PhD Research
Scenographic Storyworlds: World-Building Immersive Environments
GSA (Guildford School of Acting)University of Surrey, UK
This thesis explores a design practice of building worlds that tell or evoke “story.” In a time when audiences can be enveloped by a storyworld, this practice-research project examines the ways that designers create (or author) immersive environments for otherworldly worlds. While I draw from my professional career as a designer in the themed entertainment industry, this thesis focuses on my design practice with the theater collective Dank Parish on a variety of immersive, story-based projects in 2018 and 2019, which included theatrical districts at two different weekend music festivals and a participatory, immersive fringe show that filled a warren of tunnels under Waterloo Station. For these projects, I used a practice-research methodology that centers doing practice as a method of discovery for collaborative theatre-making. I call this methodology “scenography-as-method.”
My PhD thesis undertakes a multidisciplinary approach to creating immersive environments that combines the theories and practices of architecture, expanded scenography and themed entertainment with a foundation in literary theory. The term “storyworld” describes an intentional relationship between environment and story, but I modify the literary-centric word with the design descriptor “scenographic” to specify these types of experiential, spatial environments. Through my design practice, I propose six scenographic world-building strategies that are integral to thinking and developing scenographic storyworlds. These strategies explore a storyworld as: both (1) world-as-whole, a container that can hold many narratives and unique encounters, and (2) world-as-bits, which describes the emergent and potential invitations embedded throughout a storyworld. These six strategies include: architectural place-making, inhabitation, material invitations, narrative fabric, peripheral distraction and sequences of thresholds. Design is integral to the materialization of immersive worlds. Therefore, this research project argues that a scenographic design of an environment can invite an audience to experience immersion similar to how architectural design enables inhabitation; in both instances, the design team provides invitations to step physically and imaginatively into a storyworld.
My PhD is based on my professional work.
These 5 Practice Projects are my case studies. Each appendix includes a project design narrative and key images, drawings and concepts.