Written by Patrick Pennefather as part of the Digital Dance Research + Development for 2019.
Process:
The purpose of this series of documents-in-progress is to share the process of development that led to a Digital Tool Kit that may be useful to dance-creators.
These consist of three main areas:
design thinking
stagecraft and
mixed reality
Context and motivation ~
Part of our user-centered process included asking dance creators what would be most beneficial for their creative process. As discovered in our first facilitated brainstorming, we quickly realized that providing access to, say an online toolkit, would not benefit dance-creators as effectively as the integration of teaching, professional development, targeted workshops, and a live-production process (as a prototype of what dancers learned) associated with understanding a specific tool and how it could be of useful in context. We uncovered that dance creators needed hands-on-experience with each potential tool in order to understand its value to their own creative process and its use. Further, we wanted to provide dance-creators an opportunity to see the results of that integration, to test their knowledge in front of real audiences, to receive feedback from the specific tools that we facilitated. In essence we user-tested three different toolkits with the same dancers who represented a cross-section of dance creators with a common intention of wanting to learn strategies that they could use to help them develop their work.
Overview of the Tool Kit The tools below form part of the digital toolkit that dancers accumulated over time.
Our first categorization however is one that could be applied to all three processes. What we have entitled a Design Thinking Process is an audience-centered design tool, which, can help creators understand who their work is for, the constraints and affordances of the medium they wish to communicate to their audience, and the best ways they can achieve the way in which they communicate their art form. We summarize the Design Thinking Process and each of the three primary tools that make up the strategic toolkit for dance creators, the purpose or ‘why’ of each tool, and share the reasoning or how this will benefit the dance creator. This echoes the same process we went through facilitating workshops with the dance creators. At the beginning of the process dance creators were at a loss as to how a digital toolkit might benefit them when they didn’t understand how digital could be applied in the development, capture or mobilization of their own work. We realized a need to start at the basics; from the brainstorming of ideas using specific design thinking tools to teaching them principles of staging.