Configuring the 15 Second Dancers: Distributed Creativity in Design for Postdigital Media

Abstract

This article draws on research for the DanceTag project, which set out to develop a location-based gaming app for Pavilion Dance South West (PDSW), a publicly-funded dance development organisation in the south west of England. The research interests of this project concern design for creative behaviour, and more specifically playful behaviour. That is, how aesthetic, cultural, and technical decisions taken throughout the design, development and testing of digital media platforms, software and devices interact with each other in the process of anticipating and shaping their future playful behaviours and creative events. In the case of DanceTag, my question from the start was how a putative, rather nebulous, notion of a new audience for the dance sector might be attracted, constructed, or more precisely, configured, through the design, prototyping, testing and iteration of a game. I take the notion of configuration from Science and Technology Studies, and will employ it to explore the integral role in the achievement of creative projects and behaviour of nonhuman (technological, environmental) actors as well as human designers, producers and users. Throughout the article I aim to decentre the prevailing notion of creativity as a wholly human attribute and capability, and instead explore its achievement through networks of people and technologies, bodies and devices, environments and infrastructures.