Experiential collaborations from garment to costume: Play and the thing as design outcome

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) textile, fashion and interaction practitioners were invited to collaborate with a Danish dance group to contribute a collection of costumes for performances concerned with emotion and the senses, with the ultimate aim of understanding the qualities of audience engagement with dance. This paper discusses the designers’ use of play as a methodology, and its relationship to the philosophical notion of the thing, or how artefacts are brought into being. This provides a framework for the deliberate attempt to preserve a level of ambiguity in the outcome of the design process, such that the creative engagement of other stakeholders is explicitly supported. Epistemological and methodological developments have been the result of a number of differences: between the practices and experiences of the design collaborators; between the conceptualisation of costume as static and a need for something new, yet relevant to the themes of emotion; and between the designers’ intentions and expectations of how a garment might be used, and the dancers’ response to the garments. Outcomes are discussed as moments in a complex and ongoing process, when meanings temporarily coalesce, only to be opened up again. Such a conceptualisation of design has major implications for how we think about methodology, evaluation, material and expertise. Introduction: Sensing Dance, the costume team, and project constraints In 2012 we, as textile, fashion and interaction design practitioners at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) (United Kingdom), were invited to collaborate with the Ingrid Kristensen Ballet Company (Denmark) as part of an existing research project, Sensing Dance. This series of dance experiments was funded by the Danish Arts Council, the Region of Southern Denmark and the Municipality of Odense as well a number of smaller sponsorships, and ran from 2010 to 2013. Kristensen’s approach allowed for freedom in the evolution of the final outcomes, but put emphasis on the interdisciplinary connections made between the researchers, collaborators, dancers, audience and objects. The project aimed to test different modes of interdisciplinary creative production for increased audience engagement through all the senses, and included collaborations with neuroscientists, branding specialists working with scent, a phenomenological philosopher, interaction designers working with the concept of serious play, craft + design enquiry 138 a sculptor, and new media production. The company’s approaches included large-scale installation works, gift-giving, invitations to the audience to take part in familiar dances, the use of warm-up exercises, site specific performances in the urban landscape, and laboratory-based enquiry with professional dancers. Before our involvement, a number of public performances and events had already taken place (Kristensen 2013). This paper presents an analysis of the collaborative, practice-based research that took place between us and the dance company in the creation of costumes for a dance piece to mark the end of the project. Figure 1. Notes from meetings: mapping emotions to the body, 2012, sketches on paper Photo: Sarah Kettley, courtesy of the artist The framework for this final performance was provided by Kristensen’s conceptualisation of emotions as having a physical relationship with certain parts Experiential collaborations from garment to costume: Play and the thing as design outcome 139 of the body (Figure 1); the role of the design team was to develop a collection of costumes for the shift from longing to anger, which we were invited to explore through the garments’ relationship to the stomach and the throat respectively. These design outcomes had to support in some way the understanding of audience engagement with dance performance and, if possible, increase that engagement. A significant consideration in scoping the project was the time constraint, which precluded the development of computationally interactive garments; however, we believed that fundamental questions about interaction and engagement could still be asked without recourse to ‘smart’ systems and materials, and that any outcomes would not only support future collaboration with the dance company, but might also contribute to design research. The research aim was to reflexively analyse practice and design outputs through the lens of open design for human engagement. The costume team at NTU comprised (in alphabetical order): Tessa Marie Acti, embroiderer; Martha Glazzard, knit expert; Karen Harrigan, pattern cutter; and Sarah Kettley, concept and project lead. We were also joined in the early ‘play days’ by Fiona Hamblin, a jeweller working in mixed media and found objects. Later sections of the paper give details of the exploratory play days, and particular attention is paid throughout to the interplay between different and familiar aspects of practice. Kristensen is also referred to throughout the paper, as the creative director of the Ingrid Kristensen Ballet Company. Open design and thingliness This section describes how ‘open design’ informed our work, while the next discusses this in relation to definitions of ‘thingliness’. During the project, the NTU team had a meta-level goal of continuing our theoretical investigations of open design for user engagement and creativity, an interest since coming together to work with novel stretch sensors in 2008. This view shares characteristics, but is not completely synonymous, with the emerging concept of ‘open design’ to be found within the discipline of product design, where it has come to stand for a user-led innovation process enabled by shared ownership (without dependency on legal design protection, for example) (Billing & Cordingley 2011). In the practice-led work of the team with stretch sensing on the body, and in Kettley’s earlier work in digital jewellery, openness had been explored through the removal of technological features, ambiguity in the representation of information, minimally predefined functionality, and the emergence of practice as an aspect of craft (Kettley et al. 2010; Kettley 2012; Kettley 2013). In this way these previous projects have attempted to support user meaningmaking and creativity, through opening up instead of closing down definitions of use, experience and ownership, and this is what we conceptualised as ‘open design’. The Sensing Dance project represents a new stage in the evolution of our collective practice, which includes smart materials and systems, but which craft + design enquiry 140 is not defined by them. The concept of thingliness now allows us to reflect on the evolution of this conceptualisation of open design, as well as providing a tool for tracing the changing status of our design outputs.