I have continued working on the potential supporting graphics this week, primarily to have something that is more testable. And also try and work with the presentation of information so that i requires less previous knowledge of design thinking. I think the double diamond is for a designer incredibly self explanatory, but that is not the case for everyone else.
I started with splitting the double diamond into two separate graphics, to also make it easier to work with one at the time, and tried to make the headlines show the order in which the documents work. I then collected all the potential questions that should be answered in the middle section, and tried to show how they altogether become the overall concept
The second double diamond that is more about developing the concept, and for a festival that would be all the actual organizational challenges of planning. The first quick sketch is the one below, however i decided that this was a bit chaotic way of presenting it.
The next iteration of the planning and development stage, and what should be done in this stage can be seen below. I think this one ended up being more organized and clearer to follow. The next step will be to refine these prototypes even more so they are vectorized and easier to work with.
This week I have spent trying to refine the two potential aids from last week. They are still hand drawn, but I have worked on refining the content and making them more testable. The first graphic is the classic double diamond, but with suggestions of which activities should actually be included in the phases, so that it is easier to use for people with no background in design thinking.
The concept phase is where someone developing a new festival should be thinking of the higher level and more conceptual goals and reasonings. Why is this festival unique and should be made? What is our community and environmental impact and goals? New festivals should have clear set of guidelines and values for the actual development if they want to be successful long term.
The second graphic I have made is more a guide of who the main stakeholders in a festival are, and how they interact with each other. Here I have included location as a stakeholder, which might be a bit strange, but from my research festivals that work well within the environment they are placed are often successful. A location brings a set of unique opportunities and challenges, and using these two enhance the experience for users makes great festivals.
I also wanted to highlight the local impact of the three key stakeholders as a consideration that must always be included when making decisions. How a festival can give back to the community they are placed in, and how they positively or negatively impact locals and businesses through the actual festivals can be key for a festivals success
The continuation of looking into my case examples led me to a bachelors assignment from the University of Kristiania in Oslo (https://kristiania.brage.unit.no/kristiania-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2460345/BCR3102_3456.pdf). This is a case study of the Vinje rock festival, and it asses the factors that have made this festival successful. There are many factors that play into making a festival work, and one of the main factors is that it has to be adapted to the location and community it is in.
Having a healthy financial festival that runs for many years, it is important with good ticket sales, but also local partnerships, sponsors and volunteers. A festivals ability create and maintain these relationships is key for its financial success. This as well as connection to the local community the festival is being held in, particularly if it is a smaller indie festival starting up, without backing from a large corporation. Bigger festivals might have larger initial investments, but a smaller festival would have to build from the ground up, and local businesses, leaders and banks are key to give the flexibility that might be needed for a festival to survive.
Another key factor for festivals are their location, a lot of locations can be transformed to cool and unique festival experiences, but their might be a lot more cost and effort for some compared to others. Choosing a location that already has some infrastructure, but also the “look and feel” that you want to achieve can keep costs down. Vinje Rocks unique location is a huge reason to why it has become so popular, but also because they have solved a lot of important logistics around transportation, overnighting and food for the attendees.
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.
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.
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.
Deep understanding og target group in early-planning stages
Building mutual trust with local stakeholders
Establishing stories of the region
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
