Atomiq Design Group

I believe that what sets apart really great tourism locations or attractions, whether that is a visitor centre in a national park, a big thrill theme park, a fun waterpark or a casino in Vegas, is that whatever the experience is determined to be for an area or even the whole place, that it must be permeated to every facet possible. Whatever the “message” is that you are trying to deliver to your guest (fun, thrills, quality, value), it should be as complete as possible and not be interrupted by mismatched equipment, clash of colours, poor design areas or the “back-of-house” operations showing through to the public areas. A tourism destination may have the best natural wonder in the world or the best and fastest rides but if other aspects of the visit leave people with a bad feeling they will not return often, if at all.

The satisfaction of customers, guests or visitors comes from the TOTAL experience and interaction with staff and environment and that experience needs to be designed in every facet and not left to chance. Everything that the guest sees, experiences or touches becomes the factors of their experience and determines how they talk about a place to their friends and how often they return.

Ideally we get best results from “constructing” the guest experience on the basis of total immersion, quality of visitor experience and marketability.

Here’s a couple of links to great visitor experiences.
Dreamworld’s Claw

Islands of Adventure

Alice Springs Desert Park

Australian War Memorial

Jorvik Viking Centre

Atomiq Design focuses on a particular type of design that internally we call Experiential Design. I say ‘internally’ because it is a difficult area to grasp exactly what that means in a few short sentences. ED is all about how a person reacts to their environment and the experiences within it. That environment, and the elements that make up their experience, determine what level of engagement a person has. But more importantly for us, the level of positive engagement, or perhaps call it enjoyment, that a person has with a space. Simply put, if you as the owner or operator of a business or space are perceived to be responsible for providing that experience, a negative engagement will be bad for business and a positive engagement should have visitors wanting to return soon and raving about you to their friends. It may be that your visitors can’t find their way around easily enough, have a bad impression of your bathrooms, or just don’t find anything interesting enough to get excited about. These visitors will never ‘engage’ in a positive way and the chances or them returning or recommending you are slim.

We are often asked what ATOMIQ “does”. If I could simply say that we are Interior Designers or Architects the listener would easily slot us into a reasonably accurate preconceived notion of what that type of design involves, or at least the results and outcomes. But the real answer instead is not that simple. Although our team includes Architects and  Interior Designers, (also Industrial, Graphic, Visual Communication, Set and Urban Designers) we would not identify what we “do” by these titles alone.
Over the next few weeks I wanted to delve a little deeper into the type of design that interests me most and that, I believe, makes us unique in this part of the world.
I hope you can follow along.