Making Technology Human
A visual journey into creating a human-centred technology festival
Try to search for “technology” on Google images.
Once you have accepted that technology is very blue, you’ll quickly notice technology mainly seems to relate to humans through their hands. Mainly the hands that belong to the suit and shirt type of human.
You would think that the result is different if you searched for “technology and humans”, but it is not.
Granted, we do start to see slightly warmer colours, but it still appears to be humans merging with technology, rather than the other way around.
“Where humans and technology meet”
When we joined the Techfestival team last year, this blue, sterile understanding of technology was pretty much everything we wanted to avoid in our communication.
What followed was an intense four months period where we aimed to enable a wide range of participants to reflect on technology. From nurses to philosophers, from kids to retirees, from Danes to the rest of the world.
One of the things we realized in doing Techfestival is that a lot of non-tech people think that a festival about technology is not for them. We wanted to make people realize that technology surrounds us everywhere and that everyone needs to reflect on it.
We wanted to create a platform where anyone would feel comfortable participating in the discussion.
We didn’t just want to attract the regular diverse group of white males wearing suits and inflated name badges. It was important for us to show humans interacting with technology in a different way.
To accomplish a diverse and open dialogue about technology would require us to make technology human.
We started by experimenting with various messages on Facebook to see what resonated with people. The posts where we focused on communicating the core narrative of Techfestival didn’t get many likes outside of our own circles. The festival hadn’t established itself as a home for a critical reflection of technology yet.
Meanwhile the posts featuring our team members and partners were popular.
This led us to emphasize the first part of the Techfestival tagline, humans, in our communication strategy.
Humans became the design principle across our communication, formats, locations and everything else we did at the festival.
As a first time festival we had limited material to post on our channels. Therefore we decided to make the journey of making Techfestival public. The whole team (approximately seven of us at the time) started to share experiences from creating the festival under the hashtag #MakingTechfestival. It was a great way to build team-spirit among a rather distributed group of people and share our process with the world.
Related to the MakingTechfestival hashtag, posting a team photo became a favorite of ours. Of course we utilised Facebook’s tagging function to spread the photos to all the friends and families of the team-members.
Videos are a popular tool to create engagement in 2018. That was also true last year. With the little time and resources we had, we just used our phones and laptops to record short video clips. People responded very well to our straight-forward approach to communicating.
We were lucky to work with a design agency that understood what we wanted to achieve and were able to translate that into distinctive designs. The festival posters are a good example of this. We printed the cheapest posters possible, but encouraged everyone to draw and engage with them. Being based in Denmark, the “Ego poster” was often turned into a “Lego poster”.
Luckily it was not only us who liked the designs by Trouble. When we first posted the first glimpse of the posters, plenty people started to ask us if they could have one. Naturally we answered yes and invited anyone by our office to pick up a free poster. People were happy because they received a free poster, we were happy because it was one of the first times we met our actual audience and it also provided us with an opportunity to talk about someone else than ourselves.
The first version of our volunteer and crew t-shirts had a big, fat Techfestival written all over them. We were approximately one email away from confirming the order when we decided to do it differently. Short on time the only other thing we could think of to write on the t-shirts was Human.
We often forget that it is real people who are receiving our ads and online communication. One of the best ways to remember who you want to attract is to get out of the building and talk with actual humans. Once our t-shirts were ready we called our friends from Soundboks and hosted our own little pop-up party distributing wristbands, stickers and flyers to the commuters of Copenhagen.
… and before the t-shirts were ready we just used paper, tape and pens.
As we started to engage with people, we were happy to see the diversity of the people who were attracted to what we did. We also quickly realized how many amazing stories each of the individuals had, so it was an easy decision to copy the format of Humans in New York to highlight a few of these stories.
The human-driven design principles also went into the formats of the festival. While we did have a few classic panel-discussions and pitch sessions, the majority of the 130 activities used other formats. Circles became one of our favorites.
Each day during the Techfestival we invited sponsors and co-creators to a family dinner. The space was limited, but it made the talks intimate and at eye-level.
Printing outdoor campaigns costs significant amount of money. It can also be difficult to get the right permissions. Instead we bought tape in different colours that we could use both inside and outside to write messages and make signs.
By November last year, two months after the festival, our Philosopher-in-chief Aydogan A Schosswald was able to boil down the ethos of Techfestival into the slide below.
We are eager to get started to work with the Techfestival crew again this year to drive the movement forward and to ensure technology is not left only to technologists.
If this message resonates with you, please consider becoming a co-creator and check out the new manifest for technology that was written during the festival.
And to the more than 16,000 humans who joined us last year, thank YOU! We had a handful of unforgettable days. Techfestival was everything but suits and name badges in sterile surroundings. Techfestival was dancing, conversations, hugging, hangovers and committing to take responsibility for the world we are creating. In short, it was human.
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