"Design Thinking a Festival Event"
It’s March and this is what we know: the Ghent Festival takes place in July. Between 1 and 1.5 million people of all ages will visit the Festival. They expect to see music, theatre, exhibitions, parades, fairs and much more. We have 1.500 square meters of space in the historic center of Ghent to play around with and a budget of about 50.000 euros. How do we design think our way out of this?
MICHEL VUIJLSTEKE
Designer, Namahn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvuijlst/
Michel Vuijlsteke works at Namahn. He has been doing all sorts of design since the 1990s.
13. The process
1: ideation
2: experience design
3: prototyping / testing
4: implementation
5: continuous evaluation & improvement
14. 1: Ideation
• Start with rough ideas from all over
• Expand in one on one meetings
• Report and share
• Bring in different viewpoints
• Lather, rinse, repeat until consensus
15. Starting point
• Something authoritarian, you’ll need an app to get
in
• Voting
• Receive messages
• Keywords:
Click Farm -Tripadvisor – webcams – Google Maps –Vivino
ratings – weather forecast – upload photos – booking.com
–Tinder
• Inspiration: 1984 – Black Mirror
17. 24 April, after a dozen one on ones
• Datakamp / Dataclan / Batadata
• 10 days of absurdistic authoritarian regime with
new technology and social media
• Focus on data gathering & privacy
• Both digital and analog components
• Gamification
• Separate track for children
• Datakamp / Dataclan / Batadata
• 10 days of absurdistic authoritarian regime with
new technology and social media
• Focus on data gathering & privacy
• Both digital and analog components
• Gamification
• Separate track for children
18. Analog + Digital
• Not exclusively analog, not exclusively digital
• Make analog things digital
• e.g. virtual suicide
• Make digital things analog
• e.g. Google “I am here” indicator, real-world Pong
19. Gamification
• Earn ‘internet points’
• Via Facebook?
• Give and receive likes, votes & reviews
• Follow via dashboard
• Who was here the longest? Who went to the toilet?
Who bought the most drinks?
• Most average person
• …
20.
21. Children
• Facebook is like a friendship book
• Collect friends
• Collect stickers & badges for achievements
29. Free / Basic / Premium
• Free users
• no RFID
• will be treated ‘badly’
• Basic users
• RFID bracelet
• will have a ‘regular’ time
• Premium users
• RFID + Facebook
• will be treated likeVIPs
40-50%
30-40%
15-20%
30. 18 & 24 May: analog design brainstorm
• Ca. 30 people
• Briefing about general concept
• Divide in groups of 5
• Brainstorm ideas
• What digital things can we make analog?
• What can we do with free/basic/premium visitors?
• How can we gamify things?
• Present 3 best ideas per group
• Discussion & feedback (“yes, and…”)
31.
32. Analog ideas
Analog agents - spam man – worm – analog virus –
golden shower – troll – app man – Office paperclip – anti
radiation guru – analog cell phone – analog selfie –
Google man – match table – Gili truck – poop rating –
peepshow – faceswap corner – Buienradar check –
stalkscan – accountant hack – Russian roulette – fact
check – time check – Zalando man – African lottery
winner – voyeurcam – tinder at entrance – habibi
challenge – siri quiz – translation party – who am I? –
Pierre-cam – greenkey wall – ISS photo –VJ Lamoot –
most average person – analog followers – adult 3D –
analog cookies – analog captchas – commons quiz - …
61. Status
• API: added arbitrary info,VIP concept
• Smartphone frontend: done
• Design: implemented
• Polls/multimedia: done
• Android app: done
• RFID scanning:
• Hardware arrived in Belgium
• Still at proof of concept phase
62. RFID scanning: decision time
• Remove all but the bare-bones functionality
• No lab coat with built-in PocketCHIP
• No LEDs
• No screen for visitors
84. Free / Basic / Premium
• Free users
• no RFID
• will be treated ‘badly’
• Basic users
• RFID bracelet
• will have a ‘regular’ time
• Premium users
• RFID + Facebook
• will be treated likeVIPs
40-50%
30-40%
15-20%
30-40%
15-20%
50%
96. The bad & the ugly
• Near disaster on the RFID scanning front
• Committed too soon to specific tech
• Deadlines were not met, promises not kept
• Plan B present, was not necessary in the end
• Drastically scaled back scope, brought in new
• All-volunteer team can be a risk
• Little ”leverage” on unpaid volunteers
• Entire project depends on Heroic Efforts
(and suspension of disbelief)
97. The good
• Virtually nothing went wrong
• The process worked
• met or exceeded agreed scope
• delivered on time
• within budget
• met (exceeded) performance and quality
• We got better every day
98. What we learned
• Focus on a clear concept first
• Frontload concepts
• Delay final implementation as much as possible
• Build a great team
• Roll with the punches
• Continuous improvement & feedback cycle
• It’s not done until after it’s done
103. 1: Ideation
• Start with rough ideas from all over
• Expand in one on one meetings
• Report and share
• Bring in different viewpoints
• Lather, rinse, repeat until consensus
104. Wouldn’t it be fun to do
something with the local
elections?
