by molly.gibson -

Interaction Design – EMG Sonification as a Tool for Functional Rehabilitation of Spinal-Cord Injury

I chose this paper as i find very interesting the more experimental applications of technology like Max, and how the principles we are learning in this class can be applicable in a wide range of fields.

The paper is an exploration in to how EMG sonification can be used for rehabilitation. The main idea is that spinal cord rehabilitation is based on a lot of repetetive and boring movements for the user, and it can be hard to stay motivated to keep executing the same movements. The implementation of complex music generation based on muscle signals has two quite interesting possibilities, one is to give feedback to user for motivation, and the other is to give direct audio feedback if the correct muscles are being activated or not. This is particularly interesting if this is later developed to be something patients can use at home after they leave the hospital. The authors discuss this and the importance of continuing to practice after leaving the hospital. The audio feedback can be particularly helpful for younger children who are harder to motivate to continue with the same repetitive movement over and over. A small disclaimer is that this paper only describes the implementation and possible use of a musical feedback for rehabilitation, they do not include research on how effective the approach is, as it is a project still in development.

Another part of this paper i found very interesting is the accessibility of the technology that the authors implement to conduct the research project. Even with my fairly limited knowledge about Cycling 74 Max and computer signal processing I can understand the basics of the implementation they have done. They base the signal processing on a software tool called Body Brian Digital Musical Instrumental that is specifically developed for researcher that do not have a background from neuroscience or signal analysis.

Through this software and their own objects in Max they have created an interaction model, which i think is very interesting. It is a very cool example of how the principles we have learned so far in this class can be implemented in quite complex ways, and use the music and audio generation for quite complex prototypes. And also applications in fields quite far outside what we normally consider in our work. The development of a complex interaction interface only based on sound and muscle signals feels quite futuristic, but it is also understandable how they implemented. The only thing that I miss in the paper is a more information about how the users interacted with and experienced the technology.

by molly.gibson -

The Festival User Experience: A Summary

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.

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

Continuing into the more and more specific problem solving of event design, I really like this framework from my ninth blogpost.

Source: Chiehyeon Lim, Kwang-Jae Kim, Experience Design Board: A tool for visualizing and designing experience-centric service delivery processes, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Volume 45, 2018, Pages 142-151, ISSN 0969-6989, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2018.07.021.

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.

by molly.gibson -

Experience design in Festivals

For the ninth and second to final blogpost i want to look at service design and user experience design in festivals in a broader perspective. The two main articles i have read for this post research are “Experience Design Board: A tool for visualizing and designing experience centric service delivery processes” and “Adapting Service Design Thinking to Local Festivals”. As this will be final post with new research in this project, i wanted to see what i can find about actual implementation of service design in the spaces that i am looking at. From the first article this quote “A customer’s experience is influenced by his/her interactions with contextual elements, such as servicescape elements and service employees, as well as by the presence and behaviors of other customers” stood out. Mostly because it strongly supports my findings from the last two posts. The interaction with the physical space, other attendees and and workers/services at the festival are universally important in experience design. The framework they propose in the article shows the interaction between these fields. In this board they have analyzed a theme park service and visualized it.

I think it is very interesting how it ties together with the other article i read this week, where they talk about the important for storytelling when creating a festival. As you can see at the bottom og the figure here, it is structured like a story with a beginning, middle, climax and end. This is also supported by my insight from last weeks user survey. The individual elements of services, organization, toilet queues are incredibly important for avoiding negative experiences. However if you want to create memorable and positive experiences you need a story and human interactions.

A simpler way of thinking about the user service experience is in this theater model, which i think is a very good mental model. It is applicable to many different types of events and it highlights the intersection between all the people that are required to create good experiences, including the end interaction between customers.

But how do you actually achieve these results that you want, in the second article they come up with 4 major points that I think all designers will find very familiar.

  1. Deep understanding og target group in early-planning stages
  2. Building mutual trust with local stakeholders
  3. Establishing stories of the region
  4. Utilizing prototyping tools

This article is based on how to user service design when creating local festivals which typically have government backing and are organized differently than for example a music festival. However i think the points still stand.

