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How can Production Designers use Agile Innovation Theory and Practice to Expedite World Building?
Agile Innovation
i.Agile Innovation
a.Managing the magic behind the movies. ACAMP: the applicability of agile project management to the visual effects industry
In the scholarly article Managing the magic behind the movies. ACAMP: the applicability of agile project management to the visual effects industry (Lee & Seymour, n.d.) The paper explores the extent to which agile project management (APM) techniques have been applied in the visual effects (VFX) industry and identifies a previously unidentified incarnation of Agile called Adapted Creative Agile Management of Projects (ACAMP) that is emerging in the industry.
It was refreshing to learn that one aspect of the film and television industry was indeed applying the principles of agile innovation as a project management methodology to their work and, in doing so, had adapted it to their industry. The advent of agile innovation was initially developed for software development in 2001 when seventeen technologists drafted the Agile Manifesto. However, the parallels between software development and VFX are similar due to the technology component. The handbook titled Agile Innovation (Morris et al., 2014) aptly explains on its cover that it is the revolutionary approach to accelerate success, inspire engagement, and ignite creativity. How appropriate is the latter for film and television production? Unfortunately, there was only a partial application of existing formal agile methods to the VFX industry.
b.Practices Driving the Adoption of Agile Project Management Methodologies in the Design Stage of Building Construction Projects
This study is based on Practices Driving the Adoption of Agile Project Management Methodologies in the Design Stage of Building Construction Projects, (Chathuranga et al. 2023), focused on the adoption of agile project management methodologies during the design stage in building construction projects, and to what BIM can contribute to such a concept. Although many studies have been carried out regarding the advantages of agile, it has not yet been able to outperform conventional waterfall project management applied to practicality regarding the construction business, which is very much relevant and applied here in the United States.
Still, because BIM is virtual, design can be flexible in such a way that it permits continuous feedback, with iterative adjustments-in fact, much like software development. This research explores a gap in the understanding of what practices exist-or need to exist-that enable construction firms to integrate agile methodologies effectively.
The authors of this paper identified, through a systematic review of the literature, ten practices that lead to agile enablement.
Key practices include backlog maintenance, sprint execution, cross-functional teams, continuous integration, and iterative development application in designs. A case study conducted with a Sri Lankan architectural consultancy that had successfully implemented agile methods showed that while there was a problem of fully including all identified practices, five core practices allowed for easy transition from traditional methodologies.
These practices ensure that there is teamwork, the work is prioritized accordingly, variations in design are managed in record time, and the stakeholders remain engaged in the process. Third-party tools being used at the company include Trello for backlog management in support of communication to reduce any risks associated with faulty design work. The owner further shared that training himself and project stakeholders was key in raising awareness and commitment to agile principles.
Overall, this study demonstrated that the use of linked agile project management with the capabilities of BIM significantly increases value in the delivery of construction projects. This study identified a roadmap for how agile methodologies might transform project management in building construction; accordingly, its exploration and adaptation are merited in various settings.
Throughout the building construction projects, there exists some rendition similarity from lived experience. I have previously worked in architecture and set design; I studied production design.
Hence, I would like to abstract those similarities and trace how agile practices could be followed in the film industry, especially in areas such as production design and set design.
It was through the analysis of this article that I read of BIM's important role when integrated into CAD and PIMS. These methods have been so intense in my continuing professional and academic creative practice during the perfecting of the workflow and the quality of projects.
I use one advanced BIM/CAD tool, Vectorworks, to create highly detailed set designs that have precision to meet the required aesthetic standards and functional efficiency of the audience.
To manage and cope with all complexities of the whole production process, I use a PIMS app called Trello. I use this app because with it, necessary management tasks can be done from.
World Building
i.World Building
a.Storytelling Shapes the Future
"Worldbuilding as a design practice, which has evolved for me over the past two decades, seems suddenly more and more relevant, because its holistic and collaborative structure specifically supports organic and fluid narratives that are embedded within and driven by the intricate world around us. I was trained, as are most filmmakers, in a factory-line Victorian industrial process that is transforming into this deeply collaborative and nonlinear methodology -like jazz -with the human at the center. This design-driven, media-agnostic, multi-platform capability flips the twentieth century model on its head and paves the way for new story practices ahead." (McDowell, 2019)
McDowell's Storytelling Shapes the Future (McDowell, 2019)makes one thing clear: at this point in history, worldbuilding is a design practice opportunely relevant. It supports organically and fluidly embedded narratives within and driven by the complex world surrounding us. It can be applied to stimulate complex systems and generate multiple stories.
As I went through this article, the following became really important: to explore how production designers can apply the principles of Agile Innovation Theory and Practice, further contributing to a world-building process. This again brings me to the authority of several insightful conclusions.
It is necessary to create an immersive, highly connected world-one that inspires the story rather than being limited by a script. In these worlds, creativity can be inspired; a story could come alive from the surroundings themselves.
The production designer can achieve fast adaptation to explore many narrative possibilities through the development of an elaborate and detailed creation. Such a world provides a fresh dynamic backdrop that can respond dynamically to the characters and events, bringing forth unexpected twists and turns.
