Boomtown’s new Observatory wants to make the real world a little better

Dr Martha Newson and Shula Rael have. But each year as the sun comes up on Monday morning, the answers drift away from Boomtown like dandelion puffballs in the breeze.

Enter: The Observatory – the big, bulging brain of the annual, Hampshire-based festival. Boomtown runs 12–16 August and has come to be known as the UK’s wildest thanks to its enveloping story world and epic infrastructure. Nestled up in the woods, The Observatory is a cornerstone of its Chapter Five: Radical Redesign, whose ambitious green energy policies and welfare initiatives mark a watershed moment for festivals everywhere.

“We’ve got 77,000 people in this collective space, and we’ve got so much warm data that comes at us every single year, but it leaves when the gates close,” Rael tells me. She’s Boomtown’s brand director and, together with Dr Newson and her team, helped to develop the Observatory, which will hold talks, workshops, and panels throughout the festival weekend – with topics running the gamut from ‘Music is Medicine’ to ‘How to Create Reality in Your Dreams’.

“It’s this place where, for the first time, you can collect and start to translate and learn from that experience that everybody’s having,” she continues. “What can we learn from it? And can it make the world a slightly better place?” That curiosity philosophy and renegade innovation, as we know from the attendant redesign more broadly, suffuses everything Boomtown does – from the hydrogen-powered stage to the expansive fictional world running parallel with in-vogue marquee acts and an alluringly fringe undercard.

Dr Newson, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, is the Observatory’s primary architect, her work motivated by ideas of belonging, connection, and ritual. She’s explored such themes in her previous research, including in the context of Premier League football, which isn’t as far removed as you’d think.

“Festivals feel like quite a similar canvas to work with,” she says. “It’s for everyone, as much as you wish to join in. There are many different cultures within the bigger umbrella, and it’s a place of collective feeling.”

Not just joy, euphoria, and raving, she clarifies: “I think that’s a mistake to think that football is a fun pastime, because it’s really stressful, or to think that a festival is just joy. It’s about meaning, and overcoming the challenges of the weather, or friendship groups, or whatever it is – it’s doing it together that gives us meaning and purpose.”

Given The Observatory is framed as an “academic research hub,” I wonder what Dr Newson would say to people who might be nervous or outright cynical about studies centred around experiences that are more typically paired with intellectual disengagement, escapism.

“What I hope tempts people in is just their curiosity to learn something about themselves, which is high in the festival environment,” she says. “It’s attracting open-minded people in the first place, but it’s also creating this liminal space where things aren’t as they usually are.” (And, okay, sure, there might be sweets and meal vouchers to win over the hardcore sceptics.)

But when it comes down to it, these are non-preachy collaborations that aim to get something out of people who are already living outside their grindstone social structures, and arguably more primed for self-discovery and interpersonal epiphanies. It’s also just fun and cool, not cookie cutter new-age filler: “How often do you get to see your brainwaves translated into a mandala on the screen?” she continues. “Some of the [workshops and studies] are really, really novel. There’s a study on fear responses. The team wanted to bring in a tarantula to measure threat responses, and we had a veto on live animals, so they are sourcing ethically sourced taxidermy tarantulas.”

Elsewhere, there’s the Conspiracy Kitchen, co-hosted by four University of Kent professors, in which Boomtowners will “create, serve up, and rate conspiracy theories.” Dr Grace Blest-Hopley’s session will unpack the latest research on how psychedelics interact with female physiology and hormones. There’s a tactile arts-and-crafts workshop that peels back the festival experience for neurodivergent people, led by Dr Keren MacLennan.

“I felt very strongly when we designed this that we did not exclude other ways of knowing,” Dr Newson goes on, having put out an open call for applications to fellow researchers. “Academic knowledge is just one way of understanding things, and within that, there are many disciplines and many methodologies.”

She highlights Emma Marshall’s ‘Music is Medicine’ programme as an example. Marshall has a background in dance music but has gone on to a PhD where she’s examining the roles movement and rhythm play in healing. “She leads the dance based on her practitioner experience, so she’s uniting practice and academic knowledge within her own session,” Dr Newson says.

“We’ve got EEG monitors coming in and hooking people up to make mandalas of their brainwaves live in the field,” she continues, referring to Kate Dalby and Leah Kurta’s demo of their “live emotional visualisation tool.” “These are quite complex designs,” she says. “One of them is during a yoga session, so they make this collective mandala, and that’s a pilot for a bigger study. So some of the research is informing what happens next, which is also a really important part of science.”

Boomtown’s MO is built on what happens next – what could this lead to, how can we go further? Concurrent with The Observatory workshops, Rael is leading an initiative where digitally tracked cards – the Healer card, the Pioneer card, the Protector card, etc. – will be handed out to people who are observed being their best selves. This will spread far beyond The Observatory – to the entire site – and once again, it has an obvious practical application back home.

The Changemaker cards are the outcome of a research challenge run through the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI for Digital Media Inclusion – a collaboration between Boomtown, its tech partners, Amplify and Monks, the University of Surrey, and Royal Holloway University of London. “We worked with the research team to answer the question: can we generate real evidence that Boomtown’s world drives prosocial behaviour change? The Changemaker cards are the outcome of this work,” Rael says.

The cards aim to show how far good deeds can travel and how connected the audience is, as you’re able to literally track the deed – the card – via an app. For example, you’re seen binning someone else’s discarded beer cans, one of the team notices, and they award you the Protector card for doing your bit, protecting the land. You’d pass that card along to a fellow environmentally-conscious Boomtown citizen, and so on. It’s the same premise for the other cards, but you might get a Healer one for comforting someone who’s having a wobble, getting them some water, whatever it may be. It’s about peer-to-peer influence; not so much rewards as nudges that scratch at people’s curiosity and human instincts.

Take the Jump, a grassroots social enterprise that enables consumers to see where they have agency in regards to climate change, are a Boomtown partner this year. Because of their existing work onsite, Rael says “they are perfectly positioned to hand out Visionary, Legend, and Pioneer cards.”

Rael elaborates: “It’s all about recognising people in the pro-social space, naming it in the moment, and then asking them to recognise it in others, mapping that data, and then outside of that, getting to see how connected the audience is.”

As with the hydrogen-powered stage, whose capacity expands from 8,000 to 20,000 this year, there aren’t a great deal of models for The Observatory to look up to. Certain larger festivals such as Burning Man and Glastonbury do host live research studies, but not like this – “we believe it’s the first of its kind in that it’s women-led, and that’s just organic,” Dr Newson tells me. “We celebrate the fact that STEM has come on so far that we are leading on this.”

“We always try and prototype something that’s progressive,” Rael adds of Boomtown’s broader goals. “So Hydro was about showing a technology that was unproven in terms of powering a main stage, and actually showing the world that it can be done – just see it, and be it. We’ve got to show people what can be done to then allow that to be adopted further. The Observatory, it’s just curious minds coming together and asking questions.”

Many of those questions won’t have immediate answers, or answers at all, but science is rarely a straight line, Dr Newson tells me. “It’s lots of looping around. The end goal often isn’t what you think it’s going to be.” It’s in the process that the work happens and ways of living in Boomtown’s temporary city become internalised. Hopefully from Boomtown’s exemplar conscience, out there in the woods, citizens will carry some radical connection back into a world that’s in desperate need of it.