Tieto Tech Consulting
Flow Festival builds a world-class festival experience
Flow Festival has been a trendsetter in urban culture since 2004 — a unique blend of art, music, and culinary experiences that turns Helsinki into a global metropolis for one summer weekend.
Opportunity
Since its inception, Flow Festival has promoted the idea that festivals belong to everyone.
In recent years, Flow Festival has expanded its targets to create a digital, accessible, and sustainability-driven festival experience, developed through a long-term partnership with Tieto Tech Consulting.
At Flow, digital solutions are used to plan the daily schedules and how festivalgoers move around the area. They also help to ensure that different needs are taken into account to make the festival experience more inclusive. Technology is, above all, a service for the visitor. When Flow set out to renew its digital services, they were not just looking for a nice-looking app. They wanted a partner who could design and deliver a modern, scalable and accessible digital experience that would stand out internationally, and who would also have a deep understanding of the festival brand.
Solution
Flow chose Tieto as a long-term partner due to our advanced digital services, CX, and sustainability, powered by a shared vision and aligned values.
Together, our teams rebuilt the Flow website and mobile application from the ground up. We updated the backend systems and content management to enable fast and consistent publishing. The user experience was refined through service design: the entire digital journey was shaped using data and feedback, with accessibility integrated into every stage of design, testing, and release.
In 2025, the digital experience was enhanced with a chatbot feature, which was built in collaboration with boost.ai. The goal was not merely to answer questions, but to save time, support decision-making, and meet diverse user needs.
Real-world impact
Flow's ecosystem is now more accessible, user-friendly, and secure as well as more cost effective to maintain, enabling data-driven automation.
We designed Flow’s digital environment for real-world conditions: bright sunlight, busy crowds, weak connections or a phone used with one hand. This meant prioritizing strong contrasts, clear typography, simple navigation and logical information hierarchy.
Flow developed a unique way in the event industry to calculate environmental impact: assessing how material choices, logistics, and production decisions influence the carbon and material footprint — and how to steer decisions toward more sustainable solutions. We helped Flow Festival move into a browser-based digital service that supports informed decision-making already in the planning phase. The tool has supported Flow in reducing the festival’s production-related footprint — and it has been adopted by international partners in Flow’s wider network.
Ongoing partnership
Our partnership has supported Flow’s goals across customer experience, digital service quality, organizational efficiency, and sustainability.
This collaboration demonstrates how shared values and a passion for continuous development can set new standards for an entire industry. Flow Festival continues refining its experience: raising accessibility standards, using data responsibly to shape smoother service journeys, and further developing the environmental impact tool used in the festival production.
Tieto Tech Consulting remains a partner whose role is to ensure that Flow Festival can continue delivering world-class festival experiences.