Monday, April 28, 2014
Not Fade Away: Enriching Music Festival Audience Experience
This is the poster I presented at our masters thesis poster presentation this April to summarize my research insights and design direction for my design (Neverfade).
Monday, April 21, 2014
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
..and we have a prototype! meet neverfade
I'm now in the home stretch of this project - I've tested several concepts and scenarios, and am working on developing my final thesis presentation poster and testing my prototypes.
Getting this up and running on the iPad made me even more excited. I have three scenarios for which I've prototyped out the interactions.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Music Festival Research Summary Poster
I presented the following summary of my research process,
findings and conceptual models of music festival audience experience in
December 2013.
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
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
Back in gear and ideas are flowing!
Concept testing and initial ideas to come! I've received lots of great feedback and am moving forward with sketching out some experience solutions.
But for now, a video:
The Bonnaroo Experience from Already Alive on Vimeo
But for now, a video:
The Bonnaroo Experience from Already Alive on Vimeo
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Initial Concepts and Opportunity Areas
Although
music festivals are discrete events produced by different organizations, music
festival audiences always complete a similar set of planning and coordinating
tasks in order to attend them, and the anticipatory and reflective,
post-festival experience of attending any music festival is similar to any
other.
While there are similarities between the support services many larger music festivals provide to their audiences in the planning and anticipatory phases of the activity cycle, such as informational documents or instructional guides or FAQs, few music festivals provide substantial support to the post-event experience beyond a message board or an active social media page. The average festival producer must look instantly to the next year or next event in order to make the next profit and build the next experience for new customers – but the audience member’s experience with past events do not end instantly after they’ve returned home. Exactly what happens and how audience members feel in between events isn’t in the interests of festival producer, but to festival fans, these in-between times are almost as important as the events themselves.
Currently, there is no substantial umbrella service or online community that successfully supports the ongoing processes of music festival experiences of planning, communication, anticipation, reflection and sharing. There is no collective music festival knowledge repository, or any service that successfully connects and archives content relating to different music festivals for the larger music festival enthusiast community, over time. Generally speaking, once a festival has graduated from a future event to a past event, the content related to the event is lost to the wilds of the internet for festival enthusiasts to harvest or dig up on their own.
According to my research, a large majority of individuals who are interested in music festivals attend more than one per year, and many hope to continue attend them in to the future, even as they move through new life phases. This means there will be lots of anticipatory and reflective festival activity phases to support and many festivals attended over a lifetime. My design concepts will aim to support the ongoing experience with multiple music festivals and the times in between them, in order to make the act of attending music festivals easier, more meaningful, enriching, educational and ideally, even more fun for audiences everywhere.
Concept 1: Support three levels of sharing and reflection around music festivals: personal, small/social group, and larger festival community
Concept 2: Connect disparate music festival experiences with one umbrella service (making note of similarities and differences)
Concept 3: Support basic festival needs and activities for festival-goers with an online community (that encourages active participation)
While there are similarities between the support services many larger music festivals provide to their audiences in the planning and anticipatory phases of the activity cycle, such as informational documents or instructional guides or FAQs, few music festivals provide substantial support to the post-event experience beyond a message board or an active social media page. The average festival producer must look instantly to the next year or next event in order to make the next profit and build the next experience for new customers – but the audience member’s experience with past events do not end instantly after they’ve returned home. Exactly what happens and how audience members feel in between events isn’t in the interests of festival producer, but to festival fans, these in-between times are almost as important as the events themselves.
Currently, there is no substantial umbrella service or online community that successfully supports the ongoing processes of music festival experiences of planning, communication, anticipation, reflection and sharing. There is no collective music festival knowledge repository, or any service that successfully connects and archives content relating to different music festivals for the larger music festival enthusiast community, over time. Generally speaking, once a festival has graduated from a future event to a past event, the content related to the event is lost to the wilds of the internet for festival enthusiasts to harvest or dig up on their own.
According to my research, a large majority of individuals who are interested in music festivals attend more than one per year, and many hope to continue attend them in to the future, even as they move through new life phases. This means there will be lots of anticipatory and reflective festival activity phases to support and many festivals attended over a lifetime. My design concepts will aim to support the ongoing experience with multiple music festivals and the times in between them, in order to make the act of attending music festivals easier, more meaningful, enriching, educational and ideally, even more fun for audiences everywhere.
Concept 1: Support three levels of sharing and reflection around music festivals: personal, small/social group, and larger festival community
Concept 2: Connect disparate music festival experiences with one umbrella service (making note of similarities and differences)
Concept 3: Support basic festival needs and activities for festival-goers with an online community (that encourages active participation)
Monday, November 11, 2013
An interesting rant on the limits of data bandwidth and mobile device use at large music festivals:
"This all left me wondering – what if? What if there was an open pipe,
both up and down, that could handle all that traffic? What if everyone
who came to the show knew that pipe would be open, and work? What kind
of value would have been created had that been the case? How much more
data would have populated the world, how much richer would literally
millions of people’s lives been for seeing the joyful expressions of
their friends as they engaged in a wonderful experience? How much more
learning might have countless startups gathered, had they been able to
truly capture the real time intentions of their customers at such an
event?"
"But I also like to take a minute here or there to connect to the people I love, or who follow me, and share with them my passions and my excitement. We are becoming a digital society, to pretend otherwise is to ignore reality. And with very few exceptions, it was just not possible to intermingle the digital and the physical at Coachella." - John Battelle
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/04/a-coachella-fail-ble-do-we-hold-spectrum-in-common.php
"But I also like to take a minute here or there to connect to the people I love, or who follow me, and share with them my passions and my excitement. We are becoming a digital society, to pretend otherwise is to ignore reality. And with very few exceptions, it was just not possible to intermingle the digital and the physical at Coachella." - John Battelle
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/04/a-coachella-fail-ble-do-we-hold-spectrum-in-common.php
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