Abstract
Co-creation
Trine Aagaard Pedersen og Signe Madsen, 10. semster Exeperince Design, Aalborg University, May, 2012
Northside Festival is a music festival in Aarhus which is in a rapid development. It has grown from 6000-7000 visitors in 2010 to about 22000-23000 visitors this year 2012.The foundation of the development are the three core values; user involvement, sustainability and innovation upon which most events and experiences are build.
In connection to our internship at InVio in2011, we have collected empirical material concerning the visitor experience at the festival 2011. Subsequent to this we have created several concepts for this experience on basis of co-creation theory. These concepts have been presented for Chris Kroer Jensen, who is the development executive at Northside Festival. This has resulted in the further collaboration with the thesis, where our task is to create a digitally supported experience product, which can be realized at the festival 2012. The focus for the thesis is therefore user involvement more particularly co-creation in the development of such a product.
The theoretic basis of the thesis is experience, experience design, event and more importantly co-creation. A combination of these conceptual clarifications and in addition with the empirical material and the requirements from Chris Kroer Jensen shall result in a co-creation model that the digitally supported experience product has to be created upon. The co-creation model is a product development oriented model that works with the iterative process we have chosen to use.
The essential part of co-creation is the involvement of different stakeholders in the development process of a product, a service etcetera and the communication between these stakeholders on ‘engagement platforms’. We also wish to incorporate stakeholders which in our case are representatives of the festival visitors. These representative users shall, together with us and the requestor Chris Kroer Jensen, create the formerly discussed experience product. This is done in creative workshop sessions where several different creative methods are used. The idea we choose in the final workshop is an idea that complies with both the festival core values, the theoretical basis concerning valuable experiences, the one that seems to have the greatest experience potential in the festival context and where co-creation is an incorporated part of the design.
The idea is translated into a concept description that explains the product in detail. Hereafter we make a rapid prototype of the product and test it on a new group of users, which also represent the festival visitors and we also show the requestor a film of the test. The knowledge we retrieve is used to make some final changes before realizing the product at the festival. However we make two examples of the concept, one more digital than the other but the experience is very similar. The least digital product is the one that is to be realized. The reason for this is some practical and economical restrains.
At Northside Festival 2012 we will investigate how the visitors perceive the product and what kind of experience it creates. This knowledge we can compare with the view of the experience we have designed the product fore and then see if there are similarities.
At last but not least we will reflect over the co-creation models utility in our development process and if it can be transferred to other creative processes.