A draft conceptual model for a music festival - as experienced by an audience member

A music festival acts as a crucial space of displacement from the everyday, where many brains and bodies come together to attempt to sync through a shared, larger experience. The primary syncing agent is music, and the secondary syncing agent is the venue. Music provides a common thread to unite people and different social groups within the space of the music festival.

My model is the following: a music festival, as experienced by an audience member, is fundamentally about physical and social displacement followed by alignment (or re-alignment). This displacement affords a new space for learning both about the self, one's social network, other people, and of course, about music and the event itself. 

This model illustrates my theory that that the novel foreignness of the music festival environment  provides individuals with a a crucial space for growth and reflection - and can be an agent for positive personal change and increased music appreciation and understanding.

First forays into ideating. Solutionizing? Conceptual model interventions?

I think at this point I've developed a fairly nuanced understanding of the music festival experience from the point of view of audiences, the activities that surround them, people's motivations for attending them, and how they can enhance people's lives. I am working on developing visual/conceptual models for most of these areas, which should allow me to better explain them to other people.

So of course, the next step will be to step in to the spaces I've identified and start to build something that supports the experiences of people operating in those spaces (that is, planning for, talking about and going to music festivals!). 

My initial ideas are of course, currently web or app-supported experiences. (Unfortunately I can't ideate quite so far out in to the future where people aren't using their laptops or other personal computing devices to interact with the services I build.) The metaphor of a social media network comes quickly to mind when I think about how to begin to explain the service I'm starting to envision, but the the primary difference between the current social media models currently in use is that my idea, other than some planning and coordinating tools, will not be about the ever-changing present, not 'now-centric', but more about sharing, memory, personal reflection and of course, music. Ideally this will support the three levels of music festival (human) experience I've landed on conceptually, which are your personal experience, your immediate social group's experience, and the larger festival community.

Given these initial visions, I've started reading about design for behavior change and persuasive design (and have rapidly become a fan of BJ Fogg and The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab).

Also happy to announce that I'll be attending the International Music Festival Conference in Austin this December! I will be there to absorb everything I can from current festival industry professionals and get another hefty dose of the business and artist's perspective on the current state of music festivals.

Ideas never come out neatly the first time.

The Music Festival Activity Cycle

 

A Plethora of Sketches.

...and that's not even all of them.