Vikki Jones, Edinburgh College of Art
This paper will explore how participatory futuring (Kozubaev et al., 2020) and speculative design methods (Mitrović et al., 2009) can be used to comprehend, reimagine, and map the challenges of imagining and implementing equitable and sustainable approaches to digital technologies and data in festivals and culture for artists, freelancers, organisations, and audiences.
It will describe the making of, and the festivals sector’s engagement with, FestForward magazine (https://www.festforward.org). FestForward is a fictional, speculative cultural magazine, written in 2022 and set in 2030, that aims to stimulate conversations in the cultural and festivals sector about how digital technologies and data-driven innovation might support equitable and sustainable futures for festivals.
All the content the magazine contains was developed through interviews, conversations and workshops with individuals and organisations working in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland region’s festivals and cultural sector. As such, both the magazine itself and the methods employed in its development act as lenses through which to consider festivals’ and festival workers’ interoperating definitions of sustainability; the perceived opportunities, challenges and hopes for preferable futures; and ideas for how festivals themselves can act as platforms for promotion of sustainable goals and values (Mair & Smith, 2021).
Imaginaries developed in the publication explore possible futures for perceptions of cultural value that include social, cultural, environmental, and economic definitions of sustainability for festivals. These include a local festivals currency, Fe$toons; hybrid and digital performance; an open festivals data cooperative and equitable models for fairer cultural work.
The magazine was produced by researchers from the AHRC-funded Creative Informatics project at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University, which is part of the UK-wide Creative Industries Clusters Programme, in partnership with Glasgow-based futures design researchers Andthen.
References
Sandjar Kozubaev, Chris Elsden, Noura Howell, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Nick Merrill, Britta Schulte, and Richmond Y. Wong. 2020. Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1– 15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376526
Judith Mair & Andrew Smith (2021) Events and sustainability: why making events more sustainable is not enough, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29:11-12, 1739-1755. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2021.1942480
Ivica Mitrovic,́ James Auger, Julian Hanna & Ingi Helgason. (Eds.). (2009). Beyond Speculative Design: Past–Present–Future. Foresight, 10(1), 4-21.
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Can festivals truly contribute to sustainable development? Events as prototyping opportunities for sustainability
Chiara Orefice, Senior Lecturer in Events University of Westminster, London
The proposed workshop aims to contribute to a new piece of research on the role that events play in fostering innovation in a sustainable way. The study does not focus on how event themselves can be sustainable, but on how they can become places and spaces for identifying and experimenting with new forms of sustainable living and doing business. A multi-disciplinary approach is adopted, which combines key concepts around prototyping derived from institutional theory and Service Design research, with a process-based view of sustainability. A multi-stakeholder perspective is at the core of the research, and in this instance the focus will be on the local community where festivals operate. The input of industry practitioners will be required.
The starting point to understand how events can become prototyping opportunities for innovation is to consider them as platforms creating a temporary ecosystem of stakeholders. These stakeholders jointly define and co-create sustainable innovation opportunities, which are specific to them and materialise over me and beyond the event itself (Orefice & Nyarko, 2023). When viewed as an ongoing process of value cocreation, sustainability not only transcends organisational boundaries to situate itself in an ecosystem of stakeholders, but it is constantly developing through complex interactions (Vargo & Akaka, 2012). This implies that it is not solely the responsibility of event organisers or hosts, but it is influenced by multiple actors, which in turn are shaped by their social belongings (Edvardsson et al., 2011). Therefore, to understand how events can contribute to sustainable development, we need to consider the role they play in the ecosystem that provides the context where stakeholders negotiate values and agree on a common agenda.
According to Service Design literature, a prototype is not only the template resulting from an innovative product/service design process, but rather an evolving object that binds different stakeholders together supporting participation and communication (Sanders & Stappers, 2014). Schrage (2013, p. 23) sees prototypes as a ‘space, place and medium where value is negotiated and exchanged’ and the driving force of the innovation process. Several features of events as prototypes, derived from institutional structuring literature (Schüßler & Sydow, 2013) will be proposed in the workshop with the aim to explore them with the help of industry practitioners.
UNSDG targeted: 11 and 12
Time required: 5 minutes for introduction + 15 minutes for audience consultation.
A short co-creation workshop is planned where several characteristics of events as prototypes for sustainable innovation will be proposed to participants. They will be asked to identify one practical example of how their festival delivers/includes one or more of these characteristics. If time allows, barriers and facilitators to the prototyping features will be discussed. The workshop itself is planned in such a way to include some of the prototyping features under consideration. Examples provided by participants will be posted online in a public co-created resource so that the conversation can continue after the event.
Reference list
Edvardsson, B., Tronvoll, B., & Gruber, T. (2011). Expanding understanding of service exchange and value co-creation: A social construction approach. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39(2), 327–339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0200-y
Orefice, C. & Nyarko, N. (2023). Sustainable value creation in event ecosystems – a business models perspective. In Smith, A. & Mair, J. (Eds). Events and sustainability : can events make places more inclusive, resilient and sustainable? Routledge
Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2014). Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign, 10(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183
Schrage, M. (2013). Crafting Interactions: the Purpose and Practice of Serious Play. In L. Valentine (Eds.), Prototype. Design and Craft in the 21st Century (pp. 19–28). Bloomsbury
Schüßler, E., & Sydow, J. (2013). Organizing events for configuring and maintaining creative fields. In C. Jones, M. Lorenzen, & J. Sapsed (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries (pp. 284–300). Oxford: OUP
Vargo, S. L., & Akaka, M. A. (2012). Value Cocreation and Service Systems (Re)Formation: A Service Ecosystems View. Service Science, 4(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.1120.0019
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Session 1B: Festivals and community
Chair: Dr Louise Todd
The potential of festivals for sustainable cultural & tourism development in the North Aegean islands