To end the new research part of this project i think that my main finding is that there is still a lot of blank spaces when it comes to user experience design specifically for festivals. Next post i will summarize to my best ability what i have found and learned, but i still think that is one of the core findings.

by molly.gibson -

User Survey of Festival Attendees

To continue the thread from last week of better understanding the user at festivals, I made and sent out at short survey. I sent this survey to my colleagues at FH Joanneum, but i also shared it with friends and colleagues in Norway. The survey consisted of seven questions, and the aim of the survey was to understand what frustrated user, other than aspects connected to the actual performing artist. I also decided to keep the survey very short, to get a glimpse into the problems and receive more answers, rather than a longer more detailed survey, that is harder to get people to fill out.

The seven questions included in the survey where:

  • What is your age (multiple choice)
    • 18
    • 18-25
    • 25-30
    • 30-40
    • 40+
  • How often do you attend festivals (multiple choice)
    • 3+ times a year
    • 2-3 times a year
    • 1-2 times a year
    • 1 time a year
    • Less than once a year
  • What is your main motivation for attending festivals (multiple choice)
    • The artist playing
    • The festival site
    • Other cultural events hosted by the festival
    • Other:
  • What are the main issues you have faced before attending a festival
    • Buying tickets
    • Organizing transport
    • Organizing sleeping situation
    • Other:
  • What are the main issues you have faced while attending the festival
    • Long queues for food and drink
    • Long queues for bathrooms
    • Dirty bathrooms
    • Difficult to get into the festival grounds
    • Hard to navigate festival grounds
    • Other:
  • What issue would you say negatively impacts your experience at the festival the most
    • Here you filled in your own short answer
  • What aspects of festivals, other than the musical artist, positively impacts your experience the most?
    • Here you filled in your own short answer

Results

I am very happy with the results from the survey, as it gives good insight into the issues facing users. I have received 60 responses to the survey, which even though it is not a very large sample size it is enough to see some patterns. However there are some important factors to consider from the responses.

  • 63.3% of responders where between 18-25, 31.7% where 25-30. So almost all of the responders are quite young
  • 13.3% go to festival 3+ times a year, 13.3% go 2-3 times and 43.3% go 1-2 times. So most responders are also quite frequent festival goers

This means that my results will be skewed towards the issues and motivations that face younger and more frequent festival goers. My project has been going more and more in the direction of these types of festivals, so i still think that these results are very valuable for me, but it is still an important factor to remember.

Before the festival: the main issues that people face are Organizing transport (45%), Organizing sleeping situations (50%) and buying tickets (28.3%). These are three very concrete issues that people face, however that i are primarily issues that are resolved by the time you attend a festival, and they did not show up as issues once people where at festivals. For future research it would be very interesting how often these stop people from attending, but that was not the focus of this survey.

While attending the festival: The biggest issues people faced where Long queues for food and drinks (60%), Long queues for bathrooms (53.3%), Dirty bathrooms (41.7%). However Difficult to get into festival grounds was an issues that only 8.3% responded to, so this is a much smaller issue than i first believed when i started this project. Hard to navigate festival grounds was also an issue for about (16.7%), however this would be extremely dependent on the type and size of festival you are attending, so it is harder to conclude generally with this.

When asked what negatively affected people the most at festivals, responders to the survey could write their own answers. From the answers i created 8 categories

  • Festival grounds: 11 people
  • Other People: 10
  • Weather: 5
  • Food/Drink: 10
  • Waiting: 13
  • Sanitation: 7
  • Other: 3
  • Universal design: 1

Weather and how other people behave are hard for a festival to control, but the spatial organization of festival grounds, Food/Drink, sanitation and waiting are all things that are within the control of the festival. So these are areas that can be greatly improved.

For what positively impacts the experience the most the results are a lot more clear, here i found 4 categories:

  • Festival grounds: 16
  • Other people: 31
  • Food/drinks: 4
  • Activities: 9

So here Other People is without a doubt the most important thing for positive experiences, the answers here where mostly about fun with friends, hanging out at camp, meeting strangers, vibes. I think therefore that one of the most important thing a festival can do is how do you create those positive meetings between people. A festival can get away with not the best queue system for beer, or long lines for bathrooms if the vibes and the energy that people have together is really good. However i think there is a line somewhere, at some point the food, sanitation and festival organization can get so bad i ruins for the vibes. This is something i wish to continue to look into.

