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ToolsShearing, David (2026) Applied Scenographics: Designing the Conditions of Encounter. Theatre and Performance Design, 12 (1). pp. 560-69. ISSN 2332-2551
Abstract
This article develops the concept of Applied Scenographics as a practice of designing the conditions for encounter within public civic space. Through three iterative commissions in the London Borough of Havering, U.K, The Rising Sun (2022), The People's Kitchen (2023), and World Kiosk (2024–26), it argues that scenography, when oriented toward the emotional textures and everyday voices of a place, can operate as both method and medium: structuring how people gather, listen, and recognise one another, while generating situated knowledge through participation. Building on Rachel Hann's account of scenographics as that which orientates acts of worlding, and Tim Cresswell's understanding of place as produced through social relations and lived experience, the article proposes that design can introduce small ruptures in the social architectures of public space. Each iteration builds on the last, proposing Applied Scenographics as a cumulative civic practice concerned with redistributing narrative authority and opening provisional conditions in which place might be held, and imagined, differently.
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