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 -

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.