The project
My final-year BSc dissertation: an investigation into applying Bluetooth beacon technology in the festival industry. A piece of primary research into whether proximity-based technology could actually improve how people navigate and experience a large temporary site, rather than whether it was technically possible.
How it fits together
- A structured investigation into beacon technology and its viability in a festival setting.
- Assessment of the practical constraints of a large temporary site: power, placement, density and the realities of crowd behaviour.
- Written up and defended as a final-year dissertation.
The trade-offs that mattered
Framing the question around the industry, not the technology
The interesting question was never whether beacons work. It was whether the festival context makes them worth deploying, which is a question about people and logistics.
What I took from it
It was the first time I had to defend a technical position in writing to people who would push back on it, which is a different skill from making the thing work.
- Writing for a sceptical reader forces a level of precision that building alone never demands.
- The interesting constraints on a technology are usually environmental and human rather than technical.