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

Multi-day music festivals have a waste problem with much of it centred around patron campgrounds. Interviews and co-design workshops were conducted with festival patrons (N = 19) and professionals (N = 9). The interviews indicated the factors impacting festival campground waste including the proliferation of cheap items, the continuity of management decisions, highly social camping practices, the land, and interactions between these. Co-design workshops explored these to produce sociotechnical strategies using the festival timeline as a frame, with one of these, a patron planning tool chosen for further development. This paper contributes new insights on how information and communication technologies might enhance sustainable practices by facilitating relational change through better organisation, evaluation, and feedback. It concludes with examination of the challenges and opportunities for Sustainable HCI, including how to carve out a design response to a wicked problem by situating relations, meaning making, telling invisible stories, and finding leverage points.