Since the description of the project in my first blog post my research has taken a lot of twists and turns. My primary goal at the start of this was to better understand concert venues and live entertainment, and the pain points it brings with it. However my research has led this project into festivals, and how festivals are organized. It still how interaction design and design thinking methods can be utilized, but i needed a stronger focus and clearer objective. Festivals became this focus, as they pop up in one place for only a few days to maybe a week, and that brings with it a lot of very interesting challenges. I also decided to go in this direction out of pure personal interest, articles and research about festivals where what i found the most interesting, and therefore the ones i ended up using the most in my research.
I somehow ended up starting this whole project in the completely wrong direction, i started with a lot og research into concrete solutions to a problem i had not clearly understood or defined. Therefore i am going to start with what i learned at end of the project, and end with what i learned in the start.
So what are the issued that users face when they attend a festival? What are the pain points that people need solved, and maybe even more importantly, what makes festivals great? Sometimes it is easy to only look at all the problems you want to solve for the user, and forget to see what do we know works, and why does it work? My insight into the users was partly from my survey and partly from research articles. The main insight from this was that there are a lot of things that people experience as negative and frustrating at festivals. However the absence of these frustrations are not necessarily what make an amazing and memorable experience. Responders highlighted bad restrooms, expensive food, poorly organized venues, long queues as the points that negatively affected them the most. However the things that positively affected them the most where the human interactions, great concerts and general in, if the “vibes”, where amazing. So to create a truly amazing festival experience both of these things would have to be considered.
So. how do you do this? How do you create great customer experiences at festivals? I think one of the reasons this topic fascinates me so much is that it is a combination of logistics, problem solving, well implemented strategies and fun, creative, solutions. The conceptual framework from my sixth blog post i think is a very good way at looking at the problem. It shows how a great experience is a interplay between the social interactions between people, digital solutions and the event design.
Continuing into the more and more specific problem solving of event design, I really like this framework from my ninth blogpost.
This is in many ways the same model as the one above, but it shows a bit more clearly the interplay between the different stakeholders in the planning and execution. In the start of this project i conducted a interview with a festival organizer. The insights from that interview also align with all of my other findings around festival organization. However it seems that the knowledge was more based on practical learning and training, rather then based in theory. It is not right to draw any conclusions based on one interview with one person, but it does seem that evidence points in that direction. This does not mean that the information and skills that they have are bad or wrong, inversely i would say that there is a lot of amazing skills and knowledge spread around that is not organized or accessible to those maybe starting out in the field.
Lastly what are the actual concrete strategies that can be implemented to solve a lot of the logistical experiences at festivals? This brings me back to my first blog post and topics, airport design and nudging. One of the key strategies i found from airport design was the physical distinction between different areas to make it easier to navigate the airport. Adding artwork, colors or other identifiers to clearly distinguish different areas are also a very good strategy when designing large festival spaces.
Retrospectively I could have spent more time looking into airport design, but i became quite fascinated by the implementation of nudging as a strategy. This is one of the main strategies i have found that are concrete things that can be implemented to solve the problems you often see at festivals. However there are a lot issues with this, as well as the ethical implications. Implementation of nudges at festivals is an area where i could find very little research, so there is a lot of room for adding. The different types of nudges and how these are implemented are discussed in depth in my fourth and fifth blog post.
In the start of this project is still did not have a very clear picture of what i was trying to solve. I knew a lot about the challenges i faced when attending a concert, and was therefore interested in people flow and the strategies involved in this. Somehow i still think this strategy worked and I am very happy with my outcome in the end. I have learned a lot about research and ended up with at least a bit more defined project.
So how du you create amazing festivals?
- Understand the interplay of your venue, digital solutions and your users
- The social interactions between people are as important as concerts, food, toilets
- Spatial layout of festivals
- Have good weather
- Implementation of design thinking create effective planning processes
And lastly there is a lot of room for research into how it actually works to implement these strategies and the consequences it might have.
