Object theatre exercises unfolding human-object relations in
participatory design processes
Merja Ryöppy
Practical tips
To provide practitioners a possibility to work with object theatre exercises, I describe the details of exploration processes with objects. The reader can access the exercises from the navigation panel to the left. Each exercise is demonstrated in a video and the process described with additional highlight videos and photos*.
Introduction
Design as a field has undergone a substantial shift over the past thirty years, turning from designer-driven towards user-centred and multistakeholder-driven processes. In participatory design and participatory innovation contexts, engaging users and key stakeholders as active influencers (rather than passive receivers of the finalised design) has become a substantial characteristic of design and innovation processes (Ehn and Kyng 1987; Buur and Matthews 2008). The multi-faceted development of wicked societal problems has pushed designers to create participatory design methods and tools to engage users, citizens, and public and private sector stakeholders in design processes. Participatory design methods put a focus on aiding people to convey emotions and experiences that are difficult to express and negotiate by means of traditional interview methods (Sanders and Stappers 2008; Mattelmäki 2006). Designers use craft materials to understand a single user’s needs and desires (Sanders 2000) and tangible tools and design games in participatory workshops with several stakeholders (Buur and Mitchell 2011). Concurrently, the designers working with one-to-one contact with users, citizens, and vulnerable groups have benefited from the use of cultural probes and empathy probes.
Designing tangible tools and probes is a design research process that entails decontextualising objects to be used in field studies and approaching them as conversation starters. This means that designers have developed their expertise in facilitating interactions with users and stakeholders through material conversations and their sensitivity towards emotional and experience-based responses from participants (Brandt and others 2011). Whereas most design research focuses on the design process and development of design tools, we know relatively little about pedagogical approaches in training designers’ competences to design material conversations with participants (Matthews and Buur 2005). In this regard, pedagogical and practice-based research traditions of object theatre have something interesting to offer.
Studying hands-on research practices developed by object theatre artists, I noticed that those practices can trigger a change in how humans relate to objects and materiality through tangible exploration. Object theatre exercises offer strategies for physical and social exploration of readymade objects to develop narratives for performative purposes, and ways to investigate the different meanings that objects gain in collaborative group processes. Being situated in a multi-disciplinary design research group, I was interested in understanding how the practice of exploring objects through object theatre exercises might enhance designers’ practice to work with human-object relating in participatory design projects. I propose that object theatre practices enable designers to focus on varying interpretations of objects and transforming object meaning through object exercises. The first object theatre experiments conducted in design education aimed at novel product ideas, with a main focus on enhancing idea generation through perspective change (Buur and Friis 2015). In this study, I take a different approach by describing and reflecting upon object theatre methodology to explore human-object relating and its potential in participatory design.
In this research exposition, I focus on European object theatre exercises, which are usually employed in a devising process of making an object theatre performance. I introduced the object theatre research process to a design research process with five graduate designers. Object theatre workshop exercises were introduced to the designers as they are known in theatre processes without major adaptation to the field of design. Three of the exercises, Object Family Tree, Satelliting Objects and Dance the Object, were selected for a more detailed analysis due to the differences in how objects are investigated within them: Object Family Tree includes storytelling and metaphorical associations, Satelliting Objects is based on physical and tactile object exploration, and Dance the Object takes a starting point in object embodiment and communication through movement. My research questions were:
- What are the fundamental practices of object theatre to enhance designers’ practices with objects?
- How did the research process change designers’ understanding of objects and human-object relations?
- In what ways did the exercises develop designers’ abilities to work with objects towards participatory engagement with non-designer participants?
My study brings novelty to the research of theatre and design in different ways. It documents and analyses object theatre exercises in an audio-visual format, which has never been done before. It reflects on practices of object theatre in relation to participatory design research practice and introduces a process that enhances designers’ skills in handling and exploring objects in participatory design processes. The novelty for designers lies in the multitude of ways in which object theatre pushes for the physical exploration of objects, supports examination of human-object relations in dialogue with other people, and puts focus on inherent object qualities. As a result of the process, the designers were able to make delicate choices of objects and materiality to scaffold emergent associations with objects in their participatory design research projects with external participants.
Three design cases
This research was conducted as part of the University of Southern Denmark’s Theatre Lab, which has a long tradition of using participatory improvised theatre as a means to conduct research in collaboration with external stakeholders (Larsen and Friis 2018). Following the practice-based traditions of collaborative theatre research, I and Sean Myatt, senior lecturer at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, introduced design graduates to object theatre exercises to encourage the conditions for a dialogue with and through readymade objects to occur. I aimed to expand designers’ practice with readymade objects in design research processes where they interact with non-designer participants.
The research material presented in this exposition was co-developed during a three-week design sprint held in 2017. In the course of the sprint, three design graduates prepared for participatory design field studies with external participants using readymade objects in their interactions. Each of the designers had a different context and aim for their design research projects. The development process included exploratory and preparatory object theatre workshops, a design process to develop one’s own methods for engaging participants, and, finally, going out to conduct field studies with participants. I co-facilitated the research workshops and followed the designers to study how the processes of investigating objects physically and interactively through object theatre exercises fed into the design process of personalised methods with non-designer participants.
The design research projects are introduced as three cases: space, social and body.
Space: Engineering Laboratory. Tanya has a background in communication studies and conducted research on an engineering laboratory as an educational space in a Japanese context. She was interested in hierarchies in the space, its cultural aspects and social relations, and the emotional space between engineering students and their professors and tutors. Tanya built relational object installations to study the relationship between a student and a professor. In order to discuss spatial relations and activities in a laboratory space with students, she used the tangible pieces to form a stakeholder game.
