FOMO Festival

A festival as a research tool? It may sound unusual, but it's a concept that works. This approach allows research and design agency cocosmos to connect with the demographic they want to understand better: young adults aged 16 to 23. For years, the municipality of Eindhoven has tasked cocosmos with evaluating the needs and resilience of this age group. How can they become self-sufficient? What is their financial stability? And how do they navigate the digital world?

FOMO Festival isn't a typical music festival with bands performing on stages. It's an open event in the heart of Eindhoven, focused on four containers labeled F/O/M/O, representing Fear Of Missing Out. Each container presents a challenge that encourages participants to reflect and express their true feelings. For young adults, it provides self-awareness, and having someone genuinely listen to their story is comforting. The municipality of Eindhoven utilizes these insights for various purposes, including shaping or updating policies and allocating grants to provide appropriate support for this target group.

Cocosmos is a research and design agency that specializes in co-creation and research for societal issues. The agency believes that residents, entrepreneurs, and visitors collectively shape the city. Using a creative research approach, cocosmos’ designers create experiences and interventions that reveal people’s (latent) wishes and needs. This approach often uncovers differences between what people say and what they actually do, leading to new insights and revealing hidden needs. The results are conveyed creatively and provocatively to their clients or other relevant parties. In a recent case, they presented their findings in a physical deck of insights and actions related to young adults, similar to a paint color swatch. The insights and advice are concise and practical, enabling policymakers to take immediate action.

For more information, visit cocosmos.nl.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, young adults faced challenges such as loneliness, remote learning, and limited social interaction. As the world began to move past the pandemic in 2022, the municipality of Eindhoven sought to understand how young people were faring and how they could be supported. To gather insights, the municipality enlisted the help of cocosmos for research. What started as a one-time project has now evolved into a three-year initiative, with research conducted through FOMO Festival to stay connected with young adults and address their needs.

The idea

The research by cocosmos began with the idea of standing beside young adults to truly hear what's going on in their lives. In collaboration with the municipality of Eindhoven, they targeted young adults between the ages of 16 and 23. They noticed that while there are plenty of activities for those under 15, options for young adults over 16 are limited, and they tend to be more critical of their engagements.

To reach young adults effectively, cocosmos consulted students from the Industrial Design program at TU/e, who belonged to the target group. Together, they developed a steel frame with interactive elements such as a giant Connect Four game and provocative statements. This frame traveled with the researchers through different neighborhoods in Eindhoven, serving as a hangout spot where young adults shared their thoughts on money, education, work, and independence.

Preliminary research revealed that the central issue preoccupying all young adults, especially after the pandemic, is making choices. Whether it's about education, money, or time management, they feel the weight of their decisions. To further explore this decision-making stress, cocosmos and the TU/e students developed a creative research tool: a festival.

The research clearly showed that many young adults experience decision-making stress. But how does this stress actually look? To explore it further, you need to speak to more young adults, not with traditional surveys or panel discussions. That’s how the idea for FOMO Festival was born. FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out, perfectly aligning with the challenge of making the right choices. A festival held right in the city center is an effective way to engage a diverse group of young adults from Eindhoven.

How do you ensure you gather enough useful data at a festival? Design studio cocosmos developed a concept of four closed containers, each with an intervention. Because the containers are closed, they spark curiosity: what’s inside? Inside each container is a challenge linked to the theme of that year’s edition. The crew members are close in age and background to the festival’s target group. This creates a sense of familiarity and encourages young adults to participate and open up. In some containers, participants engage alone, while in others, they join group discussions. This was a deliberate choice: when you’re alone, you challenge yourself to reflect on your choices. In a group discussion, new perspectives emerge more quickly.

Each festival focuses on a specific theme. The first edition of FOMO in 2022 was about independence. In 2023, the theme was financial resilience, and in 2024, it will focus on digital resilience. The municipality of Eindhoven and cocosmos jointly decide on the themes.

How do you transition from a broad theme to specific interventions and challenges at the festival? Prior to each festival, cocosmos conducts preliminary research with TU/e students and the young festival team to uncover key topics related to the theme. The challenges associated with these topics must meet at least two criteria: they need to be appealing to the target group and lead to valuable research data. The challenges follow a specific sequence: each participant starts at the first container and progresses to the last. For example, during the financial resilience festival, the first challenge focused on participants' "money mindset" and how they developed it. Many young adults realized they had formed their views on money independently. Subsequent challenges addressed the truths about money that they knew. It was revealed that parents had a significant influence on how young adults viewed money, contrary to what participants initially thought.

Another example is from the 2024 edition on digital resilience. In the first challenge, participants reflected on their phone usage: how much time do they spend on it? Do they use it more than their friends? What do they think about their phone habits? Could they go without it? After this first challenge, they placed their phones in lockers for a while. In the next container, they reflected on their digital behavior in various ways. It's important to note that participants are aware that they are part of a research study. Transparency about the researcher's intentions is a key aspect of design research.

After each festival edition, cocosmos compiles and analyzes all results. The findings are presented in a card set, similar to a paint color swatch. The cards contain the key insights, along with practical recommendations. For example, participants in the young adult age group prefer the term “young adult” over “youth” (jongvolwassenen vs. jongeren in Dutch). They also appreciate it when the municipality of Eindhoven listens to them (they know the municipality is the client for the festival). More complex advice emerged too. During the 2023 edition on financial resilience, the importance of learning through trial and error was highlighted. Pocket money or a first job helps young adults learn to manage finances. But what if parents can’t afford to give pocket money? These young adults are at a disadvantage. Could the municipality support them with ten euros a month to experiment with and learn about money? In theory, it sounds useful, but in practice, it’s harder to implement.

The municipality of Eindhoven and other stakeholders receive the yearly “swatches” with results from that year’s FOMO Festival. These swatches are stored in a miniature version of the festival’s iconic container, so the results don’t get lost in a drawer but sit on shelves or desks, visible to civil servants and staff.