Fasnacht World: An AI-invented theme park
We took a trip to Rulantica recently, just over an hour from Basel across the border in Germany, and it turned out to be one of those places that sounds faintly ridiculous on paper yet works perfectly in real life. The theme sits somewhere between Nordic myth and seaside fantasy, all Viking ships, carved dragons and swirling lights, layered on top of a very German piece of organisation where the lockers talk to your wristband and the queues hardly feel like queues at all. You drift from pool to pool and slide to slide, never entirely sure which zone you are in, only that the children are happy and your shoulders have finally dropped an inch.
On the drive back home, I asked the kids what sort of place they would like to visit next.
They didn't hesitate: “Fasnacht.”
The theme park that doesn’t exist
As far as I know, no Fasnacht theme park exists, which of course made it more appealing. So I decided to see what it might look like.
Using DALL-E, a bit of structured prompting and a set of visual references from Basel and other Swiss cities, I started to build a fictional place called Fasnacht World. In my head it was a compact indoor experience, perhaps fifty metres square, stitched together from all the odd, brilliant pieces that make Fasnacht what it is: the Waggis, the masks, the music, the confetti, the slight feeling that the adults are enjoying it even more than the children.
The scenes filled themselves quite quickly. Giant Waggis figures leaning out from high balconies. Räppli cannons sending clouds of paper over narrow walkways. A garden of illuminated lanterns hung low enough to feel close but high enough to feel a bit unreal. A monstrous clown head as the entrance, the sort of thing you walk through once, laugh at, and then quietly avoid eye contact with for the rest of the day. Threaded through it all, an endless loop of Guggenmusik, loud and slightly off-kilter, tugging you from space to space in a way no signage system ever could.
None of it was sensible, and most of it would fail a health and safety inspection, but as an imagined place it held together. It felt like Fasnacht turned inside out and built as a world you could step into.
Drawing Fasnacht without drawing
The process of making it became its own little project. I started with broad, loose scenes that simply asked for “an indoor Fasnacht world”, then tuned the results in stages, adjusting the angle of view, the height of ceilings, how busy the spaces felt and where the eye was meant to land first. I played with isometric perspectives versus straight-on views, brought in warmer carnival colours, softened the shadows so it felt more like a lived-in environment than a showroom, and kept nudging details so the spaces looked as if they belonged to each other rather than to different parks entirely.
At the end, I pushed the whole thing into a pencil-sketch style, not because I suddenly felt artistic, but because I wanted to see whether the idea survived without all the visual fireworks. Taking out the glossy finish stripped it back to lines, shapes and rhythm, and that was oddly reassuring; the place still made sense. It looked less like an advert and more like something that could sit in a notebook on a designer’s desk, waiting for a client brave enough to build it.
What struck me more than anything was how little “technical” ability I needed to get there. Three years ago I would've had to lean on an exhibit designer for every iteration, brief them, wait for rounds, feel guilty about changing my mind. Now I can explore the shape of the idea myself. I'm not pretending to be an illustrator and I'm certainly not doing anyone out of a job, but I no longer need to know my way round a stack of design software to see what a concept looks like from five different angles.
Taste still matters. Judgement still matters. You still have to decide what feels too busy, what feels flat, when the colours are fighting and when the whole thing has tipped over into theme-restaurant pastiche. The difference is that you can now play with those decisions directly, and you can do it even if you cannot draw more than a stick figure.
You can direct without drawing. You can shape a visual idea without having spent half your life learning Adobe Smartsuite.
Why this matters (even if you never build a theme park)
On one level this was just a parenting detour, a way of taking the kids’ throwaway “Fasnacht” answer and spinning it into something they could actually see. On another, it felt like a small shift in who gets to work in pictures.
If you work in communications, experiences, brands or any of the adjacent worlds, ideas often live in words for far too long. We talk about them in decks and documents and hope that somewhere down the line somebody will “make it visual”. Being able to rough out a world like Fasnacht World yourself, even in this scrappy, imagined way, shortens that distance between the thought and the thing. You're no longer limited to “imagine a kind of…” while everyone nods politely and fills in their own gaps; you can put a version of it on the table, then point and say, “More like this bit, less like that.”
What began as a casual conversation on the way back from a water park turned into an afternoon of world-building that I would happily repeat, with or without a brief. It was fun, which ought to count for something, and it was also practical. It showed that for those of us who think more naturally in stories than in sketches, there is finally a way to meet the visual side of the work halfway.
And if Fasnacht World never gets built, that's fine. It exists well enough on screen and in my head, and the next time one of the kids suggests a place that doesn’t exist, I'll probably end up doing exactly the same thing.
If you are curious about the prompt structure that sat behind it all, or feel like inventing your own impossible park, you know where to find me.