In my previous post Applying the Hero’s Journey I mentioned a recent college graduate who gave me great feedback on my first post on the subject, Framework: The Hero's Journey.
I first talked with Matthew Waller when he connected with me on LinkedIn in June 2021 after he read The Experience Economy, and having already decided he wanted to get into the experience design business (that would have been the end of his freshman year at Georgia Tech). We first met at the Masterclass on The New You Business that Jim Gilmore and I facilitated in Atlanta in March of last year, with Matthew asking a ton of questions and absorbing everything we had to say about going beyond staging experiences to guiding transformations. We also met last June at the World Experience Summit in London, where my opening keynote was on the Transformation Economy.
Highly recommended: Theme Parks in the Transformation Economy
So I was very happy to see recently that Matthew’s capstone project for his degree in industrial design was Theme Parks in the Transformation Economy: Evolving Beyond Experiences. It’s a wonderful project on how theme parks could move beyond staging experiences to (also) guiding transformations, with some great frameworks. I highly recommend it! And if you don’t want to read the whole thing, you can also read the abstract and see a short video here, or see this short summary on LinkedIn here.
My one issue is with Matthew’s work is that he set the year in which a transformation theme park would open at 2045, and I think it could happen much sooner than that, particularly with him going into the business himself. You can already see ways in which theme park experiences transform people, as I discussed in my recent post, Peak Experiences.
And oh, by the way – Matthew got an A.
Joe Pine
© 2024 B. Joseph Pine II