Innovating the Design Process: A Theatre Design Journey

David E. Smith

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032121192
• eBook ISBN: 9781000571516
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Design generale

Innovating the Design Process: A Theatre Design Journey explores the process of designing for theatre and details how each part of a designer's own process, no matter what their design specialization, can be innovated and adapted for a more confident journey and for better outcomes.

The book observes and deconstructs the processes used by theatre designers, uncovers and explains the structure and concepts behind those processes and shows how they can be easily reassembled for better results and to meet different situations. It uses innovative real-world practical examples from all the fields of theatre design taken from shows throughout the author's career. The processes covered in this book are split into two sections – design development and design implementation – with an additional chapter covering design presentations. Written in an engaging and informative style, this text opens up a designer's ability to innovate within the design process to optimize reproducibility, resilience, personal fit, confidence, collaboration and audience engagement.

Innovating the Design Process is a next level book for both MFA theatre design students and early career professionals who wish to develop their craft further. Seasoned professionals will also find within its pages concepts to reinvigorate their own design process.

The book includes access to an online guide to using Microsoft Word for Mac to mirror content in two separate documents.

1IntroductionInnovation and Creativity

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003223160-1

For over a decade, I have taught a capstone class to interested BFA and MFA students in their final semester at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). The essence of this Innovation and Creativity class is to watch documentaries and read books about other innovative and creative people or teams (creatives) and try to observe and uncover their innovative and creative processes. The class then discusses as a group what aspects could be useful to bring into the student's own personal innovative and creative process toolbox. The class includes such creatively diverse subjects and people as Black Mountain College, Twyla Tharp, Andy Goldsworthy, Evelynne Glennie, Marina Abramovic, Louis Kahn, Gerhardt Richter, The Vignellis, The Eames' and Cai Guo-Qiang amongst others.

The structure of the class is to watch the documentary and read the assigned chapter, and then come prepared for class discussion. The students also write their own notes while watching and reading, and then send them to me beforehand so I can better target my questions and know they have done the work. I originally developed the class for students in our conservatory here at UNCSA in order to give them a much wider perspective before we unleashed them upon the unsuspecting outside world. It also serves to give them practice in the skill of what Picasso described as “stealing like an artist”¹, not to plagiarize but to use the creativity of others to continually inspire and develop their own creative and innovative process after they graduate. I purposely try not to use the words art or design when discussing these processes, as the class is made up of students from many different disciplines including technical majors and management majors, and not just designers. Not everyone sees themselves as an artist or designer, but they do feel that what they do is sometimes innovative and/or creative—hence the title. I believe that it is this myriad of diverse voices around the table from very different backgrounds that gives this class its richness.

It is surprisingly difficult to observe and uncover someone else's creative process. It is so easy to be distracted by what a creative is doing, what they are making, their tools, their surroundings, their product, whether we think they are nice, smart, kind to their partners or spouses, creative, successful… or not. Observing and uncovering is also especially difficult these days when social media commands our every waking moment. Under social media's influence, we have all been purposefully addicted to casting an opinion about everything, even the things that previously never required an opinion. These opinions don't now demand any thought or understanding and don't have need for any expertise or experience. We just have to Like

or not as the case may be and move on as quickly as possible to cast the next opinion. The need for this next opinion dopamine hit is so insidious and continuous that there is no time for rumination or reflection or any sense of owning the consequences of expressing the opinion. Any flicker of guilt or responsibility is quickly ameliorated by the next Like

with its associated little high. Sadly, these days, firmly held opinion seems to trump any depth of consideration, empathy or appetite for ambiguity; the very abilities that are necessary for observing and uncovering someone else's innovative and creative process. Developing and adding to one's own creative process requires observation without judgment and uncovering without immediately moving on.

Observing without judging is a hard thing for anyone to do, perhaps especially for students. My process in the class when confronted with “I like…” or “I dislike…” is to always acknowledge it and dig deeper. Why do you like or dislike? What aspect did you most like or dislike? I have to train myself to ask questions in such a way that they cannot be answered with either “I like” or “I dislike”. Once the student has explained what they meant and have dug a little deeper, I always try to restate their original response. I use this new deeper explanation and show how this leads to a much more interesting conversation that can now be opened up to the wider group for further discussion. Statements such as “I like” or “I dislike” leave nowhere else for the conversation to go except agreement or disagreement, which is the antithesis of observing and uncovering.

Despite these inescapable hurdles, as a class, we discuss the material week by week over the semester. As we slowly dispense with the drive-by opinions and push through the rabbit-hole distractions, we start to unpeel the layers to uncover and dig into the different processes being practiced by these diverse creatives. It is quite transcendent for the class when we start to differentiate the process being practiced from the person, their work and their product. This requires a lot of coaxing and cajoling, and I am very fortunate these days to have some other particularly enlightened members of the faculty to help team teach the class with me, especially since the class has recently doubled in size and popularity.

As with any journey, our discussions each year take their own unique path through the same terrain. As you can imagine, we don't always uncover and discuss exactly the same processes every year. However, despite the slightly different way [that] leads on to way … ², what consistently becomes apparent is that it is also hard for us to observe and uncover our own creative process. The complete concentration on the task that is necessary when we are in the throes of being creative, where self-conscious actions and awareness are merged together as described by Csikszentmihalyi³ in Flow, precludes any sense of being able to observe ourselves at the same time and identify the processes that we are undertaking.

If we can't easily identify process in ourselves, how can we then add to it or decide to use a different process entirely? There is this maxim that one of the signs of attaining adulthood is recognizing and accepting that other people think differently to us without us wanting to change them—a kind of recognizing and living with difference. Similarly, I believe that a sign of creative maturity is when a creative can observe their own process and change it if they want to or need to—a kind of second-order recognition and control. The Innovation and Creativity class is structured to develop this in the students. By watching and reading, they cannot change the way the creatives work, they can only observe them and then learn from their observations and apply what they have learned to their own creative and innovative processes.

