PingMag is a dual-language (japanese-english) online magazine design based in Tokyo. It recently ran an interview I made with Brendan Walker, an ex-aeronautical engineer whose company Aerial specialises in the creation of ‘thrilling experiences’. The published article was changed slightly from the one I submitted, so here it is as originally intended:

Jo riding the Tristar

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 or as a test driver for Ferrari? I was reminded of that when I first met Brendan Walker, who started his career designing jet fighters but now works with some of the world’s top theme parks, designing future rides I talked to Brendan, who New Scientist dubbed the “Thrill Engineer,” about home-made fireworks, his fascination with aircraft crashes, and the difference between being thrilled and being frightened.

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 doing computational fluid analysis. I got frustrated at how long it took to design a plane, typically it can be 20 years, which is why and left and went to study Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art.

When I applied I had a fairly standard idea of what ID was, but whilst I was studying I was tutored by Tony 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, although I did some ID work, I was already tending towards art projects, particularly large-scale kinetic and electromechanical sculptures. And I quickly realised that 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 in different ways, 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 5% of people have a defect in the D4DR gene which means they have to go to greater extremes to find their thrills, but it doesn’t help you design better products. So rather than take that approach, I began looking at how people created experiences which were thrilling for themselves.

Deathslide at the Airphoria 2 performance

And how did you do that?

Well, 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 50 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. And amazingly, I found that there were almost always some common features: for example a thrilling experience has to have an element of visceral stimulation, 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.

So is there an over-riding definition of thrill?

Yes, I think so. 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

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Self portrait in an air disaster

Tell me about the “Walker Thrill Factor”

Okay, well, having made all these interviews I was starting to wonder, what the fuck have I done?! I’m meant to be a designer and I’ve spent the last six moths coming up with a definition of thrill! I had reams and reams of paper of transcripted interviews, but where did 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. And that’s the Walker Thrill Factor.

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 rollercoaster 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 was first published in The Taxonomy of Thrill

Okay, so you’d come up with a definition of thrill and an equation to explain it; how did you get people to take you seriously when you didn’t have any actual experience designing rollercoasters?

Around the time I published “The Taxonomy of Thrill” I was also designing some interactive exhibits for the Wellcome 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.

Interactive exhibits at the Wellcome Wing © Science Museum, London

But I suppose everyone has heard of the phrase “thrill factor,” and there was me somewhat naively claiming to know what it was. Because up until then, rollercoasters 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 got a lot of press and TV attention.

Miami Trip, Thrill Laboratory 1; Oblivion, Thrill Laboratory 2

At the same time I also approached Tussaud Studios, who designed rides for Alton Towers, and managed to get a meeting with Simon Opie who was the general manager. 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 be able to destroy my ideas it would be him! He gave me a real grilling, but at the end of the meeting he ordered 13 books to give to his creative directors, so I realised I had done okay. That led to a contract with Tussaud Studios where I led a team looking at future attractions, 5 - 10 years in the future. The project went well so I was invited to become a permanent consultant, and when Tussauds were 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.

Brendan adjusts a rider’s monitoring equipment, Thrill Laboratory 2

So are you actually sitting down drawing, designing rollercoasters then?

These days I am, yes. 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, its more like creating storyboards of the way a ride will feel. In fact I was watching some Alfred Hitchcock DVD’s and in the extras 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.

Storyboard images from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho © Universal

Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, is there a difference between something that’s thrilling and something that’s exciting?

Well 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 though, is lets say in a horror film, the tension and fright is 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.

I know that you still continue to do artistic projects. Why are these important when you’re being paid to do commercial projects?

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 piece called Airphoria, which was inspired by a Korean Air crash in Epping Forest, East London.

Installation, from the Airphoria 1 exhibition

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 the limits change, and the audience is generally much more open to things which would be classified as bad taste if they were 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 eye witness 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.

From the Airphoria 1 exhibition

It’s strange though isn’t it, that it’s okay to make a film about an aircrash, which people will go to see for entertainment. But it’s not acceptable to be entertained in other ways.

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 emerges. 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.

Hybrid of animal and aircraft

There’s also a really strange coincidence where previously in Epping Forest there had been an old fairground. In the First World War it had been converted to a 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, whereas a family on a day out at a theme park would probably just find it a bit sick!

Drop From the Sky, proposal for a theme park ride

So does the artistic work ever cross over into the commercial side of things?

It can do yes. The art practise informs the design, it allows me to try things out and see what works, and occasionally take elements and use them in my commercial practise. But in 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, proposal for a theme park ride

Thanks Brendan, I’m sure we’re all glad you’re designing rollercoasters rather than aircraft now! If you want to be part of Brendan’s future research, you can visit Chromo11 and tell about your own thrilling experiences

All images © Brendan Walker unless otherwise stated.