"It Appears to Be a Free-for-All": Designing for Audience Agency in an Immersive Theatre Environment (original) (raw)
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Experience Design Theatre: Exploring the Role of Live Theatre in Scaffolding Design Dialogues
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014, 2014
While theatre has been used in HCI as a tool for engaging participants in design processes, the specific benefits of using live theatre over other communicative mediums, remains underexplored. In this paper we introduce Experience Design Theatre (EDT) as an approach to undertaking experience-centered design with multiple parties in the early stages of design. EDT was motivated by a need to involve several diverse groups of people in the design of a digitally coordinated care service -NetCarers. We used live theatre as a way to engage small groups of participants in dialogues around the design of NetCarers, to qualify their contributions in a refined performance, and to communicate their concerns and aspirations to domain experts. We highlight key benefits to using live theatre in experience-centered design and offer insights for researchers undertaking similar work in the future.
Design in Action: Unpacking the Artists’ Role in Performance-Led Research
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021
This paper illustrates design work carried out to develop an interactive theater performance. HCI has started to address the challenges of designing interactive performances, as both audience and performers' experiences are considered, and a variety of professional expertise become involved. Nevertheless, research has overlooked how such design unfolds in practice, and what role artists play in exploring the both the creative opportunities and the challenges associated with digital technologies. A two-day workshop was conducted to tailor the use of an interactive mask within a performance. The analysis highlights the artists' work to make the mask work while framing, exploring and conceptualizing its use. The discussion outlines the artists' skills and design expertise, and how acknowledging them reconfigure the role of HCI in performanceled research.
Applied Theater for Developing Participatory Design Fictions in Virtual Reality
CCC through Design Fiction in VR Workshop at DIS2020, 2020
Augusto Boal’s Applied Theater inspires processes for developing participatory design fictions in Virtual Reality (VR). Applied theater’s practice of embodied and future-action oriented storytelling encourages participants to envision potential futures and work toward them. This parallels the work of design futuring, which explores and critiques futures to potentially change the present. Augusto Boal used his theater games, Image and Forum Theater, to create fictions that identify contemporary issues to participatorily explore diverse futures. These games are rehearsals for future actions and consequences. VR enables a community of participants to envision and be embodied within these potential futures as they co-create them.
Expanding the Design Space for Technology-Mediated Theatre Experiences
Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021, 2021
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Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre 4. Special Issue: Études théâtrales et humanités numériques, 2017
After a critical presentation of the state of the art in scholarly activities at the intersection of theatre and digital humanities, in Canada and elsewhere, this paper suggests how the two disciplines might work together to articulate and facilitate new modalities of knowledge production emerging in each individually. Its aim is to make explicit the values of the inventive knowledge production characteristic of design and performance, and to propose that theatre and digital humanities might best acknowledge and enable inventive knowledge by shifting their emphasis away from production-oriented prototyping and towards experimental prototyping, provotyping, and experience design. Du développement des outils au design expérimental Jusqu'à présent, les chercheurs travaillant à l'intersection des études théâtrales et des humanités numériques ont eu tendance à se lancer dans le développement d'outils électroniques, conçus pour faciliter deux grands modes de création de savoirs: à travers des recherches sur l'histoire du théâtre (y compris la numérisation et l'archivage de textes ou de traces de représentations), ou à travers l'aide à la création théâtrale (à savoir la facilitation et la documentation des processus de création). Dans les deux branches d'activité, l'accent a été mis sur le développement d'outils prêts à l'emploi, ou de prototypes prêts pour la mise en production, susceptibles d'être disséminés largement et appliqués à des contextes variés par toute sorte d'utilisateurs, avec leurs objectifs spécifiques. Dans d'autres mots, la recherche à l'intersection du théâtre et des humanités numériques a été orientée par la création de produits et de plateformes ; nous avons imité les entreprises commerciales de production de software avec notre ambition de créer des objets numériques qui puissent aider d'autres chercheurs à générer ou à transmettre des savoirs. Quoique les outils qui en ont résulté, ainsi que notre engagement critique avec leurs épistémologiques, ont été une réussite (au Canada, ils se comptent parmi les plus notables dans le champ des humanités numériques), les objectifs et les méthodes qui ont porté ce travail ont eu relativement peu d'impact sur les buts et les méthodes, établis ou émergents, soit des humanités numériques, soit des études théâtrales comme disciplines indépendantes. En me fondant sur les projets que je connais le mieux – principalement des projets canadiens dans les humanités numériques et mon propre Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)-, je souhaite soutenir ici que les humanités numériques ont à offrir plus aux études théâtrales, et réciproquement. L'idée principale de cet article est que les réussites du projet SET, qui a su répondre aux tendances dominantes dans son domaine, sont moins intéressantes que les possibilités suggérées par ses échecs et ses à côtés, surtout dans le champ de la construction du savoir et des objets d'étude. Le théâtre et les humanités numériques pourraient aller plus loin et tirer plus de profit en mettant moins l'accent sur le prototypage orienté vers la production, et en se consacrant plus à un prototypage expérimental ou au « provotypage », pour faire plus de place, dans un champ dominé par des méthodes de recherche issues des sciences sociales ou des sciences exactes, à des méthodes plus propres aux sciences humaines et susceptibles créer, sans exclusive, des savoirs
