2024.01 — 2024.04 · Festival Chair · Concept to Operations
UFES 2024 — Spring
A spring welcome festival turning new-student season into a single culture — fourteen student groups from wildly different fields, one venue. I led the whole thing as festival chair, from concept to sponsorship to running the day and building the official site.
UFES 2024 (University Freshmen Welcome Fes) launched under one idea: turn the scattered spring welcome season into a single culture. I brought together fourteen student groups — fashion, the outdoors, sport, technology, the environment, art, medicine, global work, the lot — into one venue in Shibuya, and built a day where new students could see things, try things and discover things. As festival chair I owned all of it: the concept, the program, the negotiations with each group, sponsorship, and the operations on the day.
The hardest part was making groups with completely different cultures and energy read as one festival to a first-year walking in. The work was to bind them without flattening them — keeping each group's character intact while threading the whole thing into a single story you could move through. Pre-registration handled the headcount; on the day, I designed the flow to spark conversation on its own, while deliberately leaving slack for the chance hallway encounters that usually turn out to be the best part.
Holding the line — "an event students made because they were thinking of the next students" — across both the visuals and the experience mattered to me. The official site that carried it, I designed and built myself alongside the planning: Next.js, shipped on Vercel, with the participating groups, the concept and the registration form on one page, so the feel of the day came through before anyone even arrived.