playdemic
SPREAD THE PLAY
“HOW MIGHT WE CREATE A PLAYFUL EXPERIENCE FOR 25.000 PEOPLE AT NORTHSIDE THAT ENCOURAGES THEM TO PLAY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FESTIVAL?”
CASE
Northside, the popular Danish music festival, challenged us to create a play experience for the three-days event. A minimum budget and a vast crowd of festival-goers to play together were the main two design constraints.
SOLUTION
Playdemic is a big-scale open-ended sneaky game that made 25000 people at Northside (secretly) spread play around during the three days of the festival in June 2018.
CONCEPT
Visually-attractive teasing and complementing messages in clothespins bring playfulness to everyone. By passing the pins, the participants are free to imagine and start their own games and interactions, and thereby become an active part of a big playful crowd. Seeing these common wearables around the festival also contributes to creating a sense of belonging to the festival culture.
Teasing and funny messages in pins are sneakily distributed among the attendees by the DSKD students.
The carrier doesn’t know the game, but the pin acts as an open invitation.
The pins, when discovered, constitute the immediate instructions.
It is as simple as spreading the play the same way: sneakily passing the pin on!
FROM SCRATCH TO 2500 PINS
Playdemic was an end-to-end research-based design project; we went from studying the festival culture to the real play intervention in 6 weeks.
Basis
The idea originated following the design principles based on Northside culture (food, music, clothes, language…) and the one we wanted to reinforce: play.
Goals
Our aim was to use the festival setting as a third space, a transition for the festival-goers between their past (less playful) self into a more playful version of themselves after the experience as a little reminder at the festival.
Principles
As freedom and ownership have a strong presence in Danish Play culture, the solution was a game that combined rules and open-play. It is not only made FOR the festival-goers, but with the possibility of being adapted BY them.
Tests
Several loops of prototyping and testing let us find the ideal materials and map the players we would most likely find at Northside.
Development
Different messages and designs of the pins made it an on-going experience. The game attracts both the ones that had already been part of it and the new players.
Self-production
We produced a minimum-budget 2500 pins that were sneakily distributed among the 25000 festival-goers during the three days of the festival.
IMPACT
An interview at Northside press. That play escalated quickly!
The pins kept moving along the festival on consecutive days, with players asking for more pins to pass on, being our accomplices to pass pins on their friends or carrying them proudly on their clothes.
We received all kind of positive reactions from the crowd, with surprise and delighted faces when spreading the pins around, congratulating messages or public mentions on social media recommending the experience. We could not have asked for a better outcome for Playdemic!