In every century, there are different apparatuses that are redefining and refining the notion of immersion. After experiencing panoramas, planetariums or even IMAX movies, we are now longing to see whether VR can really fulfil our expectations. We are ready to offer all our senses and to experience new situations and to be present somewhere else. But is the virtual reality's medium prepared for these expectations? Meanwhile the immersive theatre's genre is spreading and engaging the audience for couple of hours into their very peculiar environments. The aim of my research is to point out different features of live theatre that, when combined with or added to VR-experiences, can enhance the immersion and create more realistic illusions. My investigation is related to narratology and reception studies, and is based on recent findings related to VR. First I'm going to present through some examples how 360-degree fictional movies are exploring their specialties by transferring the narrative literally into the viewers head (e.g. Alteration by Jerome Blanquet, or Rhizomat VR by Mona el Gammal) as a way to capture the viewers empathy more. In immersive performances the audience is considered a participant with a given role. This way the narrative environment is constructed in such a way that allows the participants to unfold the story by directing their focus to carefully planned details. This does not make the participants the story's protagonist, but they can become the protagonist of the experience itself. They can have a variety of experiences that are directly addressing all of their senses creating more suspense. Based on different examples, I will point out various tactics that VR-movie creators can use to draft their own language and offer more inputs for their viewers. I will also point out how to create such environments for using the VR HMD that can dramatically be built into a viewing situation, without having the forced isolation feeling. My research is based on an audience survey made in June 2017 in Mannheim following a performance by SIGNA, on several interviews conducted with immersive theatre makers, and also on hermeneutical analysis of different VR creations. Virtual reality. 360-degree movie. Immersive theatre.
But a walking shadow: designing, performing and learning on the virtual stage
Learning, Media and Technology, 2010
Representing elements of reality within a medium, or taking aspects from one medium and placing them in another is an act of remediation. The process of this act, however, is largely taken for granted. Despite the fact that available information enables a qualitative assessment of the history of multimedia and their influences on different fields of knowledge, there are still some areas that require more focused research attention. For example, the relationship between media evolution and new developments in scenographic practice is currently under investigation. This article explores the issue of immediacy as a condition of modern theatre in the context of digital reality. It discusses the opportunities and challenges that recent technologies present to contemporary practitioners and theatre design educators, creating a lot of scope to break with conventions. Here, we present two case studies that look into technology-mediated learning about scenography through the employment of novel computer visualization techniques. The first case study is concerned with new ways of researching and learning about theatre through creative exploration of design artefacts. The second case study investigates the role of the Immersive Virtual World Second Life™ (SL) in effective teaching of scenography, and in creating and experiencing theatrical performances.
The Interactivity Lab: training toward the performer as ‘Architect-Clown’
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2018
A challenge for performers working in interactive and participatory performance forms is a need to navigate between the position of the ‘Architect’, designing and structuring an audience’s experience, and that of the ‘Clown’, sustaining a performance state that is present and responsive to the particularities of individual interactions. While design and structure can preoccupy the development of new work, rehearsing for participatory performance proves a challenge when the pivotal ingredient – an unpredictable audience – is absent. How can training support performers to attend to both performance structure and the immediacies of interactive exchange? How can it support them to think critically about the aesthetics, ethics and politics of both? This article reflects on my pedagogical process of working with a group of undergraduates in spring 2017, exploring training approaches to support their devising process as they created a self-directed interactive theatre piece. It offers an ethnographic glimpse into the studio work and students’ responses, as we investigated approaches to developing the performer as ‘Architect-Clown’. Drawing on 10 years’ experience as a performer-deviser in this field, I sought the tack between these two training zones, applying pedagogic methods that work to develop performance qualities of listening, presence and improvisation, alongside methods aimed at developing a critical and reflexive approach to experience-design. Are the two roles as distinct as is suggested? How might they interact, and what might be gained (or lost) from this cross-training studio approach?
NARRATING STAGE DESIGN AS A MOMENTARY SPATIAL EXPERIENCE
INARCH2018, 2018
Stage design is a temporary space built specifically for a performance or play. Although it is created for temporary use and not permanent, the atmosphere, which is created and narrated by a stage designer, is build to determine the individual or a group of people of how they should perceive or feel. There is a space shared by a group of people who enjoy the very precise moment, confirming that all of them has share the same spatial experience at the same time. Case study for this paper is a musical stage Ariah the Musical, a musical drama to celebrate Jakarta 486th Anniversary (2014). This musical drama performed on a massive stage, using Monumen Nasional (Monas) as a background. This paper suggest that the narrative build through a systems of interiority which has create a momentary spatial experience. There is an engagement between the temporarity of time, sensorial and social spatial experience in a stage design. This stage serves it purpose not only as a temporary space for a performance but also to exhibit Monumen Nasional to the audiences. The idea need to be explore through an analytical design approach to articulate the idea.