Unlike natural resources and cultural resources where we can rely on the surrounding or the historical accumulation, the water park has to rely on enriched experience in entertaining activities, exciting infrastructures and equipment, as well as carefree exploration to catch visitors’ hearts. Only by achieving these factors can a water park offers the feeling of freshness and attraction.

Operating in this water park industry for decades, Dalang takes the chance in this article to share our ideas on four dimensions where they have significant impacts on tourists experience and tempo control; they are playtime, play space, emotional experience, and matching commercial services.

Play Time

The actual playing experience has an inevitable up- and downtime. To ensure the chance of repetitive visiting, most of the excellently designed water park cannot be fully experienced in just one day. Therefore, water park should create unique themes and routes to cater to the needs of different customers, so that to bring them an individualised emotional journey.

Dalang recommends some examples of those routes for our clients; they can be for parent-child friendly, romantic lovers, youngster, or adventurer. Each path contains various kind of water park amusements, which cater to the themes and the needs of specific groups.

Play Space

The overall layout of the water park can be defined and referred to as ‘one series logic, four-division logics, and four spatial forms’.

To further explain this idea, one ‘series logic’ means the design of a water park is better to follow a circulatory sequence, which is ‘commercial – amusements – core entertainments – amusements – commercial’. That large equipment will serve as the core, whereas the small and medium entertainments are the complements of the centre. Furthermore, commercial function supplements the gaps to form a relatively closed and systematic arrangement.

We can then separate the divisions into four directions, they are theme-specific, functions specific, theme and function integration, and spatial layout specific. For spatial forms, Dalang defines these four forms as annulus, round, group and dispersion.

Emotional Experience

Water park should also focus on guiding participants emotion and avoid negative feedbacks through a large variety of amusements and a comprehensive service system. Moreover, the team should actively arrange events and performance to bring consumers’ emotions to their up-time as well as to maintain this feeling as long as possible. The alteration between these events can extend the playtime during the day and complements the lack of activities and inconvenience caused at night.

Achieving a full day exciting experience is no longer an issue with a detailed and considerate arrangement of amusements and options for customers.

Matching Commercial Services

From the standpoint of commercial services, it can include things such as canteen, attraction photography service and performances. These services should be allocated around places where popular with tourists waiting and queuing. Such a reasonable arrangement offers a buffer for those facilities, extend the visit time and assist the smooth operation of the entire water park.

Conclusion

Overall, the core idea of developing an excellent water park should focus on consumer experiences. An ideal design of water park should encourage customers to stay for a reasonable period of time and go through the amusement one by one with specific sequences. The overall goal is to allow the positive emotion and feeling to be continuous, enriched and changing with rhythm.