That was the results from this section of research.

by molly.gibson -

Human Interactions at Festivals

Long time no see blog. To pick up again the project for the last couple of blogposts i have decided to continue to look directly into the research about the festival experience. I realized that i started this research in a bit of an opposite direction than what is recommended as a designer. We should first find our users and research them, find their problems, and then try to find solutions. However i knew that there are many issues at festivals, and went straight to looking at possible solutions, with out clearly defining what i was looking for.

Therefore the focus if these lasts blogpost will be on defining and figuring out what i actually want to solve. One of the main articles i have focused on this week has been “Tourist-to-Tourist Interaction at Festivals: A Grounded Theory Approach”. This article is focused on how person to person interactions negatively and positively impact the experience at festivals, and why this is so important to look at. One of the main take aways from the article is that these Tourist-to-Tourist interactions are a overlooked part of research on festivals, but a very important part of the festival experience, and good interactions leads to higher likelihood of repeat customers.

This article is based on research conducted at the Midi Music Festival in China. Even thought this study is based in china which is culturally very different from the west, this article is relevant for me. As described in the article “The Midi Music Festival (Midi) originated from the underground rock music scene and has grown to pioneer the music festival industry in China. Midi has been considered the Chinese “Woodstock” as it contains many western festival characteristics (e.g., rock and pop music, outdoors, camping, alcohol) [52]. Midi is the largest and longest-running non-government music festival in mainland China.” Therefore i think the insight that for many the personal interaction with other festival goers can be some of the most impactful at a festival. But what are these interactions and how do you design for them?

The article defines three types of TTI interactions at a festival

  • Entertainment: Hanging out at your campsite, playing music with each other or for each other, partying with strangers
  • Mutual assistance behavior: Helping new festival goers that are lost, picking someone up that fell down in the crowd, sharing your water etc..
  • Conflict: Pushing at stages, noisy neighbors in camp etc.

So how should a festival design for one type of interaction, but can avoid conflict as much as possible. The article presents two main factors that impact the TTI, the festival scape and the social landscape. The festival scape are the physical impacts: so weather, spatial layout of the festival grounds and the musical performances. The social landscape is a bit more diffuse and hard to get a handle on, but this is the perception of the social “vibes” in the crowd. But is also effected by things like crowd density and emotions.

The article proposed this conceptual model for how TTI works at a festival, and i think this is a very interesting way to look at it. From my own personal experiences i also believe that the human interactions you have at a festival can be the most meaningful and memorable.

This was all for this week, and next week i will continue to explore what are the motivations and gains of the attendes at festivals

Tourist-to-Tourist Interaction at Festivals: A Grounded Theory Approach

Sun, Huan & Wu, Shaofeng & Li, Yanning & Dai, Guangquan. (2019). Tourist-to-Tourist Interaction at Festivals: A Grounded Theory Approach. Sustainability. 11. 4030. 10.3390/su11154030.

by molly.gibson -

The Festival Customer Experience

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

by molly.gibson -

Nudging Festival Attendees

This weeks blog post will be a bit shorter because of the workload this week. I want to continue on the the theme of nudging, and reflect a bit about how it might be utilized in a festival setting.

However first i want to reflect a tiny bit around the ethics of using nudges. Nudging as technique has also gained critique for being social control and that it can be unethical. This however is mainly in the context of using nudges in design of public spaces, and by public officials. In these cases, as a member of the general public, you do not really have choice to interact with these or not. This is nuanced debate with no clear answers, however i will not delve into it in this project. The spaces i am focused on are not public spaces, and audience members can choose to be there or not, and also if they wish to return.

From the article that last weeks blog post was primarily based around, one of the key issues in utilizing nudges effectively, was evaluating them. Which to most designers seems a no brainer, iteration and user feedback is essential to most of our processes. However this might not be as simple if you are a part of festival staff that is only hired for the festival and move on to other projects and jobs after the festival is complete. So systems to effectively evaluate your nudges would have to be in place, before even starting to think about which ones you could try. However i had a discussion with Karoline who i interviewed two weeks ago, and from the festival she had worked on, evaluations after the festivals was implemented in at least two of the larger festival she had worked on. This is a very small sample size, but it suggest that at least larger festivals have systems in place to evaluate how well everything went, and these could be extended to nudges.

In my research this week i found the article “How nudging inspires sustainable behavior among festival attendees: A qualitative analysis of selected music festivals”. This is an extremely relevant article for my research, as i looks directly at the unique aspects of festivals in implementing nudges and changing behaviors. As the article is focused on sustainable behaviors most of the concrete suggestions are not relevant for my research, but the are still some very interesting findings.

