Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020 - 31

solution because it morphs along the path
from start to " ﬁnish " through a discovery
process that includes an ongoing interpretation of the problems at hand.
Consider the elements of humancentered design:
The client: Theatre designers serve
multiple clients in working through a
production process: the playwright; the
director; the producer; our audience.
Empathize: As designers, we strive
to serve others through our empathy for
a multitude of factors. Theatre designers build empathy for the play by reading it, interpreting it, and researching
the time, place, and people at the heart
of the story; the audience, by teaching
moral lessons and bringing forth ideas
and issues we feel are impactful in our
current world situation; and the vision
of the production team and ultimately
our director and producer.
Deﬁne: We deﬁne our mission
by choosing large themes at the heart
of the play and ideas that become the
driving force of the design solutions.
Throughout our process, we continually
deﬁne and redeﬁne how the production
will allow audience members to reexamine and discover new insights about
the world and their role within it.
Ideate: We brainstorm design ideas
and approaches. We try to keep our process ﬂuid and initial ideas disposable in
order to continue to reﬁne our approach
and ﬁnd elegant, appropriate, and ideally exciting dramatic solutions. We
continually run into dead ends, ﬁnding
that what we thought would work does
not and we return to the drawing board.
Reimagining, throwing away, failing,
and trying again are essential. The ideating process is perhaps the best phase
of design, when we experience the freedom of thinking, dreaming, and imagining without the pressure of reality.
Embracing this process allows creating,
destroying, reﬁning, and inventing, ideally moving towards more eﬀective solutions that are true to the play, the time,
the production team, and the audience.
Prototype: Rough sketches and
test models are employed to try out
ideas. Ideally, a constant feedback chain
takes place that speaks to the melding of
form and function for potential production-worthy items. Theatre designers
have to ask continually, as do all designers, is the design eﬀectively serving

" As climate change
and pollution
continue to be major
problems, more
industries are turning
towards sustainable
designs to minimize
their carbon
footprint. Applying
the human-centered
design process to
the fast fashion
industry would
result in the entire
supply chain being
analyzed with more
efficient ideas about
how to produce,
transport, and sell
the products. "
-Mike Nesmith, student

its intended purpose? Prototypes ideally should be quick and disposable.
Prototyping serves a ﬂuid dynamic
design process and allows for practical use of time and materials. Crafting
throw-away ideas is what we do.
Test: Testing solutions comes in
many forms. Actors rehearse with initial versions of clothes and props. The
pre-production technical rehearsal period involves re-working, reﬁning, and
re-thinking. Testing at this phase relies
on collaboration between designers,
actors, directors, dressers, stagehands,
etc.--in fact, everyone needs to be on
board to ensure a smooth and safe
production.

Systems Mapping for Design
Challenges
Theatre designers can use the systems
mapping process to promote information exchange and collaboration. Just
as systems mappers creatively spin
their research to tell a story, theatre
designers spin research for each play
around the values, themes, and content they ﬁnd relational to present-day
circumstances.
There are several types of systems
mapping, including:
* Journey mapping: Tell the story of a system from one perspective
* Actor maps: Show which individuals
and/or organizations are key players
and how they are connected
* Mind maps: Highlight various trends in
the external environment that inﬂuence
the issue at hand

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Aryan Sadh's final class project: masks made from sustainable materials with a mission of spreading
reliable information and compassion faster than the virus.

FALL 2020 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

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Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020

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