Thinkwell emphasizes a non-hierarchical creative culture where all team members contribute ideas to foster innovation. The document discusses how immersive experiences in theme parks and collaborative, themed events enhance guest participation and address their creative impulses. Additionally, it highlights the importance of incorporating audience feedback into the design process to create meaningful experiences and encourage guest ownership of their stories.

1. 1

2. 2
A lot of companies talk about their “creative culture”,
and at Thinkwell, it boils down to a simple statement:
good ideas come from anywhere. We strive to not be a
top-down hierarchy; there’s no name over the door and
every team member is encouraged to explore and
participate, at every level, at every point in a project.
If we’re going to design innovative experiences, we need
to have cultures and processes that allow people to do
that - to flex their creative muscles and dream big in
ways that haven’t been done before. So that thinking
extends to our workspace. Sure, lots of companies have
casual Fridays and ping-pong tables, but at Thinkwell
we encourage teams to use their skill sets to create all
kinds of non-client facing projects.

3. 3
Halloween has become a thing of legend at Thinkwell. In
addition to our amazing costume contests, departments
have started to collaborate to create our own haunts —
entire conference rooms have been transformed into
story-driven immersive walkthroughs, teased for weeks
before Halloween through internal network viral videos
and in-office ARG-style scavenger hunts.

4. 4
And during the Winter holidays, departments compete
by transforming their entire work areas into highly
themed immersive holiday celebrations.
This all started very organically — not an edict from top
down, but rather something the teams and departments
wanted to do, and we as a company encourage.

5. 5
This doesn’t mean it’s a wild-west free-for all, of course.
It requires a disciplined process and an innovative
leadership team that knows when to lean forward, and
when to lean back. Building trust with your team by
listening to them more is key — so they need to know
that you’re listening.

6. 6
This relates directly to how we view designing guest
experiences.
A more innovative guest experience happens when the
guest feels like we, as designers, are listening to them.
Everything we do is now a two-way conversation.

7. 7
Cosplay; indie music & filmmaking; indie games;
LARPing; DIY Maker culture, Etsy, Instructables,
Kickstarter — all of these online communities have
transformed every creative industry in the last twenty
years, and are starting to have a massive effect on what
we do in brick-and-mortar spaces.

8. 8
As content creators, we have to realize that it’s not just
about “user-created content” as a separate category,
nor about “us versus them” -- it’s about realizing that
your audience has a creative impulse themselves, and
that *your* stories will inspire them to tell *their own*
stories.

9. 9
Responding to stories by wanting to tell your own
stories is a basic human need:
I was here, this animal gave it’s life to sustain me,
i saw a rhino!

10. 10
It’s no different today.
The internet has just exposed it more.
And this kind of thinking — that our guests respond to
our stories by telling their own stories — has heavily
influenced the industry’s approach to experience design.

11. 11
Affinity days at theme parks were an early form of guest
creative expression and now there are multiples every
year — Gay Days, Dapper Days, Goth Day. All of them
reorient a park’s programming towards a particular
audience and their desires and aesthetic.

12. 12
Public parks, malls, and even theme parks have been
transformed through the augmented reality gameplay of
Pokemon Go and Harry Potter Wizards Unite.
Cedar Fair created an in-park RPG based on their
coaster themes, “The Battle for Cedar Point”, creating
an optional, personalized & gamified layer on top of their
existing park program.
Disney’s Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge turns your phone into
an in-world “data pad”, allowing you to accept missions,
gain a “reputation score” within the fiction, and build
your own character story.

13. 13
Games and role-play and guest agency don’t have to be
high-tech and digital, either — like Knott’s Berry Farm’s
Ghost Town Alive, which encourages guests to play
along with the story, leaning into their own creative
impulse.

