Balance
For over 30 years I have worked in environments designed to change how people feel: concerts, festivals, conferences, exhibitions, launches, cultural gatherings and corporate events.
I don't drink or use drugs, and that has sometimes created an unusual professional problem. A significant amount of business in the events industry has been won over dinner, wine, nights out or even at conferences designed around excess. There were occasions when I took a colleague with me, and occasionally even a friend presented as one, because I knew drinking with the potential client was part of the social ritual through which the relationship would be formed.
I could do the work. Someone else sometimes had to do the drinking.
I have thought about this throughout my career, sometimes with sadness, sometimes frustration and, if I am truthful, sometimes judgement. At the same time I have produced events for alcohol brands and pharmaceutical companies, and festivals where alcohol was readily available. I have never believed my role was to tell adults what they should or shouldn't consume. I did believe I had some responsibility for the environment in which they made those choices.
If alcohol was readily available, I made sure there were alternatives that were just as easy to find and more affordable. Water, juice, coffee or chai were not hidden somewhere as the worthy alternative. They had comfortable places to sit and were part of the experience.
That came from the same thinking I applied to health and safety. I have always considered what people are likely to do within an environment before deciding how that environment should be built or operated. It sometimes meant disagreeing with my own production teams. Safety designed into an experience is very different from safety added to one.
I see human behaviour in much the same way.
One of the largest festival producers I worked with once described a festival to me as a very large pub. The ticket got people through the gate and the bar was where the money was made.
There is considerable economic truth in that observation. A recent analysis of cashless spending across 25 major French festivals found beverages represented 63% of measured on-site revenue outside ticketing. Beer accounted for around two-thirds of bar revenue.
The significance isn't that festivals sell a lot of beer. We already know that. It is that the economic model can influence the environment we create, and the environment influences human behaviour.
This became even clearer to me through working in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dubai. I have watched thousands of people in their twenties and thirties gather at conferences, cultural events, entertainment and business occasions where alcohol was absent from the public experience. People stayed, talked, celebrated, formed relationships and conducted business. The gathering did not lose its energy because alcohol wasn't part of it.
In professional environments the contrast was sometimes more striking. Behaviour that could help someone become part of the group around a dinner table in London could diminish their credibility in Jeddah or Riyadh. The people had not fundamentally changed. The environment around their behaviour had.
We use the phrase attention to detail constantly in the events industry. After over 30 years of watching audiences, I have become much more interested in attention to human behaviour.
A bar influences behaviour, but so does where we put it, how prominent we make it, what it costs and what we place beside it. Food, lighting, sound, seating, the rhythm and length of a programme and the spaces we leave between programmed moments all affect the way people behave within an experience. None of this is new. We have been designing these things for as long as we have been producing events. What we have not always done is consider their combined effect on the human being.
Human beings have always found ways to alter how they feel. Alcohol and drugs are part of that history, but an event is already altering the human experience before anyone consumes anything.
Music can change our emotional state. Light can change it. Being surrounded by thousands of other people can change it. Belonging can change it. Beauty and wonder can change it.
That makes the current growth in wellness events interesting to me, although I don't believe wellness needs to become another category of event.
Environmental impact followed a similar path. It began as something considered by organisations that were particularly interested in the subject and gradually became part of the way events were designed, procured, produced and measured. The important change was recognising that an event has an environmental impact whether or not anybody puts sustainability in the brief.
The same is true of its human impact.
That doesn't mean every experience should leave us rested. Some of the most valuable experiences of my life have been exhausting. A festival can leave someone physically tired while giving them a sense of belonging they carry for years. A conference can demand enormous concentration and leave someone with ideas, relationships and confidence that increase what they are capable of doing afterwards.
An experience can consume energy while still increasing human capacity.
This connects directly to something I wrote about in Memory. We can leave an experience carrying thousands of photographs and surprisingly few memories of actually being there. We can leave an extraordinary night having experienced enormous intensity but remembering fragments of it. We can leave a conference with hundreds of pages of presentations without carrying a single idea back into our lives.
We have become very good at measuring what happens while people are with us. Attendance, dwell time, spend, engagement, content and bar revenue all have value as measures of activity and economic performance. They tell us much less about what remains afterwards.
That distinction becomes uncomfortable when what happens during the experience is also where the money is made.
The phone benefits from our attention, the bar from consumption and the festival from the bar. Nobody involved needs to intend to diminish human capacity. Economic incentives shape decisions without requiring that intention.
This is why I don't see human capacity as simply another wellbeing consideration for event designers. The designer operates within an economy. Sometimes the things that increase revenue are also the things we need to balance most carefully.
I have spent much of my career trying to create that balance rather than prohibit the behaviour. Making water cheaper, giving coffee or matcha somewhere worth sitting, allowing people to step away from intensity and recognising that participation does not have to mean consumption were small design decisions. They were also economic decisions because every alternative occupies space and potentially redirects spend.
Restoring human capacity can conflict with extracting economic value.
The Restoration Economy isn't interesting if restoration only happens when it costs nothing and conflicts with nobody's interests. Its real test comes when extraction is profitable.
We have spent years learning to measure what an experience takes from the environment. We should become equally interested in what it takes from, or returns to, the people within it.
Every experience has an economy and that economy shapes the experience. What remains belongs in more than the balance sheet.
The condition in which we return people to their lives is part of the experience we designed.
Human capacity is part of its footprint.