South East Church, Visioneering Studios
Launching a vision into reality was something I learned as a Disney Imagineer working for Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), a company founded and run by Walt Disney himself. Here, I had a front-row experience to witness the creation of Disney's magic—as well as a direct hand in building that magic.
From the lessons I learned, I share these 10 that have shaped the culture at my company, Visioneering Studios. I believe these tips can help all design teams turn their church clients' inspired vision into reality.
1-enlist brand-telling
At Disney, they have a great history of beloved intellectual property to draw from when creating immersive story environments. This same principle, when carried over into businesses and churches, is called brand-telling. It's essential when designing a space to incorporate brand-telling so that the space not only complements a church's brand but also communicates it to everyone who experiences it. Creating a branded environment is about sharing an organization's ethos while showcasing its unique place in the world.
Mariners Chapel, Irvine, CA; Visioneering Studios
2-humanize design
Great design isn't just about making the most beautiful building, but it's also designing a space that understands an audience or customer. It's asking who they are, their needs, and their desires—taking all these things into account when creating the space. For example, when designing a children's area, you have to ask what will be fun for the child while building trust with their parents.
When designing a children's area, you have to ask what will be fun for the child while building trust with their parents.
3-build an emotional connection
When Disney's California Adventure opened, the front entrance was designed to be a giant postcard of California. The problem was guests had no emotional connection with Disney and these postcard places. So 10 years later, they had to re-imagine the main entrance into Buena Vista Street, a representation of Los Angeles as Walt would have experienced it in the 1920s. For churches, if their vision is about changing lives, service, and missions, shouldn't their spaces help tell that story by creating an emotional connection to those values?
4-focus on guest experience
Close your eyes and picture Disneyland. Did you imagine Main Street? Cinderella's Castle? Or maybe even Tomorrowland? Disneyland was designed around these destinations so that each land would transport the guest to a new world. At the center of that plan is something called the Hub. If you stand next to Walt and Mickey's statue, you can look into each of the lands and know where you're going. This clear and defined design drives the guests' experience and, when brought into the design process for a church, will help guests and members feel at home and comfortable navigating a space.
5-make sure no one feels lost
A positive guest experience, often building out of the previous lesson, starts with good wayfinding and signage. Just imagine for a second that all of a church's ushers or greeters didn't show up one weekend. What would the result be? Would parents be wandering the hallways looking for the kids' ministry? Would sleepy-eyed college students be bumping into the walls looking for coffee? Putting your clients first and understanding their needs and then designing to those needs through convenient things like good wayfinding and signage will go far in helping them enjoy the space.
A positive guest experience starts with good wayfinding and signage.
6-design for people to use it
Disney Imagineers run countless tests on "thru-put" (capacity), queue lines, etc. to have a thorough understanding of how people will interact with their creations. They do this to make sure that their spaces do what they intend them to do. A well-designed space must answer the question of “does your design facilitate what you intend it to do?”
North Central Student Center, Spring, TX; Visioneering Studios
7-offer budget-savvy perspective
Even Imagineers do not have an unlimited budget when they are designing. Good design, when paired with excellent design principles and an understanding of how to implement them, will lead to solutions that go above and beyond what your clients may have thought possible.
8-keep clients moving forward
Walt Disney said, "There's really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward—opening up new doors and doing new things—because we're curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Imagineers have embodied that ideal ever since as they have iterated and reiterated on timeless classics. The same should apply to the design of church spaces. Start small with, "Do the walls need to be painted?" Then open your eyes to the area around to ask, "Is this space so out of date that it's holding back the church's mission?" Keep your church clients' spaces moving forward by creating a master plan that will guide them through the journey while staying focused on their vision.
Start small with, "Do the walls need to be painted?"
9-take a generational view
When Disneyland was first built, it was the culmination of years of work by artists, engineers, and builders. Teams of people kept at work on the finances and building phased growth plans. This phased approach can lead to a generational impact for churches as they plan for growth from the start, carrying out each phase through the years as funding and need arise.
10-engender true collaboration
Disney Imagineers are a diverse group of people. Often they are multiple disciplinarians, but even they can't do everything alone. They're comprised of movie prop makers, animators, engineers, contractors, developers, musicians, artists, researchers, business people, and many others. As developers, designers, architects, AV consultants, integrators, construction managers, and general contractors, we must all work together to take church projects from vision to groundbreaking and launch to create mind-blowing solutions for our clients.
