Cultural Festival Platform, Arenberg UNESCO Site

The short version

A UNESCO heritage coal mine outside Lille doesn't know how many visitors it gets in a year. There's no ticketing system, no attendance count, nothing to measure against. That absence was the actual starting point: our team of six had five days to design something that could bring in an audience the site had never really reached, people under thirty, and to prove it could work with a real, usable prototype, not just a pitch deck.

I was the Creative Manager on the team. I helped shape the concept, then built the prototype that proves it works: a full app a visitor could actually use from arrival to the end of the night.

What we ended up with is aRENEWberg, a twice-yearly cultural event held on the mining site itself, and the app that ties it together. Here's how we got there.

What we learned

We had five days, not five months, so the research had to be targeted. Three conversations shaped almost everything that followed: Audrey, who works in urban regeneration and site management, Simon, from the local tourism office, and Irene, a researcher who specializes in cultural heritage. We also looked closely at how comparable heritage sites operate.

We didn't get the chance to talk to the young visitors we were actually designing for. That's a real limitation, and I come back to it later. But the three experts pointed at the same gap from three different directions, and that was enough to move forward with confidence: Arenberg isn't short on history. It's short on reasons for someone young to show up.

The clearest comparison is Lewarde, another former mine about forty minutes away, now run as a full heritage museum.

Arenberg has none of that infrastructure. What it does have, and what no indoor museum can offer, is a real forest with over 150 kilometers of trails right on the property. We weren't going to out-museum a museum. We could build something Lewarde structurally can't: an outdoor, after-dark, youth-facing event that uses the site's scale instead of competing on artifacts.

The decision that mattered most

Here's the constraint that shaped the whole event. Residents next door don't want noise. We also wanted the event to be genuinely welcoming to neurodivergent visitors, who often find loud, crowded environments overwhelming.

Those two requirements usually pull in opposite directions. A disco needs sound. Inclusive design usually means giving people more control, not less.

This is also where two parts of the team met without planning to. The ethics and inclusivity group had been pushing for more sensory control for neurodivergent visitors. My track, practicality and feasibility, had been trying to solve the noise problem before it became a reason for the site to reject the whole event. Neither group set out to solve the other's problem. We ended up in the same place anyway.

The answer was wireless headphones instead of speakers. Everyone at the silent disco and the film screenings wears headphones, picks their own channel, and controls their own volume. From outside the venue, there's almost no sound. From inside, a neurodivergent visitor has more control over their sensory experience than they would at almost any other version of this event.

The interface says this plainly, not just the pitch deck. The Silent Disco card doesn't say "join here" and stop. It says why: wireless headphones, three DJs, zero noise complaints. That's the actual reasoning, visible to the visitor.

The prototype

Six activities happening in one place, with no single source of information, isn't an event. It's just noise. Without an app, someone arriving on the night has no way to know where the silent disco is, how to join the scavenger hunt, or when the market closes. It also gives the site something it never had: a digital presence, and a way to actually learn who shows up.

I built the prototype myself: a working, full click-through app, not static mockups. It has five sections, and each one does one job.

Home

The first thing a visitor sees: what's happening right now, what's coming up next, and one clear action to take. A live schedule bar shows the night's timeline. The Scavenger Hunt sits front and center, since it's the main draw, with a live player count and a direct way to join. Smaller cards below surface the Silent Disco and the film screening without demanding attention they haven't earned yet.

The hunt

The hunt is the spine of the prototype. Seven clues, each tied to a real location on site, each worth points, with a live leaderboard so visitors can see where they stand.

Every clue ends the same way: post the photo with the event hashtag. That's not a bolted-on social feature. It's how the team designed for the event to be seen beyond the people who actually attend, built into the core loop instead of added afterward.

Finishing all seven clues ends on a summary screen: every clue found, the points from each one, a running total. It's a small moment, meant to be the kind of payoff that makes someone want to come back for the next one.

The map

Five zones, color-coded, with a live "you are here" marker and every clue plotted. Tap a zone and a detail card slides up with hours, what's on offer, and how to pay. This screen solves the exact confusion the team named as the reason to build an app in the first place: a visitor arriving with no idea where anything is.

Profile

The profile tab is where the app's values live in the product, not just in the pitch deck. A digital ticket with a scannable QR code doubles as the actual entry mechanism for the night. A running timeline shows everything a visitor has done that evening. And three preference toggles: Eco Mode, which dims the screen to support the event's zero-waste goal, Event Alerts, and Share Location, with a plain line underneath it: help friends find you on site, never shared outside the app.

Where it stands, and what I'd do differently

We presented aRENEWberg to a jury on the final day, as part of the Créathon's normal structure. There's no recorded score or written feedback to share here.

Two things stand out looking back, and both changed how I think about scope and research.

We built one version of this app in five days. We never got the chance to test it, or iterate on it, before the deadline hit. That's normal for a sprint this short, but it's worth naming: what's shown here is a first pass, not a validated design. If I had another week, I'd spend it watching someone actually use the app, not adding features to it.

The bigger gap is who we talked to. Three experts gave us a strong outside view of the site's problems. Nobody in the actual target age group ever looked at the app or reacted to the concept. Expert opinion is a fast way to get oriented in five days, but it isn't a substitute for the people you're designing for. I'd treat it that way from the start next time: a starting point, not a stand-in.

The event-frequency question stayed open too. Twice a year with headphones instead of speakers is a reasonable answer, but it's still an assumption we reasoned our way to on paper. I'd want to test it against an actual resident before I trusted it.

What I'm confident stands up: the research pointed at a real, specific gap, the headphone decision solved two constraints at once instead of trading one off against the other, and the prototype is a working demonstration of the idea, not just a description of it. Five days isn't enough time to get everything right. It's enough to prove the core idea is sound, and to know exactly what to test next.