Post by nomuse on Jul 15, 2006 19:51:50 GMT -4
I suppose I've mentioned around here before that my current theater contains a large number of "magical thinkers" -- rote-trained skills, an unwillingness to learn the structure behind a process, and frequent whining that we insist on making things "complicated."
I was just tasked this week with writing up instructions on how to load cues into the submasters of an old NSI board. In most theater circles, this would be learned either by someone cracking the manual, playing around, or getting a five-minute orientation on the board by someone who knew it (or a combination of all three).
Instead I had to create a step-by-step instruction that was "simple," that wasn't "technical," and that didn't "confuse the crew."
So. I PhotoShopped a fairly accurate drawing of every control on the board's surface. I left off ALL the labels, but filled in with a nice blue the four buttons they'd actually touch in the process of loading two cues.
Then created steps 1 through 8, each with a bold number in a circle and a green hand-drawn arrow to the button to be pressed in that step.
At the top of the instruction sheet, I put "These are the only buttons you press. Press these buttons in the following order."
But I made one fatal error. After each of the large numerals I put in small lettering, in parentheses, the name of the button; "load," "bump," "cue number," and "enter."
After I watched our Stage Manager try out the instructions I took a Magic Marker and painted out all of these "helpful" words. She had chosen to press "load," then "bumped" the SUBMASTER FADER as her next step. Aka she pushed the fader above the button up a little bit.
And that in a nutshell is my plaint against "simple" instructions. You can NOT make an instruction simple enough to stop the creatively idiotic. Can I predict all the wild and wacky things they may try to do? I can not. So how can I put on one sheet of paper an instruction that will tell them to turn on the power first, turn on the lights so they can see what they are doing, and refrain from pouring chocolate milkshake into the board, stacking bibles on top of it, or setting it on fire?
There "simply" is no way to make something "simple" other than with a basic grounding in what it does and how it works.
I was just tasked this week with writing up instructions on how to load cues into the submasters of an old NSI board. In most theater circles, this would be learned either by someone cracking the manual, playing around, or getting a five-minute orientation on the board by someone who knew it (or a combination of all three).
Instead I had to create a step-by-step instruction that was "simple," that wasn't "technical," and that didn't "confuse the crew."
So. I PhotoShopped a fairly accurate drawing of every control on the board's surface. I left off ALL the labels, but filled in with a nice blue the four buttons they'd actually touch in the process of loading two cues.
Then created steps 1 through 8, each with a bold number in a circle and a green hand-drawn arrow to the button to be pressed in that step.
At the top of the instruction sheet, I put "These are the only buttons you press. Press these buttons in the following order."
But I made one fatal error. After each of the large numerals I put in small lettering, in parentheses, the name of the button; "load," "bump," "cue number," and "enter."
After I watched our Stage Manager try out the instructions I took a Magic Marker and painted out all of these "helpful" words. She had chosen to press "load," then "bumped" the SUBMASTER FADER as her next step. Aka she pushed the fader above the button up a little bit.
And that in a nutshell is my plaint against "simple" instructions. You can NOT make an instruction simple enough to stop the creatively idiotic. Can I predict all the wild and wacky things they may try to do? I can not. So how can I put on one sheet of paper an instruction that will tell them to turn on the power first, turn on the lights so they can see what they are doing, and refrain from pouring chocolate milkshake into the board, stacking bibles on top of it, or setting it on fire?
There "simply" is no way to make something "simple" other than with a basic grounding in what it does and how it works.
