Introduction to a Place: Test Park
Theme parks, being postmodern, not only speak to many audiences but also bring opposite values together in one place and present them as a normal pairing... the landscape in one of today’s theme parks often does more than simply recollect an existing myth; it creates popular culture’s new ones. -- Terence Young, Theme Park Landscapes
Test Park examines the test site, the creation of place, the unintended consequences, and the use of public test sites as a critical design tool. Test Park explores three test sites at various scales: Islands & Monuments; Corridors & Cul-de-sacs; Seeds & Genes, and forms of public engagement: politics, tourism, and participation. The paper constructs a place called Test Park from a collection of existing test sites found throughout the United States. Through a series of fictional narratives Test Park speculates the cultural implications of each site's public expansion. Each installment plays out the public test site, guiding the reader around their interactions with the rules, architectures, tools, and staff in Test Park. Test Park draws inspiration from tourist attractions and themed places like Disneyland – a series of real and imagined places brought together to form one new place. In Theme Park Landscapes, Terence Young describes how themed places can be used to unify disparate sites and bring speculation to life.
A theme park’s landscape gives form and narrative to a myth, but it also gives it a place. Typically the myth’s disparate parts do not coalesce at any one location but are scattered across the larger territory or in many media. A theme park melds these elements so that... the landscape coordinates and situates the ideal and the real, providing a context that presents a useful version of the myth, enhanced visually and aurally. The spatiality of the landscape in particular gives myth weight and force. The tale becomes truer and the place, by implication, better as the former gains spatial extension.
Utilizing real-imagined places like theme parks and test sites, Welcome to Test Park explores the creation of speculative test sites for research, mediation, and public engagement. Within the practice of critical design, the project proposes the reassertion of real-imaged places as public “platform[s] through which to question, contest, and reframe” emerging technology and cultural assumptions within our everyday lives.
Welcome to Test Park. The futures you see might be closer than they appear.