Social: Object interviews with social workers. Sam has training in social work and his project concerned the quality of conversation in social work and how social workers develop their interactions with citizens in Denmark. He conducted interviews with social work students and teachers using a set of interview methods. Sam made use of readymade objects using the Object Interview Box and Reverse Object Probe methods, developed during the three-week exploration process. More of the results and the design research process can be seen in Ryöppy and others (2018).
Body: Bodily awareness. Rita has a background in arts and design, and her project was about body awareness. She explored bodily understanding through objects and speaking ‘as a body part’. She developed a field study method to conduct research about body therapists’ bodily awareness in Greece. Rita’s study ultimately improved both the therapists’ and their clients’ connection with their own bodies.
Rita reflected on the process of designing her interview approach:
Since my research topic is body awareness, the three activities aim to unfold ‘messages’ from one’s body and give a voice to it. At first, I tried to formulate my possible interview method by thinking of interesting exercises that I could use in my interviews. The day after, I cancelled them, since I realised that in order to approach the body, I would have to ‘use’ the bodily experience myself. So, I started with a small activity that led me to another one and then another one. So, I understood that the way to approach the body cannot be intellectual.
Methodology: Object Theatre
Object theatre is a form of theatre where performers utilise readymade objects to create a narrative or a performance. Originating from different continents, theatre practitioners and artists have started to experiment with objects and puppets in new ways, developing their own performative practices. The precursors of the European and, more specifically, the French tradition include le Vélo Théâtre with Tania Castaing and Charlot Lemoine (Vélo Théâtre 2018), le Théâtre Manarf with Jacques Templeraud and Théâtre De Cuisine with Katy Deville and Christian Carrignon (Théâtre de Cuisine 2010). Théâtre De Cuisine’s performance Object Theatre: User Guide (Carrignon 2011) provides a cross-section of the most known object theatre stories staged with everyday objects, similar to the pioneering performance by le Vélo Théâtre performed with miniature objects and puppets on an old delivery bike (Vélo Théâtre 2018). In object theatre, the starting point is always a readymade object or playing with material, which a performer sophisticatedly manipulates to highlight an aspect or carve out a story, as opposed to puppetry where an anthropomorphic puppet is brought to life to move like a living being. The recognisability and ordinariness of the objects is crucial, as the stories in object theatre rise from the recognition of the object from our everyday life and the ability to project new meaning on the object (Margolies 2016). A skilled object theatre performer opens up an endless world of narrative opportunities: a suitcase filled with sand transforms to a desert, illuminated silver forks become a shadow play of a dark forest, a rose presents the most beautiful girl in town and a metallic shredder transforms into a fighter aircraft shredding everything it touches. According to (Bell 2001), the human performer complements the object performer by focusing on the object characteristics and manipulating the image through the performer’s gaze, sound, movement and text. In this way, the spectators’ attention and focus is guided to notice particularities of the object.
In the mentioned staged performances, one will not see the research and exploration process behind the finished performance. There is a difference between how the object is presented in a rehearsed object theatre performance on stage, and how the object is explored, investigated, and questioned during the devising process through object theatre exercises in the performer’s workshop. The performance is usually presented for an audience in a heightened theatre space with carefully cast objects and a story that is told through a delicate manipulation and charge of the objects (Margolies 2016). Conversely, in object theatre exercises the object is not determined up front. Through the exercises, the use of an object is questioned and the object can reveal itself in a new way when manipulated and charged with a new meaning. The emergent interaction between the human and the object players is key in determining what the object is and what it is capable of. No matter what happens during the exploration, once the human actor leaves an object to rest, the still object remains what it always was.
Object theatre exercises are developed for workshops where practitioners research objects (Myatt and Bell 2012; Object Theatre Network 2013) through tactile exploration, develop new storylines, or educate actors and puppeteers (Baker 2018). Many object theatre practitioners have developed their own specialised workshop exercises, which are based on incremental steps and progression on the level of physical exploration of the objects in groups. These are collaborative, sketchy, open-ended, and exploratory by nature – placing the objects in the centre of attention and sensitising the performer to inherent qualities of objects in a multitude of ways. It can be as simple as transforming a single object, for instance, a piece of bed linen, into various different items in a collaborative play, turning it into a mountain, a bouquet of roses, a baby, a snake, or a waterfall or the transformation can happen in more delicate ways, as presented in this exposition. The group process enables reflecting experiences from (at least) two different positions: 1) experiencing the first-hand interaction with the object, and 2) watching and interpreting the interaction from a distance.
In most of the object theatre exercises, the recognisable readymade objects are decontextualised and removed from the use situation. An essential aspect in object theatre is to utilise objects that are real, not props, and therefore familiar to us from everyday life. In collaborative object theatre workshops, the participants are invited to bring objects and establish a collective assemblage of objects of varying size, materiality, form, texture, functionality, and so on. To challenge the use-related associations of objects, the exercises include physical manipulation of the objects in different ways. The French object theatre tradition, which I draw on, is based on verbal and physical exercises through which the performer can explore the object qualities, functionalities, materiality, associations, and metaphors that the object brings forth. In some exercises, the performer explores the movement possibilities or material connections of one or several objects; in other exercises, the performer looks for an essence of the object, and in some exercises they manipulate an object to bring forth all the possible stories that might arise from that object. It can be said that the shared trait for all the exercises is to examine the relationship between three players: the performer, the object, and the spectator. I suggest to expand the terminology, and claim that the essence of object theatre is to explore and to understand the ongoing relating between humans and objects. In this exposition, I have chosen to focus on three object theatre exercises: Object Family Tree, Satelliting Objects, and Dance the Object. Each of them operates through certain principles and challenges the performer to explore object-human relating through narrativity, physicality, and movement.