Designers enjoy their Inventionland digs

By ANYA SOSTEK
Monday, November 20, 2006
Clay Carlino works on a pirate ship. With cannons that shoot smoke. Surrounded by a moat. Inside a warehouse in an industrial park.

The ship is where Carlino captains a team that designs toys and games for Davison Design & Development, which designs products both for individual inventors and for corporations.

Another group of employees who work on infant products have their desks inside a 26-foot by 16-foot crib, under what might be the largest baby mobile in the world _ they're checking with the Guinness Book of World Records. And the folks designing outdoor equipment work out of a rock cave with a fake deer and a giant fish lure, while a tree house is home away from home for the team that designs tools.

The pirate ship, crib, rock cave and tree house are just four of the 15 fantastical sets that comprise the company's offices, now known as Inventionland.

The "magical wonderland" is the work of company founder George M. Davison, who believes that creativity is best fostered in an imaginative environment.

Many of the designs harken back to his childhood _ the concept behind the office is not unlike Story Book Forest at Idlewild Park, which Davison, 42, visited frequently as a child. "Growing up, it was one of my favorite places to be," he said, watching the indoor waterfall he built outside the rock cave.

"Why does it have to be that you can only get these feelings at an amusement park?"

The project started about two years ago, shortly after the company moved into an 80,000-square-foot warehouse. Davison found that Dustin Foust, an animator at the company, was able to translate the ideas in Davison's mind into sketches on paper.

To some degree, Foust, 27, thought he was just humoring his boss when he came up with the child-like designs for new 'offices.' "Who would have thought we'd actually build a giant boat?" he said. "It was being built and I still didn't believe it."

Most of the construction work was done in-house, to the tune of several million dollars. A Hollywood set designer who had worked on "Ghostbusters" and "Gremlins" flew in to consult on which paints not to use because they shrink foam, and other tricks of the trade.

Davison believes the creative environment already has borne results, and Carlino agrees. Despite the fact that toys sometimes fall into the moat around the pirate ship, he loves his new digs.

"If you lose that element of fun, you're not being as creative," Carlino said. The on-board lounge already has two 42-inch flat screen televisions hooked up to an XBox 360 _ all the better to stir the creative juices.

Davison attributes the design of the Hover Creeper, an air-compressor-powered mechanic's creeper for which the company won a 2006 Industrial Design Excellence Award, to the new creative environment in the automotive set, known as the Inventionland Motor Speedway, complete with a suspended racetrack for remote control cars.

The company also had less positive news this year, when the Federal Trade Commission ordered it to pay $26 million in restitution to inventors who said the company misrepresented itself.

In Inventionland though, where there's a balcony named Optimistic Outlook, that topic isn't discussed much.

"You'll never find a negative moment in Inventionland," said Davison. "It is not permitted. ... It's like a dreamland."