Imola in Musica: the festival programme on a map

The problem

At a festival spread across a town, the programme is a leaflet folded in four in your trouser pocket. By nine on a Saturday evening it is half unreadable, and in any case it does not know that the concert in the square has slipped by half an hour and that something is starting in a cloister two hundred metres away. The audience of Imola in Musica moves between squares, courtyards, theatres and parks in the old town: the real question is not what is on the bill, but what is on now, near here.

For its twenty-sixth edition the City of Imola decided to answer that question with an app, the first in the festival's history. Not a digital version of the leaflet: a tool for finding your way while the festival is happening, across dozens of free events where established artists alternate with emerging names.

How we solved it

The app is in Flutter, one codebase for iOS and Android, which on a seasonal project means something very concrete: the fix that arrives mid-festival reaches both stores the same afternoon. It opens on the events happening right now and the ones about to start; the map shows where they are and guides you to the spot; the search filters by proximity and by date. Whatever catches your eye goes into a personal list you can share with friends, because you go to a festival together and the list is mostly for deciding where to meet.

And that is where it is decided whether an events app works: not in the development, but in whoever keeps it current. So we did not write the back office from scratch. We integrated DatoCMS as a headless CMS and modelled the content around the office's real work: descriptions, images and location pins, uploaded independently by the council's staff for the current edition and the ones to come, without having to go through us.

The results

The paper leaflet is still there, in a smaller print run. The real programme, though, updates while the town is playing, and what stays in your pocket at the end of the evening is not a worn sheet of paper: it is the list of events you chose to go and hear.