Kari Novatney engineers fun. From a fifth-floor office festooned with puppets, children's books and the odd rubber chicken, she can watch her visions materializing below. A huge entertainment complex -- sort of a cross between an offbeat theme park and an over-the-top shopping mall -- is springing up in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens. And Novatney is eager to go out and play.
It's her job, after all.
At 30, Novatney is vice president and general manager of Metreon, a Sony-owned complex that opens this summer in the city's booming South of Market neighborhood. Filling a four-story building near the convention center, it's a high-energy jumble of movie theaters, videogame arcades, specialty shops and restaurants. The really exciting part, though, is a trio of theme-based attractions -- fantasy worlds inspired by literature and designed to ignite the imaginations of kids. Of these, Novatney's favorite is a magical playscape based on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. It's rigged with surprises, says Novatney, who led the teams that created the Metreon attractions.
"By stepping, pushing and pulling on things, or even by talking, the kids make things happen," she explains. "It's all about trying new things." She can't wait to run along the Wild Things trail among birds that swoop, flowers that spin and goblins that erupt into silly raspberries.
All in a day's work, of course.
Novatney, who majored in industrial engineering, started her career at the Walt Disney Co. in Orlando, dreaming up hobby-based vacations for grown-ups and gauging their appeal by surveying Disney guests. She discovered, for instance, that a weeklong scriptwriting camp would be a hit, whereas a science camp would flop. "I learned so much, and it was great fun -- I say that word a lot, don't I?" says Novatney, who in fact does.
From Disney she moved to consulting, honing her analytical skills on a series of wildly different assignments. For Jim Henson Productions, she identified the age of Miss Piggy's core audience (4 to 8). For Chicago's Navy Pier, she determined the optimal size of the ferris wheel (at 150 feet in diameter, it's the world's second largest). And for the Baltimore Zoo, she devised a plan to boost attendance (one suggestion: make it easier to see the elephants).
Entertainment analysis, says Novatney, is "a combination of quantitative and qualitative research, benchmarking against the best, watching the trends and going with your gut."
So what does a fun engineer do in her downtime? "My idea of fun," says Novatney, "is spending time at home making a nice dinner for my husband and me."
Now, that's entertainment.