Key findings:

  • The relationship between the festival attendees and organizers influence how easily the attendees respond to prompts and nudges. A more personal relationship makes it easier to for attendees follow instructions.
  • Larger crowds where people are more anonymous are harder to nudge
  • Expectations and communication beforehand of the event can have a great effect.
  • Sanctions and consequences for negative behaviors do not have a great effect when people are feeling anonymous in a crowd
  • Creating a sense of inclusion in to the group and as a part of the festival is key

These are the findings for this week, and i want to continue into this realm next week.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/10/6321
by molly.gibson -

Nudging: What is it and how can we use it to better design venues

This week i have refocused on a topic that appeared in my second bloggpost: nudging. Nudging is a technique that many UX designers are already familiar with, as it is a much discussed and sometimes controversial methodology. My primary source of information will be the article “Optimising Nudges in Public Space: Identifying and Tackling Barriers to Design and Implementation”(Bandsma et.al). This article explores what nudging is and how it can be implemented more efficently in public spaces and urban design. I am interested in exploring how it can be used in the context of venue and festival design.

Let us first explore what nudging actually is. Nudging as a defined term was first introduced in the book Nudge (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Suntein. They defined it as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”. So it is about adding or changing things in the physical space to alter behavior, and often with a focus on the subconscious decision making processes. This can for example be adding lines on the ground to remind people to not speed or reminding people what others do and what is the social norm in a situation. However nudging can sometimes have very limited effects, or work counter to what they are supposed to. This is what the article that is my main focus for this week is about.

From the article these are the main nudge tools that exist, to create effective nudges.

Nudge toolsDescriptionNudge category
SimplificationMake information more straightforwardEducative nudges
FramingDeliberately phrase information so that it leads to a particular decisionEducative nudges
FeedbackProvide direct and personalized informationEducative nudges, Incentive nudges
Place/group attachmentAppeal to feelings of place attachment or group bindingEducative nudges
SaliencyMake a code of conduct more/less visible in public spaceEnvironmental nudge, Incentive nudges
Influence physical effort or financial costsMarginally influencing the amount of physical effort or costs to conduct a behaviorEnvironmental nudge, Incentive nudges
Change option outcomesMarginally influence the outcomes of behavioral optionsEnvironmental nudge, Incentive nudges
No action defaultStandard choices lead to an outcome, unless individuals explicitly opt outEnvironmental nudge
Prompted choiceForce people to actively make a decision, without prescribing what they should decideEnvironmental nudge
Injunctive & descriptive normPrompt information about what most important others do or approve/disapprove ofSocial reference nudge, Educative nudge
Refer to opinion leaderAsk opinion leaders that are respected/trusted by the target group to disseminate informationSocial reference nudge, Educative nudge
Commitment strategiesPublic commitment that individuals will make a decisionSocial reference nudge
(Table 1, Bandsma et.al).

One of the key factors of efficient nudging is to understand the underlying biases and context that lead to a certain type of behavior, and create a nudge that counters this behavior. From the article these are the main barriers to creating effective nudges, this is based on semi-structured interviews with dutch city planners.

BarriersDescriptions
Design barriers: Barries in the data collectionIt is difficult to identify the subconscious cognitive processes underlying the target behavior
Overwhelming complexity of human decision-making, as behaviors are the result of many (interrelated) factors
The (cultural/demographic/social) heterogeneity within the target group
Assumptions that behavioral theories cannot help in tailoring a nudge to public space
The use of strategies that are unlikely to provide an understanding of the target behavior
Design barriers: Barriers in how behavioral theories inform nudge designNudging is implemented to practice with it or out of curiosity
Assumptions that behavioral theories do not significantly improve the effectiveness of nudges
Lack of clarity for which policy issues nudging can be effectively applied
Potential mismatches between the identified cognitive processes and the nudge
Contextual barriersPreferences among colleagues/stakeholders to implement particular policy instruments
Policy guidelines leave little opportunity for experiments with nudging
A lack of time to properly design a nudge
(Table 2, Bandsma et.al).

