Introduction
The modern music festival is a locus of interaction between up to hundreds of thousands of people, communities, artists, vendors, musicians and technologies. Audiences may travel thousands of miles and invest extraordinary amounts of time, energy and money to attend festivals – and sometimes structure their lives around them. Festival fans will happily endure what can seem like a daunting array of environmental, physical, financial and logistical obstacles in pursuit of something intangible; a shared musical and social experience.
Problem
For festival-goers, music festival experiences span much longer periods of time than of the events themselves. Currently there are no models of music festival audience experience, and no service that successfully supports the ongoing activities of music festival experience. Few music festivals have the resources or incentive to provide substantial support to pre and post-event experience.
Goal
Despite increasing commercial demand for music festivals and the recognition of their social value, user-centered design methods have not been widely applied to music festival experience. My goal is to design solutions based on nuanced understanding of audience experiences that enhance meaningful, positive and engaging experiences for people and music festival communities, especially in the periods before and after events.
Literature Review
Topics
positive psychology, self-actualization
flow states (Csikszentmihalyi)
peak experience (Maslow)
the neuroscience of happiness
music psychology
travel, tourism
quality of life research
co-experience (Battarbee & Kokinen)
persuasive design (Fogg)
festival and special event management
festival news, reviews, blogs, social media
Lessons
Lasting happiness is built on learning to recognize happiness as it comes in the flow of life experience.
The unique experiences people have at music festivals can provide moments of learning as real, beneficial and impactful as any life offers.
Music festival experiences have longer-lasting impact than vacation experience given their correlation with peak experience.
ON HAPPINESS
“It’s really important to have positive experiences of these things that we want to grow, and then really help them sink in, because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become neural structure very effectively." - R. Hanson
ON MUSIC
“Wellbeing – a healthy sense of oneself, and pleasure in oneself – comes when your internal identity is broadly congruent with that which you find outside.
I believe this is a profound model of healthiness, and so it’s not surprising that we would seek out shared experience that matches our own internal aesthetic." - P. Robertson
ON AFTER A PEAK EXPERIENCE
“The person is more apt to feel that life in general is worth while, even if it usually drab, pedestrian, painful or ungratifying, since beauty, excitement, honesty, play, goodness truth and meaningfulness have been demonstrated to him to exist.”
“...this feeling of gratitude is expressed or leads to an all-embracing love for everybody and everything, to a perception of the world as beautiful, and good, often to an impulse to do something good for the world, an eagerness to repay, even a sense of obligation” - A.H. Maslow
ON ATTENDING MUSIC FESTIVALS
“Participants...reported feeling more positive about themselves, others and life in general as a result of attending a music festival. Indeed, for some participants the music festival experience was not only meaningful in itself, but gave meaning to the rest of their lives.”
“Music festivals don’t just contribute to ‘a transitory state of subjective well-being’ but also become ‘part of the way a person defines themselves’. - J. Packer and J. Ballantyne
Festival-Goer Profile
majority in their late-20s through early 40s
evenly-distributed mix of men and women, marital statuses
have disposable income available for festival tickets and travel
highly motivated to attend music festivals, actively engaged with music
usually attend multiple events per year
enjoy meeting new people and seeking out new experiences
