This week i have refocused on my main problem statement for this research project. How can we use design to create better customer experiences at festivals? Initially when i started this project I wanted to look at how can we take many of these frustrating experiences we might have at a festival or event, like long queues or noisy people, and eliminate them through design. However this week I have reframed this thought, because in many ways it is impossible to completely eliminate many of these frustrations. They can be minimized through smart solutions adapted too a specific venue and enough staff for example. But if you are organizing a festival for thousands of people, this is an issue you will always face, so how can we ensure that people still leave an event and only remember that it was an amazing experience, and not that they had to wait 10minutes in line before they got their beer.
The article “The festival customer experience: A conceptual framework” (Fernandes, Krolikowska, 2023) is the basis for a lot of my insights this week, as it touches on a lot of the themes i am researching. “The customer experience from an event perspective has been defined as “an interaction between an individual and the event environment (both physical and social), modified by the level of engagement or involvement, involving multiple experiential elements and outputs (such as satisfaction, emotions, behaviours, cognition, memories and learning), that can happen at any point in the event journey” (De Geus et al., 2015, p. 277).” This is how they define the customer experience in the article, and it is quite complex and many factors to keep in mind.
This is the conceptual framework that the article suggest, and i think it is a quite good one, as it encompasses the main factors for great customer experiences. Many festivals focus on having great line-ups and cool stages, so the event design is very good, but they have forgotten the social aspect of a festival, the customer experience is then not as good. My interview with Karoline also confirms this, one of the main feedbacks they had gotten for the NEON festival was that the area was not satisfactory. So even if the lineup is great, the holistic experience is incredibly important for festivals. Audience members have high expectations to modern festivals, and they are often paying hundreds of euros for two or three days, so they want a complete experience.
One of the other aspects the article highlights is the value of embedding design into planning and controlling the customer experience. “Festival organizers can benefit from tools such as the visitor journey method, blueprinting, journey mapping and the experience design board to help create emotionally appealing customer experiences and bring about real design changes to enhance the event experience”. Not enough research exist in this field of how it can be well utilized, but from my own experiences with events and the field of design, I also believe that many events could greatly benefit from a more user centered approach.
Another article i read this week was about the real time tracking of audience members to be able to adapt events to better the experience. This article is a bit old, from 2013, and a lot has happened since then in the space of gathering and using data, both the ability to do it and the laws around it. But there was one very interesting example from this article about predicting audience members aggression levels between two very aggressive metall bands at a festival, and playing a pre recorded 10 minute long art piece to give people something to watch and to calm the audience before the next band. They saw a lot less people going to the first aid and the audience where much calmer when the next band started, as the “rage levels” where calmed down instead of continuing to build. This I think is another good example on knowing your audience segments and catering to them, to give them safer and better experiences.
That was all for this week :))
Fernandes, J.V. and Krolikowska, E. (2023), „The festival customer experience: a conceptual framework“, International Journal of Event and Festival Management, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 23-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEFM-11-2021-0083
Brown, Steve & Hutton, Alison. (2013). Developments in the real-time evaluation of audience behaviour at planned events. International Journal of Event and Festival Management. 4. 10.1108/17582951311307502.
Graham Berridge. 20 May 2020, Designing event experiences from: The Routledge Handbook of Events Routledge. Accessed on: 17 Dec 2023
