Science North is Northern Ontario’s most popular tourist
spot, bringing in over 300,000 visitors in any given year.^24 Not
bad for a city of only 160,000. It consists of two snowflake-
shaped buildings just south of the central business district.
Inside is a science funhouse that will delight pretty much any-
one. Science North is also involved in conceiving, designing, and
building traveling science exhibits. Currently they’ve created
a half-dozen or so traveling exhibits that have been featured in
over 100 locations around the globe. If you’ve visited a science
center or science museum there’s a good chance you’ve seen
one of their exhibits.
Katrina has a background in psychology and came to
Science North after graduate school as an intern and never left.
Her main job? She’s involved in evaluating the experience of visi-
tors. When research indicated that visitors would like to see an
exhibit focused on extreme sports, Katrina was asked to work on
the concept plan because of her background in psychology. She also
happens to love extreme sports, so she jumped right in. Soccer and
flag football are her core sports and she works out most every day:
kettlebell, weight lifting, boot camp. “Anything that’s super chal-
lenging,” she said with a smile. “People always laugh at me but
I always say when I work out that at the end of my workout, I should
feel like I want to throw up.”
As they built the exhibit, they soon realized that extreme
sports didn’t really capture what they wanted to describe. “We got
together in groups and would pick our favorite words to describe
the exhibit. They were things like ‘practice’ and ‘training’ and
‘perseverance’ and ‘motivation’ and ‘highly skilled.’ It was interest-
ing to see that it moved away from the idea of extreme sports and
moved into the idea that these individuals are in it for something
more than just the extreme part of it. They’re in it for how it makes
them feel and the intense training that it takes and the motivation.
It just creates a different lifestyle and a different way to think about
risks and a different way to perceive sports.”
That progression of thinking is not unusual. When many
people think about extreme athletes, they think about people who
are, in some ways, thoughtless. But the more you dig into it the
more you discover that for the clear majority it’s the opposite.
These are highly skilled professionals.
“These are amazing, thoughtful, purposeful people who are
not about the adrenaline rush,” said Amy Wilson, who is a video75 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge