Today is the second Theatre Sandbox community day, bringing together participants, venues and advisory group to share learning and questions. Later on we have invited Jo Reid of Calvium to lead a session on user testing and iteration – we are a bit worried that the process of making theatre may be sometimes at odds with developing work which uses technology and needs lots of testing and iteration, so want to give some support around this.

The day started with a round up from each of the participants about progress, which I have summarised here. You can read more on each of the projects blogs:

Mind The Gap

• Initial work with actors has helped them realise that they want the audience to have more agency than they first thought and are going to segment the narrative into quests that the audiences can complete
• There is a tension between giving people something that they can use on their own device and making the sound triggers incredibly precise, which is difficult to do without extra equipment

Ed Collier and Melanie Wilson

• Have made leaps forward with narrative – by working with young people around the Lyric area and trying out some ideas they have refined a more elegant solution
• Having spent a day with Tom from Calvium they have a much more focused understanding of the technology and the possible interactions, which have been narrowed down to three options
• Now looking into holograms and smoke tornadoes (what is possible and what is actually just science fiction)

Prototype

• Have completed some testing with a group of people over three days, exploring what types of interactions were most engaging (letters, twitter, tasks, phone calls etc etc). Are now planning 7 day tests.
• Were worried that they were expecting too much of the audience or bombarding them with content. Feedback suggests people are really excited and actually want more (i.e. if they have signed up for and paid for an event they actually do want depth and multiple possibilities)
• Tension between developing technology solutions and narrative. Approach is to choose best mechanism for each desired effect and this mesh now seems to be coming together in a more organic way. Now keen to test assumptions around what is technologically possible.
• Now interested in developing alternative content for people on the periphery of the project. Involving more people in the experience at different levels, even if they haven’t paid.

Tin Bath

• Just finished a week at MAC, which they hoped would be meeting with tech people but because of timing was more focused on script development
• Most interested in translating emotion into captioning – if you are angry, can you make the text red or shake (in a live dynamic way)?
• Will start technical research doing some work with Beef, making a simple flash system
• Have met with a PhD student from Nottingham’s mixed reality lab and are planning two weeks of rapid prototyping and testing with audiences (hearing and non-hearing)
• By the end of the project they think they will end up with some simple tests and some more specific (cleverer) questions

Analogue

• Lo-fi research up to this point but are visiting Microsoft this week and are ready to start exploring the technology
• Working out what the journey for the audience is and how they want them to experience the narrative. How will they use the space?
• Made lots of progress on stages of narrative and what they will cover and identified some possible technologies

Coming up time and time again is the “what comes first – the idea or the technology?” question. Working out the order of how they should approach things and trying to give time to both is understandably difficult within such a short time period.

These questions mirror the somewhat emotional journey that Katie, Dan and I have been on, on the other side of the scheme:

• How to manage expectations around what is possible (technically) and feasible (time-wise) within this scheme?
• How to find the right people to support the participants whilst giving them the space to keep developing their ideas and changing their minds?
• How to find the right balance around knowledge exchange – connecting up expertise whilst resisting doing the research ourselves – sometimes the best learning comes discover things yourself even if other people already know the answer
• How do we manage expectations around outputs (theatre makers make work, that is what they do. We are relaxed about the need for finished pieces as the emphasis is R&D, but do need something to show to justify the funding and use as advocacy for future years)?

What is really nice is that all the groups are really open to the process, have not got disheartened (although were glad to see that their concerns were shared across the group) and we all seem to have found ways through – making huge progress in the last month.