Pick me up before you go-go: Sociotechnical strategies for waste in music festival campgrounds

Title of the Paper

Pick Me Up Before You Go-Go: Sociotechnical Strategies for Waste in Music Festival Campsites

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Area: Sustainability and Human-Computer Interaction (Sustainable HCI)
• Keywords: Human-computer interaction, Sustainable HCI, Waste, Music festivals, Sociotechnical, Systems thinking, Design

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges: Severe waste issues in music festival campsites, particularly the disposal of damaged or cheap items. Contributing factors include economic considerations, practicality, social influences, and site constraints.
• Significance: Waste causes long-term environmental harm, including marine pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and unsustainable resource consumption.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: While waste issues have been a topic of ongoing concern, research specifically addressing waste in music festival campsites is scarce. The field of Sustainable HCI requires an integrated approach combining social practices, technological interventions, and environmental contexts to find innovative solutions to waste problems.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions: Five sociotechnical strategies were proposed, optimized along the music festival timeline.
  • Design participant resources and organizational tools.
  • Use technological means to facilitate campsite identification and waste management.
  • Provide real-time problem feedback mechanisms.
  • Develop tools to evaluate waste management strategies.
  • Integrate user feedback mechanisms.
• Innovative Aspects: Emphasizes key design directions such as contextualized interventions, the construction of social relationships, and feedback mechanisms, proposing multi-phase, multi-stakeholder intervention strategies.
• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:
  • Conduct interviews and co-creation workshops to explore background scenarios.
  • Integrate strategies throughout the music festival process (pre-event, during the event, post-event) for analysis.
  • Use technology to precisely identify the sources of waste issues, promoting public awareness and industry commitment.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:
  • Established a design prototype for an environmentally friendly ICT tool, the "Music Festival Campsite Planning Tool."
  • Proposed five strategies, with further development and implementation of tools to optimize music festival waste management identified as a priority.
  • Highlighted the use of smartphone applications or web platforms to support rational resource allocation, avoiding surplus or waste.
• Comparative Advantages: The approach combines the characteristics of social groups and commercial partnerships while considering collaboration between management and consumers. Compared to current fragmented strategies, it demonstrates practicality and scalability.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Comprehensive evaluation of data phases has not yet commenced; testing is planned following the resumption of music festivals.
  • Research indicates that reducing waste can promote group behavioral changes and structured responses.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Current tool design focuses on a single phase (tool development), necessitating expansion to long-term impact evaluation.
  • Future considerations include potential policy-level support to promote data openness and sharing.
  • Explore sustained collaboration with youth culture and music festival management to change entrenched consumption and disposal behaviors.