An in-office roller coaster may sound like a bad idea, but at least it’s a fun one

Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of a presentation and a co-worker distractingly whisks past the conference room on a roller coaster?

This is not your life, but it’s actually relatable for employees of Sweden’s The Great Exhibition, which unveiled the world’s first office roller coaster.

Yes, really.

There’s an actual functioning roller coaster inside an actual professional workspace — it’s ~200 feet long, 10 feet tall, named “The Frontal Lobe,” and dripping with “WTF is wrong with these people?”

Seriously, what were they thinking?

Well, first, it’s a marketing move: We fell for it and now you know The Great Exhibition is a creative studio, recently rebranded from PJADAD, known for its work serving Swedish brand royalty (Volvo, Ikea).

But the mini amusement park running through its Stockholm office may be more than a stunt, per Fast Company.

• Studio co-founder Petter Kukacka acknowledged that “even if there are a lot of cons… there is one big pro: That it is fun.”
• It’s meant to be a visual metaphor of the studio’s stated purpose: unpredictable, emotionally resonant experiences.

It was a labor-intensive metaphor: The bright red ride, constructed from four tons of steel over a year, cost ~$150k.

Perhaps most interesting, though…

… The project arguably goes deeper: Kukacka posits the ridiculousness of the roller coaster runs counter to the AI revolution.

• A wave of soulless, predictable AI-generated content “will make the world a more dull place,” he told Fast Company, and that’s hard to argue.

The Frontal Lobe then makes sense by making no sense at all — it’s not something a computer would ever do.

It boils down to this: Whimsy is human, creative expression is harmless, and this ain’t the world’s first office absurdity (hello, break room ball pit and multistory slides).

So go off, Swedes. Especially since we aren’t the ones who’ll be developing crushing headaches from hearing that thing rattle past our desks all day, every day.