In March of 2021, following the success of the Rare Effect NFT Festival, Loominate was introduced to Alexander Dettke, the founder of Wilde Möhre, an alternative electronic music festival which takes place every year close to Berlin. 

This festival, like so many others during these pandemic times, was faced with the tough reality of having to scale back in size, whilst continuing to provide relevant artistic and cultural experiences for guests. As such, the festival had recently teamed up with Near Protocol with the intention of creating an engaging and educational space for festival guests which incorporated elements of digital art, Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs - essentially certificates of provenance, ownership and pricing that live on the blockchain), Near Tokens (a cryptocurrency), and various metaverses (crypto-enabled virtual reality environments).

‍

Scope/Challenge

‍

Loominate’s role was to facilitate a series of workshops that would generate a working concept and roadmap for the Wilde Möhre team. The challenge, to gather a creative group of individuals from diverse backgrounds and expertise (art, architecture, web 3 / blockchain, events, marketing & electronic music) and collectively brainstorm a memorable crypto-enabled festival experience and then come up with a plan on how to execute on it. 

‍

Workshop Goals

‍

Given the team's diverse background, the first step of the process was to provide some context around NFT use cases as they pertained to the arts and culture. Drawing inspiration from the Rare Effect experience, as well as other virtual festival experiences, such as the Burning Man festival, which took place in the Somnium Space metaverse, Loominate set out to level the playing field by creating a common level of understanding around what NFTs are and how they could be leveraged in a festival context. 

Utilizing techniques from Design Thinking, our facilitators asked the team to empathize with those who would interact with this experience by recreating a persona of the prototypical festival guest, and then mapping this individual’s user journey, which we affectionately dubbed the “Festival Journey”.

‍

‍

The next step consisted of splitting the team up into smaller groups to begin prototyping an experience which could appeal to our Festival Persona These concepts were then pitched to the broader group for evaluation. This was all part of what is commonly referred to as a ‘divergent ideation phase’, this stage is intendedto extract all of the ideas the group has to offer, before gaining consensus on specific ideas and further developing them. 

‍

‍

In a follow up workshop, and subsequent ‘convergent’ phase, the ideas generated were prioritised according impact and feasibility, and the teams set out to design a cohesive experience for the festival guests. The concept of creating an “NFTea House” emerged. The idea being to create a physical place, within the festival grounds, which was digitally replicated in the metaverses. In the physical space, festival guests were invited to learn about NFTs first hand through workshops and talks. Here, they would be able to create their own NFTs on-site, and learn about fair distributions by learning how to use Near’s split royalty function. In the digital space, which was hosted in cryptovoxels and Sommium space, guests would have the opportunity to experience the festival remotely, before and during the event. Content from the festival could then be streamed into the virtual gallery and several artists were commissioned to create artworks for the digital NFT gallery. 

‍

Outcomes/results

In the end, through a facilitated group brainstorming process and the application of Design Thinking frameworks, these Ideation workshops served to define the prototype for an experience, and helped the Festival team hone in on a workable MVP, whilst providing a blueprint for decentralised team collaboration.

“We had an amazing workshop with Loominate. The team worked online via “Miro”, was highly involved, and came up with project-changing ideas. We ended up with a clear mission, a high motivation towards our project, and were aligned in our goals.” Alexander Dettke, Founder of Wilde Möhre

‍

‍