A group of DTU students has developed a special room for the Roskilde Festival that gives festival-goers the opportunity to find some peace and quiet.
This week, around 100 DTU students are attending Roskilde Festival to contribute to a better festival through engineering solutions.
One of the projects is the Mellow Pod, which was already taken into use in the days before the music starts by festival-goers at the bathing lake. And it seems to have been well received:
“It’s so quiet in here!” exclaims Martin, who has just taken a swim. He has sat down with a friend in the Mellow Pod, which is one of more than 20 DTU projects at this year’s festival.
Inside the Mellow Pod, festival-goers can enjoy a quiet moment, as the structure is fitted with Hunton acoustic insulation made from recycled wood fibres and rock wool from Rockfon. The design is deliberately flexible and takes into account the transportability of components as well as assembly, and disassembly.
“Our goal is to create a place where festival-goers can mellow out, because quiet places is probably the only thing that’s really missing at Roskilde Festival,” says Lukasz Marczuk, who is studying Civil Engineering at DTU. Along with fellow Civil Engineering students Mateusz Beyrowski and Katarzyna Wisniewska, he created the Mellow Pod.
“But of course, the project has an underlying point: We’ve used recycled materials for the entire construction—including materials which are already available at the festival—because we’d like to make the festival-goers aware of the perspectives of upcycling some of what is typically considered waste.”
During the festival week, the students will perform several tests of the indoor climate inside the Mellow Pod, including noise level, CO2 level, and temperature. The aim is to get input for use in optimizing the design.
Lukasz Marczuk hopes that the group will get the opportunity to further develop the Mellow Pod design for future festivals, so that perhaps it can become a regular feature at the festival site. He also expects that the Mellow Pod can eventually be used in other places where people need a break, e.g. at other large events, in open office spaces, or in shopping centres.
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The Mellow Pod is located by the bathing lake at Camping East and is used as a place to get warm after a swim, make a phone call to those back home, find shelter from the rain, or simply relax.
- DTU and Roskilde Festival entered into a partnership in the spring of 2010.
- The purpose of the partnership is for DTU students to do who voluntary, unpaid work on various projects that tackle a technical issue at Roskilde Festival.
- In cooperation with a DTU supervisor, the students design a project related to one of the many technical challenges found at the Festival. They then use the festival week to both conduct theirs studies and present the project to festival-goers and other interested parties.
- The project is worth five ECTS credits if the student follows up with a detailed technical report, which is marked by an the supervisor.
- This means that for approximately 100 DTU students, Roskilde Festival will not just be about music and entertainment, but also about challenging their academic skills and trying out new ideas in practice.
- Among other things, the collaboration has given the DTU students behind the start-ups Volt, DropBucket, Cutlab, PeeFence, and Allumen a platform for testing their technology before they started their enterprises.