrills. But, this doesn’t help you design better products. So, I began looking at how people created experiences which were thrilling for themselves.

A mind-blowing experience - for some. The death slide at the Airphoria: Terminal 2 exhibition. © Brendan Walker

And how did you do that?

Basically, I gatecrashed online discussion groups where people were talking about thrills. I started by taking random words, adding “thrill” to them, and entering them into Google to find out who was talking about these things. I remember “tennis + thrill” and “cooking + thrill” were two of them. I made about fifty interviews, ranging from one woman who was crotcheting her own wedding dress, to a man who was secretly a transvestite, with all these people talking about what made the experiences thrilling.
Amazingly, I found that there were almost always some common features: For example, a thrilling experience has to have an element of visceral stimulation. And it has to have elements of power and control - whether being in control or out of control -, and there is often a sense of being valued of how you think others perceive you.

Self-portrait in an air disaster, by Brendan. © Brendan Walker

So is there an overriding definition of thrill?

Yes. I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So, obviously, there’s an evolutionary driver - we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life, things have become confused - we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but actually I believe that we go looking for thrills because that’s when we have the greatest sense of being alive.

Very true. Now, tell us about the Walker Thrill Factor.

Having made all these interviews I was starting to wonder… I’m meant to be a designer and I’ve spent the last six months coming up with a definition of ‘thrill’! I had reams and reams of paper with transcribed interviews, but where would I go from there? And then, one day, I was out running with my dogs and I had a kind of ‘Eureka’ moment. I realised you could think of thrill the way I’d been taught to think in engineering. What I mean is that components of pleasure and arousal can be defined mathematically in relation to each other. That led to a hypothesis, a formula where ‘thrill’ is defined in terms of the amount of pleasure and arousal and the rate at which each one changes. That’s the Walker Thrill Factor.

Walker’s special thrill formula consisting of the amount of pleasure and arousal and its changing rate: the “Walker Thrill Factor.” © Brendan Walker

It’s not actually been proved - but it’s not been disproved either. And it’s become really valuable because, now, in my work, if I’m designing a roller coaster, for example, I can decide to reduce a person’s arousal whilst keeping their pleasure high, in readiness for the next increase in stimulation. I can talk with other people about why certain elements are placed at certain points in a ride, and we can discuss them from a shared understanding rather than just intuition or gut feeling.

The “Walker Thrill Factor,” first published in “The Taxonomy of Thrill.” © Brendan Walker

So, you’d come up with a definition of ‘thrill’ and an equation to explain it. But how did you get people to take you seriously when you didn’t have any actual experience designing roller coasters?

Around the time I published “The Taxonomy of Thrill,” I was also designing some interactive exhibits for the “Welcome Wing” at the Science Museum in London, and they picked up on the mathematical element of my work. To be honest, I hadn’t intended it to be a rigorous piece of scientific research, it was more like a rule of thumb I could use in designing interesting experiences.

Brendan’s interactive exhibits at the Welcome Wing… Photo © Science Museum

… of London’s Science Museum. © Science Museum, London

Everyone has heard of the phrase “thrill factor,” and there was me somewhat naively claiming to know what it was. Up until then, roller coasters had been designed with a mixture of intuition and experience to choreograph the ride - how does a barrel roll follow a drop, etc. - and g-force calculations. That can be done very accurately using computer simulations to calculate changes from positive to negative g, but it only tells you how arousing the ride is - it can’t calculate the pleasure. So, the Science Museum was interested to create some experiments where we measured arousal and pleasure, which would validate the hypothesis. That led to the first Thrill Laboratory, which actually got a lot of media attention.

Brendan personally adjusts an (excited) rider’s monitoring equipment. From the Thrill Laboratory 2. © Brendan Walker

At the same time, I also approached The Tussaud Studios, who designed rides for Alton Towers, and managed to get a meeting with general manager Simon Opie. It was actually really scary because, in “The Taxonomy of Thrill,” I had talked about my work in terms of scripting and choreography. Simon Opie was from a theatre background - he had worked on productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company – so, if anyone would’ve been able to destroy my ideas, it would’ve been him! He gave me a real grilling, but at the end of the meeting he ordered thirteen books to give to his creative directors. I realised I had done okay… That led to a contract with The Tussaud Studios where I led a team looking at future attractions, meaning five to ten years in the future.