"The world had become a container for narrative -not just one narrative, we could have told hundreds of stories in this space. We knew the world intimately if Steven Spielberg had wanted Tom Cruise to turn left instead of right out of any doorway, we knew what was there." (McDowell, 2019)
This framework provides for organic, collaborative, iterative storytelling in which the world shapes the story. It is in this way that the emergent setting sparks character and plot ideas as part of a continuous feedback between the world and the story.
"What was also significant was that scenes emerged from the development of the world that would not have been in a script written in advance of production by a writer sitting in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills and typing out 120 pages. The world (of Minority Report (2012)) had fundamentally incepted the narrative. The fabric of the world had triggered the story. Over the years since it was released, there has been a constant stream of innovations that could be directly tied back to the film (Liptak, 2012)."
b.World Building and the Future of Media: A Case Study-Makoko 2036
The paper World Building and the Future of Media: A Case Study-Makoko 2036 (Cechanowicz et al., 2016) refers to making a collaborative world creation dealing with imaginings of media and technology in Makoko, in 2036 -a floating fishing village in Lagos, Nigeria.
After considering this article, I have identified how production designers can leverage agile innovation theory and practices in the pursuit of improving world-building.
Iterative design and prototyping may also be informed by agile methodologies. That means designers will have to create design elements in cycles and make continuous improvements based on feedback from various sources. Through the constant refinement of features in the world, the designers make sure the final product is visually impressive, yet functional and immersive, to fully engage the audience into the story.
Agile innovation is all about collaboration and co-creation. A production designer should liaise with writers and directors and other key project stakeholders right from the beginning of the project. Meeting others nurtures a shared vision and invites diversity of opinion to bring worlds together for believability. This experience of working together will help in streamlining the decision-making process and channelizing creativity, enriching this design with diverse insight.
Agile practices are big on storytelling as a means of communication. Production designers can take some valuable leads from the narrative field in creating a world of beauty and meaning. Given that every design decision made reflects and furthers the overarching story, designers create layers of engagement that resonate with the audience, making each element an active part of the journey.
Speculative design within the agile workflow visualizes the possible implications of converging technologies and social conditions. Thereby, it enables a production designer to have all kinds of futures and their problems in the constructed world. This way, it allows them to critique emerging scenes for potential pitfalls, proactively solve some in innovative ways, creating an even richer and more realistic environment.
Agile innovation benefits greatly from holistic perspectives, which is why systemic thinking and reality-based speculation are such valuable tools for the production designer. It is through envisioning the final state of his world and then working backward that a designer is, for all practical purposes, able to discern all the stages, elements, and resources he will need to explore in bringing his vision into the world. This strategic foresight further provides a well-organized and coherent process of world construction.
By integrating experiential futures and rapid prototyping techniques, the production designer is enabled to complete the deeply immersive experience. This hands-on methodology enables feedback and iteration in real time, as designers can observe how users interact with all of the elements of the world. Showing cause and effect helps participants understand consequence and trade-off inherent in the designed environment, enhancing feelings of agency and connection.
Embedding agile innovation practices into their work process, the pace and quality of the world-building exercise in which the production designers engage are increased. It comes out as a high-quality final product that is innovative and cohesive. A fully immersive audience leaves a very enduring mark.
c.Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
I ought to know. I do the same thing." - Philip K. Dick
The paper Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design (Zaidi, 2017) proposes a new model, the Seven Foundations of Worldbuilding, that will be instrumental in enabling worldbuilding practices by science fiction authors. The Seven Foundations serve mostly to inspire artists in conceiving and creating stories that will advance sustainable futures. The Seven Foundations provide a framework that provokes writers to think reflectively about diverse aspects that make a world believable and appropriately coherent.
This further led me to the following question: how might production designers make use of Agile innovation theory and practices effectively in order to speed up the process of worldbuilding? The Agile methodology-anchored on flexibility, collaboration, and iteration-therefore guides the production designer in ways valuable to the creative work. It allows for a more dynamic and responsive design process; it thus creates richer and more immersive worlds in visual storytelling.
Production designers can employ iterative design and prototyping strategies, parallel to agile project management methodologies, when creating and revising many of the elements that comprise their envisioned world. By so doing, their work can be subject to constant feedback incorporation in line with continuing improvements. The last design is practical and engaging, just like the world envisioned by the designer.
Emphasis on collaboration and co-creation makes agile innovation one of the cornerstones. A practitioner in the creation of a production design will then obtain a more cohesive, believable world when there are close partnerships at the beginning with writers and directors. This helps permit streamlining in decision-making with increased creativity and richness in the developed world.
Such a represented imagined future is impossible to obtain without the involvement of visual futurists, which are central to designers of production who seek to produce real artefacts-a manifestation of possible future scenarios. This makes for perfect alignment with agile core principles, essentially to create working prototypes used to help visualize and iterate in the world in flux. In so doing, that is, representing the design outcome through tangible artefact, allows for a better grasp of their creative insights by designers.
The agile methodologies have at their core this-the art of telling stories, the way ideas are envisioned and tracked in terms of progress. The narrative techniques will be applied by the production designers in creating worlds that are immersive with captivating detail, where every single design element is shaped and informed by, and contributes back to, the overall story. This ensures that the world is alive and interconnected.