14. 14
Technically, costumes usually aren’t allowed in most
theme parks — but “Bounding” is, which is styling street
clothes to be inspired by a particular character or IP.
Fashion blogger Leslie Kay coined the term in 2011
when she was “bound” for Disney World and wanted to
show all of her friends her outfit ideas on social media.
Now, it’s quite commonplace in all of the parks, and
even embraced and defined by Disney in their marketing
and social networks. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge explicitly
aims at letting the guests “tell their own Star Wars Story”
(hey, who’s that guy in the middle?)
This trend happened quite organically — I discovered
middle-school-aged Hogwarts “students” literally doing
their *actual* muggle school homework on the tables at
the Three Broomsticks restaurant. They went to the
school right behind the park, and would come over after
school to have a butterbeer, celebrate their fandom, and
pretend to be real students at a fake school with their
real homework. Let that settle in a bit.

15. 15
You’ve probably heard of the classic engagement
pyramid, used in all kinds of industries — we prefer to
reverse that pyramid into a funnel, using a swimming
analogy, “waders/swimmers/divers”, and it’s all about
making something that appeals to all three, but
ultimately about removing the barriers of engagement as
much as possible to seduce guests further into the
depths of participation.

16. 16
You’ve probably heard of the classic engagement
pyramid, used in all kinds of industries — we prefer to
reverse that pyramid into a funnel, using a swimming
analogy, “waders/swimmers/divers”, and it’s all about
making something that appeals to all three, but
ultimately about removing the barriers of engagement as
much as possible to seduce guests further into the
depths of participation.

17. 17
One of Thinkwell’s projects, the Center for Puppetry
Arts, directly invites guests into the history and craft of
puppetry by being puppet designers and performers
themselves, making space for all kinds of thinkers at all
ages, removing barriers to access and creating a space
for guests to be creative.
It could have been a very dry, didactic presentation of
stuff in cases, but our approach was rooted in 2 ideas:
that #1, the puppet is infused with meaning and life
through performance and #2 anyone can be a
puppeteer, we all have stories to tell. We knew from
observing guests in the existing galleries and, more
importantly, school children attending performances that
they all wanted to play with the puppets themselves. So
we found ways to do that, while respecting the artifacts.
There’s no one right way to make a puppet or tell a story
- just new ways of expressing an ancient craft.

18. 18
Another recent project that benefitted from this
disciplined process of creative innovation was Cartoon
Junction, one of six highly-themed immersive lands at
Warner Bros. Abu Dhabi, the world’s largest indoor
theme park.
With a polyglot audience of multiple languages and
cultural backgrounds, it was up to us to do three things:
introduce these brands to newbies (waders), strengthen
knowledge and engagement for casual fans (swimmers),
and offer deep fan-service for true believers (divers).
We did that here by not just slapping cartoon brands on
rides and colorful buildings — but rather by imagining,
“how did this town get here?” So we modeled it after an
early-century American town, anchored by an old house
that was probably the rail baron who first settled here —
that eventually became the creepy mansion that’s home
to our Scooby-Doo attraction. Amenities started to build
the town, like cafes and hardware stores and hair salons
and five-and-dime shops and vaudeville theaters —
where Bugs & Daffy got their start, and where guests
can volunteer and perform as other classic Looney
Tunes characters alongside the iconic duo. And once
the town was booming, it became a mid-century
company town centered around manufacturing — and
that company was, of course, ACME, where guests get
hired as new mailroom drivers, delivering ACME
products aboard the ride vehicles of Animayhem.
While none of this narrative is directly guest-facing or
explicitly told, the design is rigorously guest-focused, by
creating a strong narrative backbone and intellectual
architecture that feels true, and complete, and
encourages the guest to discover those details and
make their visits — and participation as citizens of
Cartoon Junction — all the more enjoyable.

19. 19
While it’s easy to default on innovation being about
technology, tech is only a means to an end. Focusing on
technology will always result in, eventually, outdated
technology.
At Thinkwell, we believe that a truly innovative guest
experience is equal parts GUEST as it is experience. As
designers, we have an opportunity to innovate through
that shared conversation with our audience, and by
observing trends of creative desires and impulses.

20. 20
At Thinkwell, we like to say that “you can’t make your
own theme park, but you can make the theme park your
own” — and you can be certain, your guests are doing
that whether you like it or not.
Make space in your experiences for guest agency,
guest access, and guest inclusion, and you will
land on innovation every time.