Design for Temporary and Sustainable Music Festivals. New Values and Informal Educational Systems for Humanizing Energy Transition

Whether today the energy transition is too often expressed with technical-scientific languages and approaches, highly specialised and top-down, appearing hardly comprehensible to common sense, it becomes necessary for the culture of the project to support milder and more suitable strategic levers of action and innovation, to embrace paradigmatic changes from below, certainly more relational, inclusive and qualitative. In this sense, given their nature as centres of artistic expression and cultural, educational propagation, temporary and sustainable music festivals can take on a dimension of social activism, helping to inspire people towards new environmentally, energetically, and socially preferable trends and behaviours. In the last decade, in Europe, festival managers, public institutions, design teams of various backgrounds and active citizens’ groups, have rethought temporary music events in a sustainable way, fostering and disseminating an awareness of the logic of circularity, water-saving, energy-saving, soft mobility, use of renewable sources, and other interrelated issues. Such festivals, close to individuals, appealing to their personal responsibility, stand as catalysts of good practices for the energy transition, as well as ecological media environments for an autonomous and spontaneous re-education to socio-environmental sustainability. Through the analysis of fitting case studies, this contribution aims to reflect and debate on the role of temporary musical events as accelerators of innovation and as a vessel for new design experimentation, especially in the areas of clean technologies, by an informal educational approach to sustainability.