One of the most important aspects that makes festivals a ‘time out of time’ experience is the world you live in for the time you are there. Lowlands welcomes you with lighthouses, as if you are coming home after a long trip, Paaspop gives you an all over view on the field when you arrive. Some festivals have the city as a décor , others have fences around it. But all of them have one thing in common; they have an original identity which they want to send out.
This is exactly the thing that interests me as a student of Cultural Studies. How do you define a festival identity and how do you translate that into the field layout? You can see the festival as a person, for example Rabobank Amersfoort Jazz would be a Jazz loving man, interested in talent, quality and new experiences, drinking his beer in the pub. Festival Classique describes itself as a woman, which also returns in the layout as a silhouette of a girl. People, and festivals too, have a personality and express that in their appearance. The appearance of a festival is seen in the advertising up to the field layout. With the use of particular colors, the arrangement of things like stages, food service and toilets, return of artifacts and symbols, names, a new world is made. 
After forming a theory for festival identity analysis the outcome will be combined with a description of field layout and a case study. With this I hope to make a good base in this social-esthetical research to festivals.

Curiosity is a fundamental component in research. It stimulates the motivation to explore and to discover the “truth”. It is the engine on which research is driven that leads to new insights and knowledge that expectantly is valuable for science and the society. As a researcher you always have your eyes open to new and enticing things in your surroundings that devotes your attention. Judgments’ are not made quickly since there are different perceptions that one can take in. At least, this is what I think what my research attitude primarily is about. As a researcher I find it therefore inspiring to read about other fascinating research and experiments that are being done in the world. In this blog I would like to share one experiment with you.

One of the nicest things of doing a Master of Arts instead of a Master of Science is that you are allowed to do Artistic Research. No, this is not an oxymoron. if your fairly open minded than your reaction could be: ‘Okay, we have for instance scientific research, journalistic research and even legal research, so why not artistic research? Please tell me what peculiarities this form of research has compared with other forms!’

A typical Monday evening at our house:  matthijs and I both tired of our first workday of the week, and still not totally recovered from usually a full programmed weekend, our bellies round from a lovely meal either one of us could have prepared, sitting on the couch, fighting over the remote.

More people than ever before interact with each other. Numerous individuals connect with friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, share their thoughts, activities and experiences on Twitter and publish, comment and rate video clips on YouTube. The latter examples depict only a small array of the social activities in which users partake using social media services. Human activities on the Internet, made possible by these social media services, continue to grow. It is not a complete surprise that companies, politicians, scholars and the popular press display a deep interest towards these social media services that facilitate human activity.

The research on mentality has lasted for a year now. After reading lots of papers, trying to find out what mentality really is and trying to determine six basic mentalities to come up with a segmentation tool to name one’s mentality, for me the fun part really begins now. We’re going to do some experiments. The gut feeling we have is that the mentality of a person is kind of similar to the mentality of the brand he or she prefers. So now we’re going to put that gut feeling to the test with a few experiments.

Got my hands on the first edition of the social media monitor. And to say it upfront: disappointing. For some reason I was excited to read this, maybe because social media is also a major topic in our own research program. Knowing how hard it is to define and model social media in order to deduce some relevant research questions, I expected new insights and some help to bring our own research one step closer to the Holy Grail. Alas!

Two months ago I started my graduate research for CrossmediaLab on business models. My main focus will be the STOF-method as it was developed in the Freeband program. In March 2008 a book was published concerning the STOF method: “Mobile Service Innovation and Business Models”, which is more or less my reference source for the coming months.