For its 50th edition, the Winterthur Music Festival dared to look ahead: in a future lab, we worked with 20 participants to develop scenarios and speculative objects from the year 2050. The results show that the future of the festival should be collaborative, sustainable and people-centred.
What will define the Musikfestwochen as a festival in 2050? What does the festival want to achieve for Winterthur and its residents in the future?
In a one-day future lab at the 50th Winterthurer Musikfestwochen, a diverse group of people from the festival environment, partners, former team members and festival visitors developed ideas for speculative objects from the festival in 2050.
The thinking was based on the future, starting from the future needs of the people of Winterthur. The focus was not on the question ‘How will the Music Festival change?’, but rather ‘What kind of festival do we want in the future?’.
I thought it was great to link such an abstract topic as the future to tangible objects.
Methodologically, we worked with speculative design, an approach that opens up new possibilities. The resulting objects are narrative fragments that explore alternative ways of living and question familiar notions of technology, society and everyday life.
The objects make abstract scenarios tangible and thus open up a space for dialogue: What might a particular development look like, what opportunities and risks does it hold, and what values or priorities are reflected in it?
In a second step, methods from applied improvisation were used to playfully explore and further develop the festival of the future and its objects.
You have prepared a beautiful path on which we were allowed to dance.
Feedback participant
A solar water flower and a MFW coin
The ‘solar water flower’ generates electricity, provides shade and cools, a ‘levelling sole’ compensates for differences in body size or vision, and the ‘golden goose’ stands for financial abundance with opportunities and the risk of losing authenticity. An ‘anti-discrimination pill’ enables encounters free of prejudice, and the ‘music festival cosmos’ with the ‘MFW coin’ creates a year-round cultural venue with a socially just currency, while the ‘hop roof’ provides greenery (and raw materials for festival beer!). The ‘MFW soap bubble’ promotes group formation according to individual taste, and a forest stage combines music and nature for a decelerating experience.
What all these objects have in common is a festival vision that focuses not on technology, but on community, sustainability and cultural participation. Instead of growing in duration or size, the Music Festival Weeks should continue to gain depth and quality in terms of content, combining the tried and tested with bold innovations. Music remains at the heart of it all, embedded in an open, diverse and climate-conscious community.
Want to shape the future?
We show how speculative design sparks discussion and makes ideas tangible.
