Audacity Week Challenge: Designing Wonder and Thrills
This was first published as an email newsletter (on 30th June 2025, photos added from 1st July 2025), sign up here to receive in your inbox next month! (Je rédige aussi une édition en français par ici, en général les articles sont différents)
It is hot in Paris! My phone even says it is an “Extreme High Heat Warning.” Not exactly ideal theme park weather, but there are worse fates, worse places to be, and after all theme parks do tend to be busy in the summer and high heat.
My monthly newsletter is borderline not even the right month at all. I aim to send it out mid-month, and instead I’ve been spending silly amounts of time apartment hunting. A full time job in addition to the rest of my work, even to the point that work took a backseat. The rental market is extremely tough in Paris and I am even more appreciative of how easy it was to find my current place when I moved back.
Long shot, if you happen to know anyone renting an apartment in Paris, please keep in touch. I’m not going to get into the details here, feel free to reply and I’ll happily do that. We’re meant to be moving asap this summer. We were hoping to find something and move next weekend but it’s not the case.
Let’s move on to something fun I’ve been working on and am doing this week with students at the end of their 5th year of studies. ISCOM, the institute for communications and advertising, organises Audacity Week as a fun and challenging last week of studies in a variety of tracks.
I organised one titled “Designing Wonder and Thrills,” I briefed the students this morning, they are set in groups and have to create a new immersive area, or land, of a fictional theme park.
It’s a design sprint week, and each team has to come up with concepts to bring their theme park land to life in five areas, one per team member:
An overall theme, the story, feel, and details of this new land
A star attraction, like a roller coaster and its features.
A food and beverage concept, along with menu items
A retail experience and/or merchandising with items visitors could buy as souvenirs
And finally some kind of live experience, like a show or a character, something special that you’ll only see in that place.
I also asked them to come up with an original theme, not based on any existing IP, and gave them specific rules about using gen AI images and videos (I’m testing, we’ll see what happens with that). My best-in-class example is Rookburgh in Phantasialand, in Germany. It’s an exciting and original steampunk aircraft flight themed land. It’s small, but packs a punch and is beautifully themed. The ride is a lot of fun too!
I’m encouraging students to create supports in a mix of physical and digital, the workshops during the week are going to focus on physical and analog supports: today we sketched and doodled (I hugely underestimated the number of pens needed, students don’t have pens whatsoever with them, not one) in a series inspired by the ‘Crazy eights’ exercise.
It is a simple format: everyone has a sheet with eight boxes, in which you sketch ideas. They did a round inspired by movies and tv series, and another where gave them illustrated cards from the board game Dixit as inspiration.
Tomorrow we’re going to the Jardin D’Acclimatation in Paris, a themed park and garden with a few rides. The attractions and rides manager is going to welcome us to talk about their design choices, and we’re going to test their brand new roller coaster, Le Défi du Dragon, built by Gerstlauer. Apparently it’s a cool new machine with a randomized circuit, it has four different settings, with forwards and backwards launches, a rotating track, and when you get on, you don’t know what of the four circuits you’ll go on.
I'm mixing chronologies given I published this yesterday via email, and today on my website and Linkedin. I will include massive thanks to the whole team at the Le Jardin d'Acclimatation, in particular Solenn Martin and Vincent Ciardi who were extremely generous with their time and attention for this student project, and thank you to ISCOM and Beki D for the opportunity to organise this!
Wednesday I’m bringing old magazines from my hairdresser’s and we’re going to do collages, it should be fun. They spend time working as teams, and then present their concepts on Friday morning. I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing what they come up with!
What else have I been up to?
I have been playing a lot of online board games with a couple of friends on Board Game Arena. Add me as a friend if you want to play some time! My user name is Hippowill.
I finished a 10 sessions long campaign of Blades in the Dark, the excellent tabletop roleplaying game by John Harper, in which you play a daring crew of scoundrels.
I had the chance of playing Brass Birmingham with a couple of friends on a Sunday afternoon, it is a brilliant strategy board game with an industrial revolution theme. I highly recommend checking it out.
I heard mixed feelings about the latest Mission Impossible, but I thoroughly enjoyed it! I saw it on a massive screen, a few snacks and it was silly and action packed as I hoped for. Is it a good movie? Besides the point. It does what I was expecting it would. And I couldn’t believe the first one with Tom Cruise was in 1996!
I’m working on a pretty big brand strategy pitch as part of a team, it would be awesome to win it. We’re presenting next week, wish me luck.
Thank you for reading, next monthly newsletter coming soon!
Willem
