Playasophy
Jan 2013 - now

My Role

My first year, I designed and built my camp’s new Hookah Lounge. I primarily focused on the overall experience, and led the décor effort to create the desert caravan feel. In my second year, I increased our coffee and hookah offerings, as well as our on-Playa visibility. In my third year, I designed and built three laser-cut pillars to improve our camp frontage and overall look and feel. In my fourth year, I helped improved our LED art and wrote documentation on how to run camp to pass on to the new leadership.

Apart from yearly projects, I’ve also co-led the camp since 2014. At a high level, I was in charge of inter-group communications, transportation, scheduling, and people management. I also coordinated the kitchen, our offerings, and acted as the main point-of-contact for inquiries.

Camp Management

Running a 35-person camp at Burning Man is not an easy task, and requires a variety of managerial and administrative tasks. Add in the fact that this desert is a hostile environment that most are not used to, and the task now encompasses keeping everyone alive and relatively unharmed. Off-Playa, this means that we maintain documentation on how to run the camp, year-to-year operations, and communication to both the Burning Man organization and to our members.

Hookah Lounge and Iced Coffee

This is our main public offering, with the Lounge open five of the seven days that people are on-site. To keep things running smoothly, we require members to work four 2.5-hour shifts throughout the week. Shifts are split into hookah running, coffee making, serving, and bartending.

Previously, I tracked and managed the burn rate of all consumables to ensure we had enough for a full week’s offering. This also led to off-Playa math to figure out how much we need to increase our amount of open hours.

Camp Frontage and Sign

While the appeal of iced coffee was strong, the outside of our camp still looked like a bunker and did not show what we truly were. I went through a few different design rounds and settled on pillar boxes to frame the entrance and create a more intriguing look. To do this, I researched laser cutting and construction.

I also helped with creating a new and simpler laser-cut sign to replace our previous one, as it did not work half of the time.