Supply Chain Complexities

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Fast Prototyping > Supply Chain Complexities

Ongoing supply chain problems mean that getting hardware or devices that might suit your show can be a struggle, so prototyping with what you have available can help you stick to budget and timeline constraints. Michael Deacon noted that getting items or costumes for shows meant using what was available or what could be shipped quickly, even if it was imperfect: ‘a lot of it, like when we were in lockdown, it's just what you've got, or what could be posted to you on Amazon … especially during the pandemic, you sort of got what you could, and it was a bit more thrown together’. Carmel Clavin agreed; she told me that, while trying to pivot the Richmond Fringe Festival to a fully online format in 2020, ‘Nobody was ready for what was happening. Nobody had the correct hardware, or I should say nobody had the optimal hardware – and you couldn't get it at that point because there wasn't enough stock’. She and fellow festival producers eventually created a one-sheet that they sent to their participating artists so the performers could set up with whatever webcam and microphone they had available and still provide the best possible show. Nathan Leigh, a composer, lighting designer, and digital theatre practitioner, had a similar experience: ‘most of the technology was just stuff we had lying around, that we repurposed in some way’.

In contrast, artists like Clemence Debaig, who aimed to create shows using tools they developed themselves ran into problems getting what they needed. When Debaig created the haptic wearable devices for Strings, she told me that she grabbed what she could from Amazon to develop an early prototype:

I made a really dirty prototype that was in a pouch that I was just strapping on the body with physio-tape, and then we did a few rehearsals. … On one hand, we wanted to make sure that it was not limiting the movement; but where do we optimize the sensation of the vibration? … [I conduct] purely technical research around which ones are the strongest haptics I can get in, that can still be small and driven by a small motor. It's a lot of compromises, you know, the size of the processor and the size of the vibration motor.

Debaig now implements paper prototyping for devices and software integrations. ‘the technique of usability testing the paper version of an interface’. For theatre makers looking to develop new tools with what they have available, paper prototyping can help speed up the process by collecting ideas into one document to think through potential problems and solutions. Rather than trying a wide range of software or hardware solutions, which can be expensive and time-consuming, paper prototyping helps narrow down what your production needs.