After nearly a year, the Fusion project on Social interaction in the event experience led by Dr Lenia Marques (Department of Event and Leisure, Faculty of Management) came to an end. The main aim of the project was to develop tools to better analyse the experience of events for audiences, focusing in particular on the social interaction part of the event experience.
Overall, the project was successful, contributing to advances in research and also to reinforcing and expanding an international network in the field of events, and also feeding into leisure and tourism.
Several meetings took place between the partners of the project (U.K.,Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Romania) and also involved other partners along the way (Brazil and South Africa).The first results were presented in two conferences and the outputs will be published shortly.
The project shed new light on the different dimensions of the event experience, and in particular how audiences interact with each other in and beyond the event. This is only considered as a beginning, since the partners are continuing to using the tools and work together towards using the results and developing professional practice advice.
As principal investigator, I’m very satisfied with the outcomes and look forward to building on the work of the past year. This is also the time to publicly acknowledge all the partners who supported and gave valuable input to the project, as well as all the students, who in one way or the other, contributed to this project. To all those who assisted, a big thank you.