Calculating the pleasure - equipped riders prepare for “The Oblivion”… From the Thrill Laboratory 2, Alton Towers. © Brendan Walker

The project went well so I was invited to become a permanent consultant, and when Tussauds was bought out by Merlin to become the world’s second biggest theme park group, I became a consultant for all their brands: Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, London Dungeon, etc. Within that work I bring a certain viewpoint and expertise, a methodology for understanding how to make their attractions more thrilling. And I’ve also taken that to other companies such as Disneyland Paris, where I’ve done similar work.

Impressive! Are you actually sitting down drawing and designing roller coasters then?

These days I am. In the beginning, my work was more conceptual, strategic. But recently, I’ve been getting jobs where I do have to design or choreograph the ride. I’m not designing what a particular ride might look like; it’s more like creating storyboards of the way a ride will feel. In fact, I was watching some Alfred Hitchcock DVD’s and in the extra features it showed some of the storyboards. They weren’t that well drawn, but really communicated how a scene should progress and how tension and excitement would build or drop off. That’s what I’m trying to achieve!

The original storyboard images from the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho. You surely remember that crucial scene… © Universal

Hitchcock is known as the ‘Master of Suspense.’ What would be the difference between something that’s thrilling and something that’s frightening?

In dictionary terms, the differences are very subtle. But by my definition, thrill has high levels of both arousal and pleasure, whereas fright has high levels of arousal but low levels of pleasure. In terms of pleasure, ‘fright’ is exactly opposite to ‘thrill’. What’s interesting is that, in a horror film, tension and fright are unpleasurable. But from that low point, the pleasure has to increase to get back to “normal.” It’s the release from fright which people find thrilling.

Besides your commercial projects you continue doing artistic installations. Why is that important to you?

It’s the opportunity for experimentation, I suppose. The last performance piece I did, at the Shunt Lounge in London, was part of an ongoing project called Airphoria, which was inspired by a Korean Air crash in Epping Forest, East London.

The imagined remains of an airplane crash… Installation from the Airphoria 1 exhibition. © Brendan Walker

You did an art piece out of an airplane crash??

I know there’s no way a theme park is ever going to commission a ride based on an air disaster. But when you call something “art,” then the limits change and the audience is generally much more open to things which would be classified as bad taste if they were made for pure entertainment. Especially in smaller, contemporary galleries, the audience is already on the fringes of what is commercially acceptable. So in this latest piece I was interested in eyewitness accounts of the crash, where people had described seeing a fireball coming down out of the sky and being fascinated and excited by it. Only when they found out it was an airplane crash did they become reluctant to talk about their feelings.

The crash… as art. From the Airphoria 1 exhibition. © Brendan Walker

Of course! It’s strange, though, that it’s accepted to make a film about an air crash, which people will go to see for entertainment, but it’s not acceptable to be entertained in other ways by it…

That’s right, and in Airphoria I’ve been interested in the possibility of recreating a visceral experience, a sense of thrill and euphoria which draws on the event of a plane crash before the feelings of guilt about those feelings emerge. What’s also interesting about the Korea Air crash was that the forest was a nature reserve, and a lot of deer and other animals died. So the next stage of Airphoria is to create mechanical fantasy sculptures which are hybrids of animal and aircraft, and imagine how survivors of a crash would feel about meeting those mechanical creatures.

Creepy, though: hybrid of animal and aircraft. © Brendan Walker

Creepy!

There’s also a really strange coincidence where previously in Epping Forest, there had been an old fairground. In World War I, it had been converted to barracks and a German plane dropped a bomb which destroyed the fairground and killed a number of soldiers.
There’s already an association between entertainment, aircraft and death at that site, and that’s an association which an art audience wants to know more about. A family on a day out at a theme park, however, would probably just find it a bit sick!

The next step in arty entertainment: “Drop From the Sky,” proposal for a theme park ride. © Brendan Walker

Most probably. But this association is weirdly interesting, indeed. So, does the artistic work ever cross over into the commercial side of things?

Yes. The art practice informs the design, it allows me to try things out and see what works, and occasionally take elements and use them in my commercial practice. But in the future I could maybe imagine a film about a plane crash, and a theme park wanting to build a ride whose marketing tied in with the film.. If it happened, I would definitely want to be the one who designed it!

“Backwards,” another art proposal for a theme park ride. © Brendan Walker

Thanks, Brendan. We’re kind of glad you’re designing roller coasters rather than aircrafts now… For you thrill-seeking folks, if you want to be part of Brendan’s future research, share some of your own experiences with Chromo11!