Think Spatially, Act Locally

Laying out an event is by essence a spatial task:

• Ensuring every attendee is always close to a recycle bin or a trash can.
• Making sure entrances are in walking distance of public transportations and parking lots.
• Carefully placing restrooms so they are never too far from a person who needs them.
• Making sure merchandise is available everywhere.

The Spatial Analysis tool on the Event Intelligence palette aims at supporting event producers solving many of these spatial layout challenges. It provides the ability to select a category of map items, and set a radius around each of the items in the selected category to see the spatial environment of the items. The flexible EventMapStudio interface then allows the user to add, delete, or move items. The user can also modify the radius interactively to continuously analyze the changes on the map, and make layout decisions. Let us review three examples of spatial analysis.

How to Place Recycle Bins

a good rule of thumb for recycle bins placement is every 30-40 yards. You can use the Spatial Analysis tool in order to efficiently layout your recycle bins.

1. Open your map and draw an event border for the area where your event will take place.
2. Create a recycle map item and place it on your map.
3. Open the Event Intelligence palette, go to Spatial analysis
4. Set the radius to 60 feet (20 yards), an select Recycle bins.
5. Duplicate the existing recycle map item as many times as you need to and place the resulting items in a way that the circles on your map cover the map entirely
6. You now have a perfect layout with recycle bins placed every 40 yards.

Click here to see an actual video of this process.

If you want to leverage this map to actually set up the actual bins in the most efficient manner you can follow the following steps:

1. Set the export property of all the recycle map items to true
2. Load all your recycle bins on a truck
3. Open your map in eventgoer mode, and enable geolocation
4. Drive your truck and set up a recycle bin using the markers on the map.

If you export all the recycle bins to the eventgoer map all the people attending your event will be aware of the exact location of the recycle bin. They will be more likely to recycle, and will also be made aware of the importance your organization attaches to recycling.

How to Encourage Public Transportation Use

According to Julie's Bicycle, a leading organization in the sustainability in the arts space, "Audience travel accounts for the largest portion of the carbon footprint of any event or venue"1. Encouraging Public transportation use is therefore an important element of any event’s sustainability plan. A factor in encouraging public transportation use is the proximity of your event’s entrances to bus stops and subway and train station exits. EventMapStudio provides an easy way to achieve this through the combination of two of its Event Intelligence wizards:

1. The Transit Locator
2. The Spatial Analysis Wizard

Here are the five easy steps to achieve this:

1. Place the center of your event location at the center of your screen
2. Go to the Event Intelligence palette and click on the Locate Public Transit button
3. Select which public transit stations you want to insert on your map
4. In the Spatial Analysis wizard, select the Mass Transit item and set the radius to the maximum distance you want your entrances to be from public transportation
5. The circles on the map show you where you can place your event entrances so they are easily accessible by the public

How to Create an Alcohol-Free Zone

Many events sell alcohol, yet want to provide an alcohol-free area for kids. The Spatial Analysis tool can help you achieve this.

1. Open the Event Intelligence palette, go to Spatial analysis
2. Select Alcohol, and set the radius to the minimum distance you want any alcohol-serving location to be from a kids area.
3. Inspect the circles on the map to make sure no kids area is included in them.

Three Categories of Spatial Reasoning when Setting Up an Event

It is interesting to note that the three examples above each involve a different category of spatial reasoning. Placing recycle bins involves analyzing the distribution of a type of items, and the coverage of an area. Encouraging public transportation by placing entrances in the vicinity of public transportation involves minimizing a distance, in this case the distance between event entrances and public transportation exits. On the other hand, setting an alcohol-free zone involves maximizing a distance, in effect setting up an exclusionary zone around the kids area. These three different types of spatial analysis are challenging and can benefit greatly for the automation EventMapStudio provides.

1 Audience Travel Guide. Julie's Bicycle @  https://juliesbicycle.com/resource-audience-travel-guide-2015/