We won’t forget the night we met dancing.
Okay, technically we met on a Monday morning in June —at the DO School’s Berlin campus to accept Telekom Electronic Beats’ Smart Connection Challenge. But in a truer sense, you could say we met during a night out in Kreuzberg. I’d say we walked in, but in reality it was more of a strut. With our flashy touches of red, mesh and leopard print, we stood out amongst Berlin’s signature all-black dress code, but we were freakishly there for each other.
After that night, we adventured to all ends of the U-Bahn, survived on a diet of falafel and Club Mate, and fell in love with the trashy elegance of #SpätiLife. And we were always dancing: we danced to celebrate birthdays, we danced to get through tough days. Ours is just one of the many meaningful connections we’ll take away from the program as we boogie back to our respective perches in the universe—Noah to Chicago, Sarah to Toronto. (But you should know we’re already plotting a midpoint reunion in the birthplace of techno music, Detroit!)
We’d liken the DO School’s innovation program to a dance floor. Sometimes literally, when our rotating “resident DJ” would pump tunes for a midday dance break in the studio, or at night when we’d all cram into a hostel room for a spontaneous jam sesh powered by every wired instrument we’d packed with us. But even more so metaphorically: a dance floor of ideas improvising and colliding like sweaty bodies, vibrating at the same frequency of our shared values—inclusivity, social responsibility, and respect for cultural histories.
We also shared the burdens of the world we’ve inherited: hyper-connected yet more lonely than ever, faced with the worst of capitalism, hate violence and environmental destruction. It might be hard to understand how dance music can help to overcome the world’s problems—until you meet our team and hear the incredible ideas that were born out of our month together. Our squad, gathered from Karachi to Moscow, Nairobi to Beijing, LA to Bogotá, featured musicians and mobilizers, marketers and social entrepreneurs, optimists and critics—all citizens of dance with visions of a better, shared future.
One such vision was a mentorship program for marginalized artists that operated on the basis of mutual knowledge exchange between artists at every stage of their career, disrupting the traditional, hierarchical mentorship model. Another group looked at supporting local DIY communities by using cryptocurrency in resource sharing. Taking dance floor into the IOT era, the tech team explored wearables as a way to connect at the club without disconnecting from IRL onto your phone. Other groups designed a loyalty program to incentivize venues to prioritize safety, diversity, sustainability, and accessibility; blueprints for a DIY festival encouraging innovation and collaboration between local artists, promoters and venue owners; a visualizer of a party’s vibe based on live user data; an AR experience to generate sonic experiences in unexpected places; and a 5G-powered global dance floor to give smaller, regional communities a platform on the world stage.
Throughout this process, we had no shortage of inspiration and guidance. Our shining disco ball lighting the way were the guest experts who visited our studio daily. They shared their expertise on innovative technologies, while urging us to consider technology’s social impact and influence on the core values of nightlife. Liz Steiniger of Least Authority highlighted the importance of designing for privacy, inspiring one group to consider using zero knowledge proof at the club door. David Muallem, founder of Blitz club in Munich, emphasized the power of co-creation and collective ownership to make nightlife a safe, “parallel universe for minorities.” We explored decentralized business models, like upstart Res()nate, a #Stream2Own music cooperative poised to dismantle the ad-driven Spotify empire by using Blockchain to give power back to artists and fans. We heard the artist’s perspective from Ari Robey-Lawrence, whose creative collective WOOD // WORK showed us how collaboration and self-released music can be viable paths to navigate politics, space, and self-representation in electronic music.
Ultimately, we worked together with Telekom Electronic Beats to synthesize our ideas with their core insights into an MVP that could be tested in their Eastern European markets. Though we don’t want to give away the surprise, we know it’ll no doubt have an impact on how music lovers discover and experience new places.
We came to Berlin to answer Telekom Electronic Beats’ challenge: to create compelling new ways of fostering meaningful connections through music. What we couldn’t have anticipated were the meaningful connections we would forge with each other in a matter of weeks. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long you’ve known someone to feel connected. That’s the power of friendships made “on the dancefloor.” Sharing space, music and movement can tell you a lot more about a person than their CV or Facebook profile.
The legacy of our connections continues to reverberate even months after the program. Jahanzeb is using his online music venue, JamOut.tv, to facilitate virtual dance parties through our group’s network with a global lineup of VJs and DJs. Sarah is collaborating with Cecilia and Noah to continue to share our projects, experiences and visions on her dance music community and storytelling platform, We Met Dancing. Indeed, a new connection, a sudden burst of inspiration, or just the right song at the right time, can be exactly what you need to go out and make your dream life happen.
And so we’ll keep on dancing…
