Product Testing

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Fast Prototyping > Product Testing

Part of rapidly pivoting to a new format or new digital tools was stumbling through the learning process. Holly Champion said of the first Streamed Shakespeare productions: ‘We didn’t know really what we were doing. ... then, by the end of those two weeks [after A Midsummer Night’s Dream], we had our system pretty well in place and then we thought, “Well, we'll keep going for as long as the lockdown goes. As long as we can sustain this”. And we did. We managed to do about 15 or 16 weeks’ worth of a show a week’. The group got into a flow after upskilling and could do show turnarounds very quickly after a few weeks of trial and error.

When Nathan Leigh and his partner, Nicole Orabona, started creating the musical audience interaction for their show POV: you are an a.i. achieving consciousness, they set up an informal Zoom hangout with some friends and explained how to interact with the program Leigh developed. The first test mainly proved that the interaction worked remotely and the results were fun and exciting to the audience; a later session added Orabona as performer, reading a ‘poetic text we found’ and that rehearsal-testing process led to results that worked so well that Leigh and Orabona decided to develop the show: ‘there was this collective sense that we had experience something really special together, at the end’. However, this process required testing the prototype over a few Zoom sessions, not only to ensure it worked, but to determine whether it was a viable product/performance. Clemence Debaig also described her process of testing her haptic prototypes: ‘before even making the things for Strings: our first rehearsal was no tech, and it was just me shouting “right arm right arm right arm”’ – this shouting stood in for what would become the audience interaction that triggered the haptics to buzz.

Leigh himself noted in our interview that he did not necessarily want to be a test subject for new technology in performances, at least when the performances were considered done enough to present to an audience: ‘I'm like, “Oh. I'm intrigued by what you're doing. But I don't want to be a beta tester for it”’. Although the process of exploration can be creative and exciting, it is important to separate the prototyping period from the performance, unless it is explicit that the performance is a type of prototyping or testing. Leigh added:

But you try to like test it on this kind of mobile device, test it on Safari, test it on Chrome. You try and accumulate as many perspectives as you possibly can in terms of like, what's the range of audience experiences? And even if they can't all be the same, are they at least all good in their own way?

Part of testing is to determine the type of experience the audience will have, which Leigh compared to sightlines in a theatre space – seeing the top of the actors’ heads is fine if the overall stage picture is considered, but if the show is geared only toward the best floor seats, then numerous audience members will lose out on some level of comprehension and aesthetic appreciation.