Today marks the first day of my R&D residency for the new digital theatre lab - Open Source! Over the next 4 days, I am going to be digging into a new kind of dedicated design mentality for creative production - one that explores how we can expand on the way we sensorily experience stories by bringing our sense of touch into the equation. When we look across the established landscape of creative production we can see that for the most part the aural and visual modes reign supreme. They are the most utilised and most expected of formats for everything we experience across the arts and media industries. With this we have the sound designers, we have the lighting engineers and a set of established workflows and resources to do those jobs and generate outputs in each of those modes. But now - in a bid to explore the affordances of a wider modal bandwidth it's time to consider what it would be like to work with (or as!) a haptic engineer. What would this design role entail? How can it enhance and augment storytelling experiences? ...and why is this worth pursuing? 'Feeling Theatre' is actually one discrete experiment of a wider series of experiments that marks the beginning of a personal effort to start spotlighting and experimenting with the more underacknowledged and underleveraged modalities that surround creativity - something that my Making Sense® cards have been specifically designed to spotlight for creatives and makers from all backgrounds. As you can see...
To mark the beginning of this process I've put together a video in which I explain what I intend to explore over the coming days, as well as introduce you to the bone-shaking hardware that is going to support my initial explorations into the world of haptic design. (This video is also serving as a soft launch for my new Youtube channel also! More on that specifically to come soon though) Now, this is a fairly comprehensive vlog - so do feel free to jump through the chapters highlighted in the video play bar to find the tasty morsels you might be looking for!
...and with that, the haptic explorations are a go! I'll see you all on the other side ready to share my findings-and-a-tinkerings once I've quite literally shaken my bones and my muscles into creative revelation! Now excuse me while I kiss the sky.
