HappyLight
Off-grid wayfinding light for festival campsites
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Light pillar standing on grass at night, casting a warm pool of light downward and a blue zone glow upward
- Client
- Godik A/S - case: Roskilde Festival
- Context
- Holistic Design of Engineering Systems, DTU
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Stakeholder Manager
- Team size
- 7
- Tools
- Stakeholder mapping · User survey · Use-cycle design · Implementation planning · Cost modelling
- Contribution
- Team of 7, stakeholder mapping, interviews, data analysis
A three-module off-grid light pillar built from recycled zinc drainage pipe, which runs 48 hours across a 7-day festival on one charge, sets its own colour by GPS in order to match the festival's zone map, and installs by an untrained volunteer with an earth drill. This lands at 156–269 DKK per unit at 1,000 units.
The problem, measured
The survey drew 62 respondents, 52 of whom completed all the quantitative questions, and when asked to rate lighting and wayfinding across six areas of the festival the campsite scored lowest by a significant margin, at an average of 2.4 out of 5, with 53% scoring it below 3 and not one respondent rating it 5. The average respondent age was 25. This reframed the brief from brightness to orientation and perceived safety, since what people described was not that the campsite was dark, and instead that they could not find their own tent.
Tested with users, not just designed
A hi-fi prototype was built and put in front of real people rather than reviewed on screen, and we ran the qualitative field testing at a DTU Friday bar, which was chosen deliberately since festival campsites are used by people who have been drinking, and we needed to see how the lamp would actually be treated rather than how it would ideally be used. Participants gave first impressions and told us what they would be likely to do with a HappyLight standing in their camp. Furthermore we ran a dedicated durability test, where the lamps stayed stable under accidental impact when secured with 20 cm ground stakes, and the prototype was then presented to Godik, where we walked the client systematically through the requirements in order to establish which ones mattered most to them.
Tested at Roskilde Festival
We spent the whole festival with the lamps, with two prototypes placed in the Silent & Clean and Clean Out Loud camping areas and at the DTU stand, and we observed and filmed how guests interacted with them in daylight and after dark before talking to people in the camps for direct feedback. The structure held up where it needed to, since both lamps stood stable in strong wind and in tight spacing between tents. Guests were curious rather than indifferent, as several walked over to inspect prototype 2 specifically, two opened the top of lamp 1 to look inside without damaging anything, one was surprised that the lamp could be taken apart and then reassembled it himself, and people danced around them. This last point mattered more than we expected, since guests did not read the lamps as infrastructure and instead read them as part of the festival atmosphere, which means the design can improve safety and the experience at the same time rather than being tolerated as a practical necessity. However two failures were more useful than any of that. The lamps are so hard to pull out of the ground that one prototype broke during the attempt, and a guest jumped onto a platform and used lamp 1 as a handle, which damaged the structure. Here it is important to note that we had designed the cutout cover partly in order to remove a handhold, and someone still found a different one.
What I owned
I was Stakeholder Manager in a seven-person DTU and ITU team, and I was jointly responsible for the interview programme, which meant reaching out to festivals and suppliers, running the sessions, and analysing the data that set the requirements. Furthermore I mapped the actors the product has to survive, being the warehouse and logistics crews, the festival organisers, the volunteer setup teams and the guests themselves, and I wrote the conclusion and contributed the reflection. It is important to note that the CAD was Adam and Ditte's, the prototyping Anne's, the electronics Simon's and the visualisation Sofie's, while Maj ran the project.
The decision I'd defend
More durability costs more, however festival equipment gets stolen and vandalised, which means that the more you spend per unit the more each loss hurts. Here the team specified medium durability and dropped solar, since solar would not deliver meaningful charge during a Danish summer festival week anyway, and the lamps instead recharge from Godik's existing green energy infrastructure. This brought the unit cost low enough for theft to be an operating cost rather than a business-model problem, and I flagged to the client that their rental model could potentially justify revisiting this at a higher price point, due to the lamp being reused across events.
How it works
Head, body and foot are fully separable for storage, transport and repair. An RGB strip does the zone wayfinding while a high-intensity LED throws light downward through a milled cutout, which keeps glare and light pollution low. A microcontroller with an integrated timer and GPS switches on at dusk and reads its own coordinates in order to pick the colour matching the festival's navigation map, and this means that a lamp can be dropped anywhere on site and configure itself. A 12V battery through a step-down converter gives 48 hours over a 7-day event, prototyped on an Arduino Nano. Furthermore the cutout is covered with plastic, which keeps water off the electronics and at the same time removes the handhold that someone would otherwise use in order to pull the lamp out of the ground.
Delivered
The client received a design report, CAD files, survey data, a costed production plan and a three-phase rollout, running from 1–3 prototypes at TechLAB Roskilde, to 50 units in one camping area, and then to 600–700 across the site in order to test whether colour-coded zones actually work as navigation at scale.
What I'd change
The wayfinding concept was validated on intent rather than in the dark with tired and unfamiliar users, and here I would test that assumption early and cheaply, with coloured lights on poles in a field at night, before any enclosure design was started. This is due to the whole product resting on people reading colour as direction, which seems to be the assumption most worth breaking early.
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Two lamp prototypes set up on site at Roskilde Festival, one lit, beside a DTU-branded setup crew
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Bar chart of survey responses rating night-time lighting and wayfinding
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Annotated technical breakdown of the lamp: RGB ring, smile-shaped cutout, zinc alloy body, drill-in feet
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Roskilde Festival's own colour-coded camping zone map
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Guests sitting on the grass at night around a lamp's blue glow