Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020 - 27

processes that ideally lead to elegant,
creative, practical solutions. Designers
invent from scratch or reinvent what already exists to construct responses that
meld form and function. Great designers
must embrace ambiguity, recognizing
that, while design problems do not have
wrong or right solutions, some solutions
just plain work better than others and ultimately will be judged in terms of their
relative success.
Designers take in all the information available to them, often from a range
of perspectives, think profoundly about
a problem, and wait for inspiration to
strike. While they can work alone, designing is most often a collaborative process
between the design team and the end
user, or client, who in the theatre is often the director, producer, or audience.
Designers need to have and continue to
build empathy for the user to ensure solutions are ultimately effective. The best
designers are not ego-driven. Solutions
should not be about oneself but should be
appropriate responses to the needs of the
problem-at-hand.
Effective theatre designers use and
apply a broad set of tools and approaches
for solving intricate challenges. The job
requires visually bringing a playwriter's
text to life, while collaborating with a
team of people, all working to create coherent and meaningful production value
for an audience in a powerful display.
Theatre designers:
* Remain flexible in interpreting and connecting visuals to literary themes and
ideas to empower audiences to grasp
big ideas we find essential to understand best human practices
* Collaborate with a variety of team members to solve myriad problems
* Appreciate, recognize, and apply the history of art as well as color theory and application to illustrate big ideas in ways
that we hope excite and inspire our audiences to live a more meaningful life.
More generally, designers use design
techniques to solve problems, illuminate
new pathways and possibilities through
innovation, create new realities and facilitate change, stimulate dreaming and
imagination, create work that is at its
best positively impactful, interpret and
re-package essential ideas, and create
relevant solutions that serve something
larger than themselves.
In their process, designers must

embrace risk and failure, brainstorm,
ideate, create, fail, re-boot, and try again.
They work in the realm of the unknown
without right or wrong answers, think
flexibly in both linear and circular pathways, collaborate in order to develop solutions than are greater than the ideas of
an individual, exercise persistence and
fearless risk-taking, and work beyond
constraints.

" Learning and
practicing the
elements of DIVE
allowed me to not
only think like a
designer but develop
my individual
design process.
Empathizing,
defining, ideating,
and prototyping
are all fundamental
to research, so, in
essence, DIVE is
a research style
that can be applied
to everyday life.
I have integrated
prototyping,
specifically, into my
daily routine; if my
product is successful,
it's successful, and if
it's not, I'm prepared
to brainstorm, create,
and test again. "
-Paige Adams, student

Human-Centered Design in Class

Human-centered design provides a
systematic approach to design and facilitates taking the interdisciplinary
classroom collaboration to the next step,
where teachers and students work together to construct effective curricular
design. Using one, some, or all of the five
steps of the process, and running relatively quick brainstorming sessions, students
can provide valuable insights through
which they help to construct or redesign
the class, at any point of the semester.
Brainstorming activities can include rethinking assignments, formatting daily
lectures and information exchange, and
the existing syllabus design. The collaboration inherent in design thinking
promotes an exchange between student
and teacher that begins to blur the dividing line, evolving into a classroom learning community. Many students will go on
to business environments where humancentered design is used in a variety of formats. They will be able to apply the steps
and overall experience of using human
centered design in myriad ways throughout their lifetime, both for personal and
professional problem solving.
Using human-centered design in the
classroom:
* Leads to valuable student input for flexible, responsive teaching
*
Allows students and teachers to be
collaborators
* Can increase the democratization of the
classroom. Exercises in brainstorming
can be used to tweak and redesign the
class at any stage during the semester.
These design skills and techniques
were deployed in what was first an inperson and then a pandemic-quarantine-induced online Spring 2020 First
Year Writing Seminar titled Fashion
Sustainability: Issues, Practices, and
Possibilities. As a part of Vanderbilt
University's College of Arts and Science
Writing Across the Curriculum program,
FALL 2020 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

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Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2020

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