So it’s the end of March and this is what we know:
The Ghent Festival takes place between the 14th and the 23rd of July. Between 1 and 1.5 million people of all ages will visit the Festival. They expect to see music, theater, exhibitions, parades, fairs and much more.
We have 1500 square meters of space in the historic center of Ghent to play around with.
And a budget of about 50.000 euros.
When I say “we”, I’m talking about cirQ. cirQ is a production house that creates acts both big and small,
Things like the great snail race, where you can bet on which snail will reach the outside of the board the fastest
Or things like this Children Soup, a custom jacuzzi where kids can cool down if it’s too hot, or warm themselves when it’s raining, while eating healthy vegetables.
Or Marcel & Vicky, a dynamic DJ duo that plays at festivals all over Belgium and Europe
Or we can combine different acts and create a total experience. A short clip to give you an idea of the atmosphere. […]
You saw, amongst other things, a yodeling act, a one-legged man giving people slices of sausage off his leg and a vibrator race.Now, just in case that gave you the wrong idea: we’re not just about low-brow or absurdist things.
This is also one of the things we do – Refu-Interim is an employment agency for refugees, with a couple of hundred refugees deployed over the whole of Flanders.
This job agency was actually an aftereffect of what we did last year at the Ghent Festival. The idea was that the everywhere except Batahlan was a refugee camp, and that we were the only place where it was really safe. Batahlan was a sort of land of milk and honey run by Potential Belgians, and everyone could take refuge if they had the correct papers and if they followed the rules as laid down by the Potential Belgians.
It turned the refugee situation on its head –there was an intake interview in Arabic or Amharic or Pashtu for people who wanted to get in, a transit zone for people that broke the rules and were in danger of being deported, there were daily news reports, and mostly everything was run by refugees, or “potential Belgians” as we called them.
Batahlan was a huge success, we made headlines, me made people think about the situation in the world, we made an actual difference.
So: no pressure at all, this year. No pressure at all. :)
So it’s March 2017 and there’s about four months to go to the next Ghent Festival.
The outline of the story I’m about to tell you is probably not going to come as a big surprise. Here’s how we do things:
This looks straightforward, but as you’ll see, things can get a little more complicated when there’s different tracks running in parallel
The way cirQ works is there’s a small number of people working for cirQ full-time, and there’s a *lot* of other people that work on and off as volunteers.
The way this works is there’s always ideas floating around. Things we were going to do last year or the year before but didn’t get to do, things that weren‘t possible for one reason or another, or just plain ideas where we went “that would a great thing to try out”.
A very preliminary list of rough ideas is sketched out by Xavier and David at cirQ, and then they expand and refine the ideas in a number of one on ones.
Fast forward a month.
By the end of April and after a dozen meetings a consensus emerges.
We also reached a consensus about the way we were going to use the space we had
Fast forward another month:
But to recap…
We have three main design tracks
Fast forward another month:
We looked into a “standard” RFID solutions. There are things like mats you can lay on the ground to measure the number of people with a bracelet who enter and leave, and antennas that can triangulate the position of a bracelet, but that turned out to be too expensive and not precise enough for our purpose.
So we went with a lofi solution: raspberry pi and pocketchips with a standard USB reader
We looked into a “standard” RFID solutions. There are things like mats you can lay on the ground to measure the number of people with a bracelet who enter and leave, and antennas that can triangulate the position of a bracelet, but that turned out to be too expensive and not precise enough for our purpose.
So we went with a lofi solution: raspberry pi and pocketchips with a standard USB reader
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
End to end test
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
Datakamp is a well-oiled machine.
About 250 different people work for Datakamp during the 10 days of the Ghent Festival, with an average of about 100-120 people per day are working.
This needs to be rigidly planned and followed up – if only for insurance reasons.
planning
Fast forward another month:
Fast forward another month:
So it’s the end of March and this is what we know:
The Ghent Festival takes place between the 13th and the 22nd of July. Between 1 and 1.5 million people of all ages will visit the Festival. They expect to see music, theater, exhibitions, parades, fairs and much more.
We have 1500 square meters of space in the historic center of Ghent to play around with.
And a budget of about 50.000 euros.
The way this works is there’s always ideas floating around. Things we were going to do last year or the year before but didn’t get to do, things that weren‘t possible for one reason or another, or just plain ideas where we went “that would a great thing to try out”.
A very preliminary list of rough ideas is sketched out by Xavier and David at cirQ, and then they expand and refine the ideas in a number of one on ones.
So it’s the end of March and this is what we know:
The way this works is there’s always ideas floating around. Things we were going to do last year or the year before but didn’t get to do, things that weren‘t possible for one reason or another, or just plain ideas where we went “that would a great thing to try out”.
A very preliminary list of rough ideas is sketched out by Xavier and David at cirQ, and then they expand and refine the ideas in a number of one on ones.
So it’s the end of March and this is what we know: