Night Consumer
Design Drafts #1 from Het Nieuwe Instituut and Disegno.
“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun” —Ivan Chtcheglov
Metal barricades separate partygoers into three neat lines in an industrial area outside Amsterdam. A big sign announces the night’s HOUSE RULES, threatening expulsion to those who break them. As I enter, my pre-sale ticket is scanned and the requisite sticker placed over my phone camera. Next, I see a QR code: “Scan here for cashless locker”. An A-frame sign replete with bold lettering, numbers, and arrows spells out the steps to store my personal belongings; the simple instructions involve entering my credit card information, address, email, and checking a box giving away the rights to my data. The poster, however, forgets step zero: peeling the sticker back off my phone camera to scan the QR code. Welcome to clubbing 2.0, designed for you, in theory.
One side-effect of the Covid-19 pandemic is that QR codes, a seeming relic of the early 2010s smartphone boom, have come back with a vengeance in Europe. They grace health forms, gallery walls, and advertisements. You frequently cannot order at restaurants without scanning one and, for a time, you could not even enter restaurants without one. The matrix barcode has seeped into many corners of contemporary life – to our benefit, right? It’s for our health and security. It’s more efficient. It’s green. As a touch-free, digitally-enabled solution to ordering public life, the QR code is service design, darling. And now, at a party venue in Amsterdam, I witness its encroachment on a new frontier: nightlife.
“The locker system – like wristbands, deposit tokens, and timed pre-sale tickets – are symptoms of a wider phenomenon: the festivalisation of nightlife spaces.”
The apparent culprit is a Dutch start-up that specialises in “wardrobe solutions” for events. While the company offers a range of key- and coin-operated lockers for rent, its proprietary system of “Elockers” is the hallmark product. The storage system is programmed with six lock functionalities to suit organisers’ needs (such as whether to charge you every time you open it) and the company website spells out other profit-driven benefits: “A fast, flexible and safe storage option, without high personnel costs. With our unique smart lockers you can now rent out lockers without a counter. It’s even possible to upsell merchandise or drinks!” In addition to reducing costs and pushing sales, the lockers feed real-time data to organisers for optimising party management. The benefits are clear, but something seems depressingly wrong. What?
The locker system – like wristbands, deposit tokens, and timed pre-sale tickets – are symptoms of a wider phenomenon: the festivalisation of nightlife spaces. In-demand DJs now regularly crisscross Europe, blessing fans with their mixing and organisers with ticket sales. Cross-pollination between scenes in different cities pushes sonic innovation, but also produces same-sameness. Parties take their cues from Instagram and Resident Advisor. People go out to see popular artists, rather than frequent – with open ears – a trusted club. The commercialisation of electronic dance music into a multi-billion-euro global industry frequently dovetails with the optimisation of party spaces, impacting the way clubs operate, look, and feel.
“Solution-oriented design thinking is necessary to make large festivals work, look good and make money at the same time. ”
In countries such as the Netherlands where electronic music is not only tolerated, but mainstream, festivalisation seems more complete, and its influence more profound. ID&T, one of largest industry players, takes festival brands such as Awakenings and Tomorrowland to global audiences, copy-pasting lineups, stage designs, and vibes to editions in far-flung places in the Americas, Australia and Asia. Like flowers, electronic dance music festivals are an important Dutch export, and the state knows it. During the pandemic, the fate of the cancelled industry became an issue of political debate and street protests. Despite Covid-19 measures forcing businesses to close at midnight, Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), a premier electronic music industry conference and festival, went ahead last year. Leaving one party abruptly at midnight, I noticed ADE welcome banners put up by the municipality dotting the canals on my cycle ride home. The festival, and the city, became one.
My fear about festivalisation is not the festival itself, but the logic it bears upon people and space. Festivals are massive undertakings. They require complex security and operational plans. Solution-oriented design thinking is necessary to make large festivals work, look good and make money at the same time. Yet, while scale may justify the approach, an individual’s role at such events can feel reduced to that of a numerical unit. For the municipality or the organisers, I am one of thousands of atoms to be corralled, searched, and accounted for in the design of the night. I am a consumer.
During the pandemic, while the business of partying took a long break, a thirst to party did not. At a protest rave in South Brooklyn in June 2020, you knew there were smiles under every mask, even when the NYPD shut it down. In Berlin, that same summer, I got lost and found new, dear friends looking for the right make-shift sound system in the mess of the Hassenheide forest. There was not a dime to be made in these spaces. There was no bag check. There was just an urge to dance together.
“From the placement of a simple disco ball in an empty warehouse in Queens to the spatial arrangement of toilets in a massive club like Berghain, design choices make a huge difference”
It would be a shame if what we hold onto in nightlife spaces after the pandemic is QR codes rather than this urgency to connect. 2020 was a bizarre time that reinforced the importance not of good design, but of good music, good people and little else. Gatherings were slapped together, rather than carefully produced. It makes me wonder: at what point do the trappings of professionalised club culture become traps?
At a minimum, nightlife spaces can avoid looking and feeling like state-sanctioned big business. While economic pressures in cities such as Amsterdam put the squeeze on more underground operations, the way these structural dynamics affect the vibe within a club is also a question of design. Ian Schrager, founder of the glitzy Studio 54 in Midtown Manhattan, once described his approach to club design as “trying to generate a combustible energy, explosive – a mayhem for people to have fun.” While Schrager’s celebrity- and money-obsessed operation is hardly a blueprint for the type of community-oriented space most ravers dream about, he does identify a key ingredient often missing from the profit-maximising and liability-minimising logic of festivalised club spaces: chaos. But how do you design for mayhem? Since the dawn of the disc jockey in the 1960s, nightclub proprietors and designers have been experimenting with architecture and technology to build alternative clubworlds. While the features that make a good club are hardly universal, core design elements across venues – the lighting, the placement of the DJ, the sound system – are played with in order to impart feelings of freedom, escape, inhibition, or being one with the music. From the placement of a simple disco ball in an empty warehouse in Queens to the spatial arrangement of toilets in a massive club like Berghain, design choices make a huge difference, both functionally and in service of my and others’ fantasies. If design thinking must be legible in clubs, ideally it elevates an entropic experience, or scrambles it.
“Standing amid the crowd of people filling out a complicated form on their phones, rather than talking to one another, I had to wonder: Is a design solution even necessary?”
Facing the QR code that evening, the ELockers presented to me like a Trojan Horse of festivalisation and its logic – a disruptive technology and not in a good way. The system replaced the jobs of community members to save the organisers money and, supposedly, us partygoers time. Yet while queuing to check your items is hardly glamorous, it is decidedly human. I’ve met one-night stands and lifelong friends chatting with neighbours in line at the end of a night. If lore holds that nightlife spaces have transformative power, then breaking the alienation that people may feel from one another in daily life is one of partying’s most potent potentials. The locker start-up’s site explains that “our multi-deployable electronic locker was born from a shared challenge around improving visitor flows at events and fixed locations.” However, standing amid the crowd of people filling out a complicated form on their phones, rather than talking to one another, I had to wonder: is this system really addressing a “shared challenge”? Is a design solution even necessary?
A desire for clubs to feel organic, not optimised, is more than hedonism. An openness to be confronted by new, unexpected sounds and people is also a key ingredient of creativity and cultural production. David Byrne, singer of the Talking Heads, wrote a book to grapple with How Music Works. He argues that spaces are undervalued ingredients that define the music that is made. In his words, “spatial context has a huge impact on creativity”. Byrne deconstructs the design and operation of CBGBs, the influential cradle of early punk and new wave. The tiny venue on the Bowery in downtown New York City “was, from a structural point of view, a perfect, self-actuating, self-organizing system. A biological system, in a way: a coral reef, a root system, a termite colony, a rhizome, a neural network.” Several bands played every night at the narrow bar, and the owner Hilly was not afraid to book unknown acts. There was no timetable. Musicians hung around since they got in for free on their off nights. The venue became a public living room, an open laboratory for listening and collaboration, and the nexus of a new sound and scene.
Many party spaces I love – such as Nowadays in New York, or Garage Noord in Amsterdam – do establish clear codes of community conduct to keep partygoers safe from harassment that comes from both within and from outside the club. While imperfect, the operations of these clubs and rules set up to protect them are designed for the community and the music – not profit and surveillance. My movements, choices, and energy contribute to the collective experience within a club. A good club should enable this contribution. So, when HOUSE RULES remind you that “you are a guest in this space”, ask: whose guest? Are you a co-creator of the culture or are you a consumer of it?
“If the festivalisation of nightlife renders us consumers rather than contributors, then nightclubs risk becoming a hollow representation of a free space rather than the authentic thing”
One legendary club, the Haçienda, opened in Manchester in 1986. The space is famous for its colourful, striped design and for birthing the city’s influential acid house rave scene. Founded by Factory Records and members of the band New Order, The Haçienda was, in its early years, a financial failure despite its popularity. Peter Hook of New Order even wrote a book about the experience aptly titled How Not to Run a Nightclub. In it, he details how design and operations decisions that were taken in the 90s to squeeze more money out of the space ended up squeezing the scene itself. As Tony Wilson, Hook's business partner from Factory Records, remarked: “Some people make money, others make history.”
The Haçienda takes its name from an obscure radical slogan by Ivan Chtcheglov, a member of the Situationist International: "The Hacienda Must Be Built!". Written in 1950 at the age of 20, Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism is an absurdist rejection of the modernist city: “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.” While Chtcheglov was committed to an insane asylum for plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower in 1960, his vision for building a new urban space centred on "free play", the Haçienda, was finally realised decades later in Manchester. Naturally, it was a club.
When I go out, I want to live deep and suck out the marrow of the night. I want to build Haçiendas in which neither myself nor the collective experience is treated like a commodity. I foolishly think: let’s not be hypnotised by production and supposed conveniences such as ELockers. Guy Debord, the intellectual leader of Chtcheglov’s Situationist International, argued that the modern era is one in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. If the festivalisation of nightlife renders us consumers rather than contributors, then nightclubs risk becoming a hollow representation of a free space rather than the authentic thing. And, as the brief respite from commercialised nightlife during the pandemic reinforced, you don’t need a whole lot when you go out to feel free.
Words Andrew Pasquier
This online exclusive is part of Design Drafts, a new ongoing writing programme by Disegno and the Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) that is devoted to nurturing new voices and perspectives within design writing and criticism.
The first cohort of writers' work on the inaugural theme ‘Is design just a game?’ feature in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.