Introducing the fly club wrist band; a wearable wrist band that allows people attending fly events to create a personal souvenir to remember the events they have been to, by allowing them to choose their favourite DJ playing. Attendees can do this in the form of a little ‘pin’ that they choose on arrival and insert to their wrist band for safe keeping.
Where did the idea come from? Well I started by doing some background research on fly open air, looking at things like dates, locations and line-ups, to see if anything would be changing from usual, and to see if anything sparked initially in terms of ideas.
From what I could see, it was basically the same, Hopetoun house May, Princess street gardens September. However, the only thing that had changed was the days the events were held. The first couple of years, fly was held over one day, usually a Saturday. But since the last event, fly have started hosting it over the whole weekend, presuming due to growing popularity. This is where my first idea stemmed from; all these events, now two days at a time, now even more DJ’s, making it increasingly harder to be able to remember key parts from the events that people enjoyed, such as who they enjoyed the most. Initially I had thought about digital ticketing and redesigning what we would perceive as a ‘ticket’ but this strayed a little too far from the souvenir aspect I was looking at bringing.
I researched into existing festival souvenirs, and quickly found that most souvenirs given at events like this, come in the form of ‘merch’. Collectable things like clothing, mugs, bags. All which had nothing to do with the actual event they had just experienced. This is what I wanted to try achieve; something that would create a memorable link between the two for the user. Creating a more immersive experience both at the event, and looking back. I ended up landing on the idea of wrist bands.
Wrist bands are something used a lot of events like this, however always over looked as just a way of keeping track of who has bought and ticket and who should be attending the event. Most commonly made from a material called ‘Tyeek’. Which is that weirdly strong, paper-like material you get stuck on your wrist at event and spend ages trying to rip of when you get home. For one, its destroyed when the user has to rip it off, but then the memory of it is also destroyed when it gets thrown in the bin and disposed of.
So I looked in to a material that would allow users to use it over and over again, very common one that came up was silicone. Which works great for my ideas as; its flexible so allows for once size fits most, durable, weather resistant and is very cheap and fast to produce. However, one thing that was missing, how does this differ from any other wrist band? How does it create a souvenir? How does it give data to fly club? As well as wanting to add this element into my design, I also really wanted to make use of the wasted bottles and litter that ae left at fly events. Having previously researched into brands such as 4ocean. So many bottles and cups are left over every year, so using this in the new product is also such a good proposal for fly club’s reputation.
This is where my idea of the ‘pins’ came from; they serve a dual purpose. They allow the users to customise their bands by choosing one based on their favourite DJ and inserting it into the holes on the band, and also allow fly to analyse data such as popularity of the DJ’s, through the bar graph style dispensers which would be at the entrance to the venue.
The pins are colour coded to a DJ, to allow people to customise their band aesthetically, without having a physical connection to the DJ playing as this would not be very nice looking. The pins slide into holes on the band and stay there well due to the properties of the silicone.
Through attendees taking one of these pins at each fly event, they begin to build a band of memories for this great event, while also helping fly club with data analysis, while simultaneously making a dent in our fight against global warming.