Speculative design can be intertwined with this process as a way to unpack the implications brought forth by divergent technological futures. In such a light, production designers will proactively consider what challenges and opportunities might arise within their worlds, adding depth and realism to their vision.
Agile innovation is further enriched by systemic thinking and backcasting methodologies. The production designer can come to a decision on an ideal endpoint of the fictional world and then work their way backwards to achieve a series of steps and necessary elements to create the vision. Such structured thinking promotes substantial understanding of the dynamics and interdependencies within a particular world.
Incorporating experiential futures and live-action role-playing (LARPs) can provide invaluable, immersive experiences that enable real-time feedback and iteration. By allowing participants to engage directly with the world, designers can illustrate the cause and effect of their creations, teaching them about the consequences and trade-offs inherent in the designed environment.
This, in turn, can help the production designer to shorten the process of world creation significantly by managing at the end that the final result be creative, imaginative, yet cohesive and actually powerful.
Production Design
i.Production Design
a.Production Design for the 21st Century
This seminal paper Production Design for the 21st Century (McDowell et al., 2013) , talks about how production designers should adapt practices and collaborate across disciplines to envision narrative worlds across multiple media platforms in the face of radical changes and disruptions within the entertainment media industry.
In the estimation of the acclaimed production designer and instructor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts Alex McDowell, the current shifts happening with entertainment media will radically revise the principles of 21st-century production design. According to him, the line separating conventional crafts-film, animation, television, and interactive media-is increasingly blurred because all of them are collaborative endeavours that should be considered interdisciplinary.
"...we are looking at the radical disruption of production being caused by virtual reality and augmented reality, as a Trojan horse to challenge production practices at their core." (McDowell et al., 2013)
It is McDowell's venture, Project Tesseract, that epitomizes the concept of trying to bring together approaches from areas of vastly different professions such as architecture, engineering, and science as a means of innovating around the practice of narrative design, especially with virtual and augmented reality technologies. He outlines ten fundamental principles of production design that capture this holistic, interdisciplinary practice. Entwined within the process of world-building and the creation of story, these principles emphasize the idea that the design process can evolve organically with constant contribution from fellow collaborators. The production designer is in charge not only of the aesthetic aspects of the work but also should take into account the feasible structure of the production, making sure the design framework is born into the telling of the story. McDowell makes it clear that he wants to create a three-dimensional narrative space, based on the fluidity of modern storytelling coupled with audience experience.
He further elaborates on the flexibility of the production workflow for nonlinear telling and how technology should be embraced to further enhance creativity and collaboration. The point is, it's not just the designer's job to show static worlds but rather to define dynamic rules of these worlds that will help in pushing the story and its characters.
McDowell finally projects a media renaissance-a forum that allows cross-disciplinary collaboration, new pedagogical structures, and design literacy as an intrinsic part of the common language of storytelling. He concludes that a production designer should be preparing for a future whose shape is being determined by inventions that haven't happened yet will force today's creators toward fluent and holistic world design that expands the storytelling palette. Interrogating this article allowed me to formulate some very detailed strategies in which agile Innovation theory can be used by production designers during world building.
Together, creative production designers can revolutionise the process using virtual and augmented reality.
In turn, these advanced tools are allowing designers to create immersive environments that engage an audience on a manifold deeper level. For instance, VR can create worlds whereby designers can visualise and work with spaces in three dimensions, collaborate very well, and communicate effectively with a production team. In AR, digital elements can be overlaid on physical sets, esoterically inviting the audience into a hybrid reality between the real and the imagined.
By adopting such novel technologies, designers can convey more in less time and tell stories in ways not as accessible or engaging if traditional means were used.
Employing the practice of cross-disciplinarity to inform and enrich their work, production designers must actively seek information and working methodologies from many disciplines outside of traditional filmmaking. Researching how other disciplines such as television, animation, interactive media, theatre, architecture, engineering, and sciences work may bring different insights and new approaches. As an example, interactive design practices learned from video gaming can inspire much more dynamic storytelling about the film. Similarly, knowledge of architectural concepts can enrich set design for more practical and visually appealing settings. Obviously, each would bring his or her own methodologies to the table-designers would use theatrical stage techniques to best evoke emotion, while engineers' principles ensure set constructions are both visually appealing and safe. This could create a much richer and more diverse world-building experience. In this respect, collaboration with academic institutions provides a unique platform for updating new ideas for production designers while utilizing academic resources for rapid prototyping and taking advantage of university research and development capabilities.
The academic setting is a neutral ground where designers can carry out vigorous experimentation and prototyping of various practices in production. In collaboration, scholars and students in related fields allow production designers to test new approaches in real time, receive critical feedback, and refine their concepts relatively quickly. For example, material testing could be done on site in the lab or virtually through a virtual lab simulation to gain insight and help designers innovate more effectively. This quickens the pace of change and development for sophisticated production techniques, while it gives rise to a spirit of continuous learning and adaptation whereby designers are sacrificed to take the lead in such an ever-changing industry.