Brendan Walker is an industrial designer, who has worked on theme parks, car desgin and recentley collaborated with sceientists to produce an experiement that was recodnised nationally.
He started to look into the idea of thrill and took experiences and tried to understand them to produce something himself, and he came up with the idea of Chromo 11(http://www.chromo11.com/). The research he conducted to produce this lead him onto publishing two articles known as Taxonomy of Thrill and Thrilling designs. Within his publications he produced a formula for thrill which was his drive to produce a machine known as 'The Portrait Machine.' This unique machine looked at language, heart rate and how much people would sweat during their thrill experience. He asked people to wear it on rides to discover the relationship between pleasure and pain. This machine was used in The Thrill Laborotory in 2007, where volunteers hooked up to the portrait machine were asked to ride 3 rides. The findings from this experiment were displayed in the Museum of Science and Industry.
His next project developed from his publication Thrilling Designs, where he focused on thrill derived from horror films. Brendan designed an electronical wheel chair and used elements such as forms volunteers had to fill in and smell, as well as unxpected parts to create anticipation, monitoring facial expressions, heartrate and breathing during the period of time in which they were watching the horror movie.
All Brendans thrill collisions and findings lead to produce a live reality horror show where he conducted a fake blog and fake academic reports, and created a character known as 'The sobbing boy,' - a made up ghost, to allow him to monitor people's reaction and body during the confrontation with ghosts. He sent 3 volunteers and 1 actor into 'a haunted coffe shop' in nottigham to produce a reality tv show.The experiement made its way into newspapers and onto national radio.
Currently Brendan is working on a reality TV show which starts on the 7th May known as " The House the 50's Built,"
I found this lecture very interesting, and the story of his work and how he has conducted such an exciting project and what he has produced from this was very inspiring. I think it also helps to highlight the importance of collaborating with other departments, as you can produce work that can be nationally sucsessful, which was also relevant in the Lauren Bowker lecture.
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