Students Reimagined Future Music Festivals at AAU’s Innovation Workshop
On April 9th, 2025, Aalborg University (AAU) brought together students, educators and sector experts for a one-day innovation workshop that challenged participants to rethink the future of music festivals.
The event titled “Help Create the Future Nibe Festival” invited students from Medialogy, Interaction Design, Interactive Digital Media, Experience Design, Tourism, Hospitality and Business to co-create innovative solutions for one of Denmark’s popular music festivals: Nibe Festival.
A Case with a Cultural Twist
The day started out with Nibe Festival presenting the challenge of developing ideas for new festival experiences by using digitalization and gamification. Their intro was followed by an AAU Business Developer giving an inspirational talk about the many ways of applying game technology and gamification in products related to culture and social events. With this “soft-edged” case blending culture with the potential of gamification and game technology, AAU aimed to attract a more diverse group, especially more women, than if the case had been purely game tech related. The event succeeded in this matter as 84% of participants were women.
Innovation through Design Thinking
The rest of the day was a dive into the Design Thinking method for innovation. Working in cross-disciplinary groups, the students were guided through a step-by-step innovation process of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing – supported by facilitators, employees from Nibe Festival and Experts from Destination Nord and Högskolan i Skövde. The goal was to develop interdisciplinary solutions that enhanced the festival experience while fostering collaboration across study programs like Medialogy, Interaction Design, Interactive Digital Media, Experience Design, Tourism, Hospitality and Business.
Treasure hunt and guests writing their own music
The ideas that came out of the workshop were a great inspiration to Nibe Festival. One group came up with a concept of a festival treasure to motivate guests to collect garbage through turning it into a competition that can be followed on your phone. Another group developed a concept where guests could create their own music, send it in and perform themselves at the festival. The good atmosphere of the day was accelerated at the end, when Nibe Festival unexpectedly rewarded all the participating students with tickets for the 2025 festival in July.
Creativity in a safe atmosphere
Working across disciplines and forming ideas like these can be challenging for students as it requires skills in communicating, taking on new perspectives and sharing ideas with students from totally different professional backgrounds. This I why a key pedagogical principle of the workshop was to create a safe and inclusive atmosphere that made the students dare to ask questions, be creative and come up with crazy new ideas. It seems that the workshop succeeded in this, as the evaluation survey from the students points to exactly this safe environment as a positive key factor of the day. In this way, the workshop has confirmed AAU in integrating elements that create a safe and inclusive environment when motivating students to think and work beyond their silos.
Two Interreg ÖKS projects co-organizing
The event was co-organized as a joint event of Game Tech Academy and another Interreg ÖKS project: Scandinavian Growth Creators 2.0. Besides the Game Tech Academy partnership, researchers from Chalmers University and students and teachers from UCN Aalborg participated.
Contact
With questions about Game Tech Academy, please contact Luisa Geitmann-Mügge at luisa.geitmann-mugge@aalborg.dk.
