Contribution of BUas students to Fieldlab events
It will undoubtedly not have escaped your notice in recent times: the ‘Back to Live’ trial events of Fieldlab Evenementen. Together with several knowledge institutes and partners from the field, they are doing research into the safe reopening of events in times of a COVID pandemic. Lecturers and students of the minor in Crowd Safety of Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas) and Logistics Community Brabant are involved in this research.
Due to the corona restrictions, events can only be organised to a highly limited degree. This has a major impact on the events industry. That is why Fieldlab Evenementen was set up by the events industry in cooperation with the Dutch government. The aim of Fieldlab Evenementen is to develop validated building blocks as evidence of a safe and reliable approach, in co-creation with companies, government authorities, scientists and researchers, interest groups and the general public. The programme of Fieldlab Events is aimed at differentiation of various events (corporate and public) and situations (indoors and outdoors, static or dynamic) and an accelerated return to full-scale events operations.
To this end, Fieldlab Evenementen has identified eight building blocks that contribute to preventing and reducing the risk of transmission of the corona virus: behaviour, quick testing, air quality, dynamics, personal measures, surface hygiene, vulnerable groups, and triage, tracking & tracing. These building blocks are based on the customer journey of visitors of events. Events should be organised in a controlled environment - from the purchase of a ticket, the actual event itself, to the journey back home and possibly the period after that. By paying attention to process management and capacity calculations, a safe environment is created within which the desired visitor numbers during events are possible again. Along these lines, several trial events took place in the past period. For instance, a business conference and theatre show in Beatrix Theatre, a dance event and pop concert in Ziggo Dome, two football matches and two festivals in Biddinghuizen.
On behalf of BUas and LCB, Maarten van Rijn, Iris Kamphorst, Justin van de Pas, Simon Donders and Joep Coolen have been busy for several months now working on the organisation and development of the three building blocks assigned to them (‘dynamics’, ‘behaviour’, and ‘triage, tracking & tracing’) and on reproduction of the data obtained.
Iris Kamphorst: ‘Within these building blocks, we are looking at, among other things, the number of contact moments, contact duration and the processes during inflow, circulation and outflow of the events. In this respect, we meticulously measure the distance between people in the audience, in combination with contact duration. Our results will shed light on the full visitor dynamics process, based on which TU Delft, together with medical and university experts, can develop a risk model’.