All The Fun Of The Fair
Royal College of Art
19, 20 and 21 September 2007
If you've ever thought that watching people willingly submit themselves to the fearsome fun of the world's top rollercoasters was a little like watching acquiescent lab mice being ushered through an experimental maze, your suspicions might soon be confirmed.
Brendan Walker, Senior Tutor, Design Interactions, at the RCA and the world's only 'thrill engineer', is packing up his Thrill Laboratory and taking it to Alton Towers themepark this September for a series of workshops designed to expose the "science of thrill".
A series of willing volunteers will undergo individual Thrill Profiling, in which they will be briefed by Walker and his team of Thrill Assistants - a team of trainee doctors of psychology - in a bid to assess the experience of riding on Oblivion, the world's first vertical drop rollercoaster.
Riders will be monitored and filmed to capture everything from patterns of stress on individuals' heart rates to the physical effect of the G-forces they experience on the ride.
Their rides will be reviewed and analysed following a debrief with the Thrill Assistants; the thrill seeking tendencies of each participants will be assessed via psychological profiling using the Sensation Seeking Scale (an internationally recognised measure of 'thrill') and other techniques.
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