Final outcome — Final Major Project
Designers: Alex Newson, Sebastian Ervi
Stage of the project: Refinement and Production
Here it is! Last week of the project. After discussing with our tutor Mor Bakal, Alex and I agreed to organise a concert with 3 artists to show the outcomes of our design in-situ.
Preparing the workshop
Alex and I were still wondering whether we should design a toolkit or a workshop, to help unestablished artists to design their own intimate performances in small music venues. Our course leader John Fass compared our role as designers to the one of dramaturges in theatre, who help designing and putting up a performance in place.
We decided to first work on the content and the structure, and then decide the form of our outcome after that — which ended up being a co-design workshop to take advantage of our expertise as researchers and designers and focus on quality of experience rather than reachability of the outcome.
We were also thinking about how to connect the individual activities and interactions designed by the artist, to make them a more coherent whole. We had explored storytelling practices a little, that can be used to elicit empathy (Grimaldi et al., 2013). Alex mentioned about Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”, which also made me think of Gustav Freytag’s “Narrative Arc” (Lupton, 2017). We took both as inspiration for our workshop, to help artists to think about their performance as a story or as a journey to engage the audience in.
The workshop was supported by a visual presentation that Alex and me built together over a Zoom call. The presentation explained why the project is important, what we were going to design together and how. In parallel, I managed to book a study room at the top floor of the building, and recruit 2 other artists to come along that I had been in touch with through Facebook — Serena Kaos and MELÓ. Stressful times!
The day before, we tested the workshop with our classmates Sylvester, Tiana and Luchen. This helped us to work on minor issues we encountered, and improve the process of designing the performative journeys on paper.
Running the workshop
After having printed the last documents we needed, brought snacks and water for our artists, and set up my camera with my stabiliser and a microphone we rented from The Kit Room (+ an adapter from Sound Arts — thank you for saving us two times in a row!), we were ready to welcome the artists for the workshop. Unfortunately, an issue with the guest booking system made us start the workshop 30 minutes late, but this also helped to establish a more informal atmosphere between the artists, who had a lot of time to break the ice between them. The experience was also uplifted by the views on London that the room was offering.
Alex was responsible of running the workshop itself, while I was filming the process. Luckily, everything went as expected as after a collective exploration of personal warm-ups, space dynamics, musical stories and storytelling techniques, our artists designed their own performative journeys — which Alex helped them to improve with final feedback. It was also interesting to see how this type of setting tends to generate and develop ideas with the artists discussing their thoughts and ideas between each other. This led us to think that designing a workshop was a good choice.
All 3 artists designed their performative journeys, that they were willing to share with us:
Organising the concert
For the concert itself, which we wanted to hold on Saturday — we wanted to rent an external venue and invite as many people as possible to attend. Alex sent requests by e-mail on Tuesday and after a few e-mail exchanges, we still didn’t have a venue secured on Thursday evening. This is when I decided to take things in my hands by spending the evening and the next day searching for venues around London and calling places to organise the event. I eventually found the Premises Studios in Hackney, a reputed recording and rehearsal studio with a large rehearsal room that fit our purpose.
At this stage, we only had one day to recruit audience members, which we did by sending an Eventbrite link to people we knew, and to friends of our three artists. Eventbrite helped us to keep track of the number of people coming, which we needed to hold below 15 because of restrictions. The internal MA UXD students were either busy with the final week of their project, or celebrating a birthday — which led us to rely on artists bringing their own audience.
Saturday at 7pm, we began to set up sound and the space for the concert. The staff of Premises Studios was kind enough to help us set up the microphones and individual reverb effects for artists. We started 20 minutes late at 8:20pm, with only 5 audience members showing up, out of the 12 people who originally signed up on Eventbrite.
MELÓ invited her audience to write about their personal struggles on pieces of paper, that were placed in a lit jar and shared background stories of her lyrics, while sat in a circle with her audience.
Serena Kaos had the idea of writing a poem about her own story, and the story behind her name, which she heard in a dream one night. She also shared how she writes down sentences to reassure herself when she goes through struggles. She wrote down some of these sentences, that she gave to the audience before the last song.
Lastly, Kelly Erez began her own set by warming up with her audience, through physical movements, mouth and breathing exercises that were done collectively. She then gave stones of her garden having a personal meaning to her, that she holds with her fist to release negative energy. She also shared more about an exercise she teaches about in her life coaching lessons. She ended her set by teaching lyrics of her last song, that the audience then sang along during the concert.
Thoughts of the artists on the workshop and the resulted performance were then filmed through an informal interview in front of the camera, which were included in the video of the outcome.
Final notes
I edited the video that served to communicate our outcome on Adobe Premiere Pro, cutting the original footage, adding transitions, colour grading and adding visuals. For assessment purposes, we decided to include the feedback from the audience at the end of the video — the one without will be showed more publicly. Consent forms were of course signed by the audience and the artists, to allow us to use the footage of the concert for our project.
We would still have elements to improve, especially in the workshop. In fact, it became inadvertently centred about storytelling, which was not the core of our project. We could also think about better ways to provoke artists and make them wonder about specific topics more deeply, instead of sticking to their initial thoughts. And as it was the first time we organised a real concert, we also learnt a lot and expect to make the organisation smoother next time.
The week was one of, or arguably the most stressful and busiest I have ever experienced. After all, we organised a workshop from scratch, recruited artists, tested the workshop, ran it, rented a venue and organised a concert with external participants, while writing the essay and working on the video. I feel like our organisational issues leading me to work on most of our group tasks is what led me to submit the final writing of the project late (by 1 hour and 10 minutes).
But in the end, we made it real! And seeing a project come to life and having a positive impact is a wonderful feeling a designer can have.
Now, on to project presentations and the graduate showcase, while waiting for our grades…
Reference
Grimaldi, S., Fokkinga, S. and Ocnarescu, I., 2013, September. Narratives in design: a study of the types, applications and functions of narratives in design practice. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (pp. 201–210).
A special thank you to our artists Kelly Erez, Serena Kaos and MELÓ, who trusted us from start to finish, and were willing to try weird but wonderful things with us. I would also like to thank the whole MA User Experience Design tutoring body (John, Al, Mor, Eva, Jack, Wan, Tiff, Greg, Yae Jin, Steph) and to our classmates willing to help us with workshops, feedback and testing (especially Max, David, Tiana, Sylvester, Maria, and Anya). And of course, thank you Alex for your work, flexibility and enthusiasm throughout the project.
Thank you for reading me so far! A lot of effort was put to make these posts easy to read and the blog easy to navigate, which, I hope, improved your experience here.
All images mine unless stated otherwise.
