Representation, Participation, and Shared Design Space
Scenographic ideas do not move through collaboration as finished images. They are shaped through the drawings, models, renderings, image boards, notes, and shared visual systems that collaborators use to encounter and test them. This research examines how representations structure participation, interpretation, and decision-making within scenographic practice.
Across recent productions, I have explored how visual materials become active working spaces rather than neutral containers for design information. Miro boards, models, sketches, drafting, renderings, and process images do more than communicate what a design might become. They shape what collaborators notice, how they respond, what gains authority, and how ideas are revised over time.
Rather than treating representation as a final presentation of design intent, this work considers it as a shared site of inquiry where scenographic thinking becomes visible, negotiable, and collectively shaped.
Key Questions:
How do representations shape who participates in the design process?
What changes when collaborators encounter design ideas through shared visual systems?
How do models, renderings, sketches, and image boards structure interpretation and feedback?
When do representations clarify design intent, and when do they flatten or distort it?
How does shared visual space influence authorship, decision-making, and revision?
Ring of Fire
Shared Visual Systems and Collaborative Interpretation
Ring of Fire became an important case study in examining how shared representations shape participation within scenographic collaboration. Developed in collaboration with director Rachel Peake for the Arts Club Theatre Company, the project relied on Miro boards, digital models, image archives, renderings, and recorded walkthroughs as active sites of design exchange.
These representations did more than communicate proposals. They structured how collaborators encountered the evolving design, what they noticed, how they responded, and which ideas gained emphasis over time. The shared visual environment allowed collaborators to return to material independently, compare options, and trace the development of spatial ideas across the process.
The project also revealed a challenge within shared visual systems. When sketches, references, renderings, notes, and technical images occupy the same digital space, they can begin to carry equal visual weight. Early proposals may appear as resolved decisions. References may be read as intentions. Process material can become difficult to distinguish from final direction.
In this sense, Ring of Fire helped clarify a central question in my research: how do representations shape not only what collaborators see, but how they participate in the making of scenographic decisions?
Mousetrap
Spatial Logic, Withholding, and Implied Worlds
The Mousetrap became an important project for examining how representations help determine what a scenographic world needs to reveal, and what it can leave unresolved. Developed with director Stephen Drover for the Arts Club Theatre Company, the design process used digital models, paint studies, architectural references, and production imagery to test how much information the audience needed in order to understand the world of the play.
The project began with a more fully realized interior. As the design developed, it became clear that showing too much reduced tension and flattened the environment. The work shifted toward framing, partial information, and implication. Rather than completing the architecture, the design used selected details, thresholds, surfaces, and sightlines to suggest a larger offstage world.
In this process, representation became a tool for withholding as much as revealing. Models and renderings helped test proportion, orientation, and spatial continuity, but they also helped identify where too much visual certainty weakened the dramaturgical tension of the space.
The project clarified how scenographic representations can guide collaborative decisions about absence, implication, and audience inference. The question was not only how to show the world of the play, but how to structure what the audience imagines beyond what is visibly built.
Million Dollar Quartet
Live Image, Framing, and Representational Systems
Million Dollar Quartet became a useful project for examining how representation can operate within the performance itself, not only within the design process. Developed for the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Granville Island Stage, the design integrated live video, projection, and physical scenery into a single scenographic system.
The production used live video to bring exterior locations, booth interiors, and private moments into the visible performance environment. These images did not simply decorate the set or provide supplementary information. They altered scale, shifted focus, and changed how the audience understood the relationship between the recording studio, the performers, and the world beyond the room.
This created a different kind of shared design space. The physical set became both an environment and a frame for mediated images. Projection, staging, lighting, and scenic structure had to be calibrated together so that the live image and physical space could support, interrupt, and reorganize one another.
The project helped clarify how representation can become an active scenographic condition. In Million Dollar Quartet, the image was not just something used to explain the design. It became part of the design’s spatial logic, shaping attention, proximity, and the audience’s experience of simultaneous theatrical and mediated worlds.