Wisdom begins in wonder.

-Socrates

Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park is an exhilarating gateway into the wonder of the wilderness. For many Disney Park Guests, daily life at home is a hectic routine lived out in spaces of isolation from the biosphere - offices, vehicles, classrooms, metropolitan sprawls. In the words of theme park visionary Joe Rohde, Disney’s Animal Kingdom is a “safe space” to build a deeper relationship with the vastness of the natural world.

A good many of Disney’s park Guests enjoy their tours sitting in strollers or carried in the arms of their loved ones. These little Guests may have limitations on what they can experience due to the taller barriers that maintain safety between Guests and the wild animals that roam the grounds. I came upon an opportunity to enable youngsters to engage in a more interactive park experience through connecting Smart Toy, a technology company funded by Disney’s startup incubator, with Walt Disney Imagineering to create an in-park companion plush we named Safari Mickey. Safari Mickey, powered by an Android “brain,” accompanies young Guests like a personal tour guide, educating and entertaining along the way. It does so by delivering contextual content triggered by communicating with beacons in the theme park as well as commands from the My Disney Experience mobile app.

As a strategy consultant I worked with Smart Toy and senior Imagineering creatives through a guided process of presenting the specific opportunity, developing personas and narrative use cases, solutioning the UX and technical aspects of a prototype, creating a live pitch demonstration, and preparing the table stakes terms of engagement for further product development.