I think many of these obstacles are very relevant for design of festival spaces as well, but i think also there are some unique aspects to the festival venues that make them very well suited for nudges. The main issue would be properly understanding and implementing them to target certain cognitive behaviors, as most people who work in festivals are not city planners or have extensive knowledge about behavioral psychology. However there are some areas that i think make festival very well suited for this. First and foremost many festival grounds are built from the ground up to accommodate the festival, which give a unique opportunity to build nudges into the area. As well as festival tend to cater to a certain user group, which gives a lot more homogenous group then users of most public spaces. There is also a lot of time that goes into design an area, and opportunity to properly evaluate what did and did not work in previous years.

Another aspect is that there are often a lot of unwanted behaviors at these types of events, littering and public urination are the ones come to mind. Particularly the aspect of trash management at many festival is a huge issue. Therefore it there was a way to implement effective nudges that reduce this, i think that would be very interesting for many festivals and music venues.

Next week i want to continue to explore how nudges can be implemented into physical spaces, and by extension festival grounds and venues.

Koen Bandsma, Ward Rauws & Gert de Roo (2021) Optimising Nudges in Public Space: Identifying and Tackling Barriers to Design and Implementation, Planning Theory & Practice, 22:4, 556-571, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2021.1962957

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-risk-regulation/article/nudge-and-the-manipulation-of-choice/D1ED64479FF868BD79FFE90E76A4AB54

by molly.gibson -

Interview with a Festival Organizer

My research this week is based on an interview I did with Karoline Rolfstad. She has worked as an arena coordinator at several large Norwegian festivals with up to 18,000 attendees. I had a quick and informal chat with her about what she perceives as the main challenges when organizing a festival area.

Based on her experience, the main concerns for audience members are the two essentials: beer and access to restrooms. These are the areas where audience members would feel the most frustration if they were not properly organized. One of the key factors here is the visibility of options. People dislike waiting in lines, but they are also reluctant to search for other areas that sell drinks further away. Having a very long bar where the audience could easily see where there was available bartenders had proven very efficient at several of the festivals she had worked at.

Another key insight was that signs that contain text and icons are much more efficient in directing audience members in the right direction, for example to find the toilets, then only text. (Toilet →) is a better sign the just following (Toilet) signs in the area. In the context of festivals its also important to remember that audience tend to be affected by alcohol in varying levels, which makes it even more important to ensure that it is a close to impossible to do the wrong thing.

For the people working the practical aspects are the most important. In this case one of the main issues for people coming to work in the bars and around the ares, was where they could safely leave there things. Lack of access to areas to hang coats and keep bags where there is no risk for anything being stolen is often overlooked when building up a festival area from the ground.

This was a short summary of what i learned from my conversation and many interesting insight to take with my into the next week of research.

by molly.gibson -

Airport design and nudging behaviors

This week, my main focus has been on exploring other fields of design that might provide relevant information for my topic. I started by looking into airport design, as it is a field that fascinates me and has potential applications for my research.

When designing modern airports, there are two main goals: efficiently moving people through security, check-in, and other practical tasks, and maximizing revenue by encouraging shopping once passengers are inside the secure area. I can draw parallels between this and the concert music venue experience. The venue wants the audience to quickly and efficiently pass through ticket checks so that they have more time to spend inside, purchasing drinks and snacks. However, it is easier to find information about what airports need to do and why, rather than how different airports achieve these goals and what strategies work best.

One thing I discovered is that airports use spatial design to guide passengers and help them navigate. For example, large art pieces in different airport terminals serve as landmarks and help passengers distinguish between different areas. Additionally, using clear and distinct colors on carpets and walls provides passengers with visual cues about their location.

Through this line of thinking, I came across another interesting concept that I believe is relevant to my project: nudging. Nudging is the unconscious way of signaling to passengers to make the correct decision in a given scenario. This approach can be employed in various ways to steer people towards making the right choices, without explicitly instructing or prohibiting certain behaviors. I find it particularly intriguing to explore how this approach can be applied in a music venue.

Overall, these findings have opened up new avenues for further research in my project.

Sources:

What Are the Airport Design Standards That Must Be Met to Develop an Effective One?
https://www.smithsdetection.com/insights/60-seconds-with-desmond-lian/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190430-psychological-tricks-of-airport-design¨
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140917-how-to-trick-terrible-travellers
https://inudgeyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/OP-ENG-What_is_nudging.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926580523002005
https://simpleflying.com/how-airports-are-designed-to-optimize-passenger-flow/