Your best live music moment? Text 83111.
Post categories: Live Events
| 10:12 UK time, Monday, 10 December 2007
We get lots of text messages sent into the radio stations everyday. Some get mentioned on air and some get put on the website. It’s also a useful tool to get the audience to take part in the various events we do throughout the year.
For those of you who managed to check out the Electric Proms gigs at the this year you may have noticed the massive 60ft long sms projections within the building.
When we kicked off the brainstorming around the live events project that Chris recently wrote about many of our thoughts focused on what we could actually do at the event itself. Due to time and the size of the project team it wasn’t something that we could pursue but fortunately we managed to get an independent design company to develop an idea for us. The outcome was an SMS wall where you could text 83111 with your favourite live music memories and moments later the wall would update (with some nice transitions) displaying your memory graffiti style for everyone to read.
Several festivals I’ve been to over the years have displayed sms messages from the crowd on screens that often sit next to stage. It does the job but lacks any integration with the event itself, which is why the wall at the electric proms worked so well. The typography and positioning of the text itself worked really well in the space and it provided good material for people to read while they were waiting for friends or queuing at the bar.
In a similar vein is the project . Using projections again, but this time presenting the text in speech bubbles on the side of buildings. This kind of urban intervention can be very playful and provides an opportunity for the audience to engage with the event in a direct and public way.
Of course there is the big issue of moderation and for designers of such systems it’s a real challenge. You want the SMS’s to be as authentic and as possible and spontaneous so that the audience get direct feedback from what they have just sent you. However you also don’t want lots of offending comments displayed! Either anything goes or you have some moderation in place. It’s a difficult balance but experience has shown me that having a theme (e.g. send us your favourite live gig experiences), a context (a specific area of town, a building) and a playful way of presenting the text message can help to elicit useful responses from the general public. There is also the assumption that people will just participate and often this is not the case, so employing game mechanics can also provide a good way to get people to join in and send stuff in.
With festivals it’s a little harder to display SMS in a creative way as you are not in a space that contains walls or surfaces (and tents often have poles and bits of quipment everywhere that makes it a bit impractical) or at least this is what I though until I’d seen the Smoke Signals project by Miniaforms:
It looks incredible, I’ve never experienced it myself but to quote :
onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts “are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text.
Another wall for collecting audience contributions, but this time not reliant on any technology, could be found at the Radio 3 Free Thinking: festival of ideas this year in Liverpool. Rather than using projections and mobile phones it consisted of the humble post it note.
Really simple and very straight forward and the team gathered lots of responses.
You can browse the thought wall on the Radio 3 Free Thinking website.
I find this project really inspiring, because for a while I’ve been thinking what opportunities there are to do something interactive at an event and the post-it note idea translates really well, its simple and tactile and by using a technology such as RFID it would be possible to visualise the activity in the space.
The challenge of introducing any kind of interactivity at an event is how you feed that information back to the audience at home. Time was against us when building the electric proms site but we managed to get a page together to present some of the interesting messages we received. An alternative approach could have been a time lapse video of the wall so you could see the transitions between the messages or perhaps a virtual wall on the website that anyone could annotate at home or at the event. Another example of providing feedback to our audience is on the Radio 1 website we dynamically filter the text messages that the station receives and display them on the homepage, we also have an image scroller displaying mms photo's. Audience participation at events through SMS or MMS is becoming increasingly more common and the big challenge for designers is how you accommodate and present that real-time information in a meaningful and engaging way across different platforms.