In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, the author David Galenson uses the price of artwork throughout an artist's life to show that they usually fall into either of two groups. One group he terms as conceptual artists whose creativity develops early on in their career; and the other he calls experimental artists, whose creativity takes a long period of experimentation and refinement to develop. I am in that second camp. It has taken me a whole career of practicing as a designer to understand what it is I am really doing; to then take it apart, optimize each part and then reassemble my process for better results.

My career has been as that of a theatre sound designer and although some of the examples in this book reflect that experience, they are not limited by them. As with Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit, which was not just limited to dancers and choreographers, what I have learned and uncovered is about the much wider area of design, its concepts, practice and philosophy. As such, all the insights included in this book can be applied to your own field of design in whatever way you feel appropriate.

After a quarter century of observing students as an educator, I noticed that when they learn something for themselves, they do it in a very different way than we educators traditionally like to teach them. Their method seems to be much more fragmented and nonlinear, both recursive and discursive, with eventual understanding as a process of coming into focus rather than being built up brick upon brick. We have taught them well! A class may be laid out logically, progressing steadily brick upon brick from A to Z throughout the semester, but from the student's point of view of attending many different classes all at the same time, it is just a lot of disconnected fragments they are experiencing and trying to make sense of.

President Abraham Lincoln has been quoted as saying that it is much easier to ride a horse in the direction it is [already] going. To that end, what seems to be needed is something different that acknowledges the way people learn and connects these fragments and allows them to coalesce into a fabric of understanding. The Innovation and Creativity class was one attempt at providing this and the way I have chosen to write this book is another. It is unlikely that everything within these pages will be new to the reader but because it is written less like a traditional textbook and more like a conversation, a coalescing of understanding, I am hoping that the larger fabric of design process will emerge.

To honor my background, this book is laid out like a play. The first act loosely covers developing a design, then follows a short intermission which covers design presentations and finally the second act loosely covers implementing a design. In sharing my insights and experience, I have not thought of them as only limited to a certain level of designer. In university parlance, both undergraduate and graduate design students should find this book useful. However, having taught both MFA and BFA students, the value of some of what I discuss may only become apparent after a designer has had some experience in designing and has come up against the limitations of their own process. As such, I hope this book will also serve any experienced professional designer who is wishing for their process to be reinvigorated.

Within these pages, I have also consciously tried to stay away from any discussion involving technology, systems or engineering. Firstly, because it is different for each design discipline, but more importantly because its lifespan is so much shorter than the ideas and process of design contained within these pages. As such, I hope this book will serve the reader well for many years.

Words constantly evolve. As some words gain in meaning and value, other words lose it. Recreation is one of those words. It used to mean practicing being creative over and over again. That is the “re” part of the word. Because being creative as a child usually also meant running around while doing it, recreation evolved into meaning sports, with its current emphasis on winning and losing. There is no winning or losing when innovating and creating. There is only practice. Rather than read this book as just an intellectual exercise, I encourage you to put into practice the ideas within these pages as well as any ideas of your own they may provoke. I suggest that we take our ideas apart, modify them and reassemble them repeatedly to better suit our own processes. To judge these ideas as either winners or losers are to miss the point, they need to be practiced.

I hope this book's greatest offering to the wider profession of design will be to show that what was once thought of as fixed and indivisible can now be taken apart, rearranged and changed at will. We as designers can not only unlock and deconstruct the processes that other creatives use and apply them back to our own creative process, but we can also apply our own process of innovation and creativity to our own process of design. Designing design. Design squared. D².

Maybe there is yet a third group of creatives that Galenson has yet to identify; experimental artists who after a long career of experimentation and refinement make sense of it all by becoming conceptual artists. In a way that is what Tharp and others are becoming in their writings and presentations. It would be interesting to see if there were similar data that would support this thesis. If there were to be such a group, I would be humbled to be considered one of them.

Notes

1. Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.
2. Referencing a line from The Road Not Taken. A poem by Robert Frost.
3. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist who conducted a long-term study that used pagers to randomly interrupt creatives while working and report how they felt at that moment. This allowed him to uncover a focused creative state he called Flow.

References

• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
• Frost, Robert. (August 1915) The Road Not Taken. The Atlantic Monthly.
• Galenson, David. (2007) Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2Prototyping as Design Process

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003223160-2

One of the documentaries we watch in our Innovation and Creativity class is Maya Lin's A Strong Clear Vision (1994) about her designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I am particularly struck by the comment she made on the plane while on her way down to Alabama for her first site visit for the Civil Rights Memorial…

[I needed to] come up with a definition in a verbal way before I found a form for it… I need to understand conceptually what the piece is about before I visit the site, because once I visit the site, I tend to start designing.

In essence, Maya Lin seems to be articulating this recognition of her creative process and her control over it. She must first recognize and then hold herself back from kicking into an automatic mode of design in order to purposefully practice a more considered process.

I personally can identify with this. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Innovation and Creativity
• 2 Prototyping as Design Process
• 3 Words as Pre-Prototype
• 4 Script as Machine
• 5 Symbols, Narrative and Vocabulary
• 6 Granularization
• 7 Purpose, Meaning, Reason and Research
• 8 Word-Based Prototype Template
• 9 Simplicity, Syncing Up and Annealing
• 10 On-Ramp, Quest and Warm-Up
• 11 Meet & Greet
• 12 Designer Run
• 13 Next Morning
• 14 Fade Ins and Outs
• 15 Designer as Chef
• 16 Content, Distribution, Environment
• 17 Quiet Time
• 18 Tech
• 19 Observing
• 20 Ending Safely
• Index