Eiffel Over

Tag: clown

  • Cooking with what’s in the cupboard

    My thanks to Jen Ford of Factory X for this analogy. Regular design is like thinking to yourself, “what do I want for dinner?” then going to buy the ingredients from the supermarket. Circular design is more like seeing what’s in the cupboard and thinking creatively about what you can make.

    This shift in approach represents a different relationship with our cooking supply chain. The goals might still be the same: to eat something; to care for someone through providing them with food; maybe to eat healthily; possibly to spend time with family or friends around a meal. But the starting point is different: not what do I want but what do I have to work with.

    I was writing earlier this week about how an improv clown in a theatre works with the audience. They have to work with what is there – they can’t decide in advance how they want the world to be. But they can work with the audience dynamics to create something entertaining with the emotions the clown is able to generate.

    More generally, when we work with what is already present in the system, we have the potential to create a much lower energy solution. If we are working with a material that the system already produces: eg an existing waste stream or renewable resource, then we can create much tighter feedback loops that balance our choices against what’s available.

    But perhaps most excitingly, for the cook, for the clown and the engineer, working with what’s in the cupboard is a much more engaging creative challenge. Walking around the world, we start to see ingredients we can use – the world starts to reveal itself in new ways.

    So, what will you cook for dinner this evening?

  • When the joke isn’t funny anymore

    I’ve been writing this week about when is and isn’t a good time to optimise. And also about the way a street theatre clown uses feedback to keep them close to their goal of making the audience laugh. 

    Well, the clown has another trick up their sleeve, which I learnt from clowning teacher Holly Stoppit, which is called the Drop. 

    Usually a clown can whip up an audience into a frenzy of laughter by doing silly, unexpected things on stage. They will find a gesture or a game that gets the laughs rolling. But then usually, at some point, the joke will stop being funny. The tide turns quickly, and the audience isn’t laughing anymore. 

    This is when the clown should use the Drop. They simply forget all about what they were doing and invent something new. The surprise keeps the audience engaged. It reanimates the clown, giving them a new creative opportunity. It reconnects the clown and their congregation. And the game of improvised laughter-making starts again.

    The reason the clown can do this is they have no resistance to changing the plan. Few deeply held plans about how the session is going to go. Few carefully created props that wouldn’t get used if they took the show in a different direction. And critically, no ego.

    With none of this baggage, the clown is freed of sunk-cost fallacy. Sunk-cost fallacy is the often-held belief that we must continue doing the same things as before because we have invested so much in our existing ways of doing things, even if in the long run changing plans would lead to better overall outcomes. 

    One of the reasons we continue to do the same thing as before rather than change approach is because we feel we have so much invested in the status quo. It could be investment in physical infrastructure or personnel. It could be more personal than that and be an issue of reputation. Or a fear of challenging the powers that be.

    But if the approach we usually take is no longer working for the system, we need to have the confidence to drop and explore something new. Because when the audience stops laughing, the joke isn’t funny anymore. 

  • The tight feedback loops of the clown

    In street theatre, the clown lives for the audience. I’m not talking here about the stereotype of the kids’ entertainment performer, but of the much older sort of clown performance. The kind of clown who appears on stage with nothing more than a funny outfit, a sense of curiosity and maybe a trick or two up their sleeve.  In this sort of performance, the whole purpose of the clown is to find something that will make their audience laugh.

    So if they do something, and the audience laughs, that’s good feedback. They do it some more. If it is a funny gesture, they refine it. When they get more laughs, they amplify the movement and the laughter increases. If that amplification of the movement didn’t correspond to an increase in volume of laughter, they bring it back down again and try a different variation. 

    In improvised clown performance, there are strong reinforcing and balancing feedback loops at play. When the audience laughs more, the clown does it more. When the audience laughs less, the clown does it less.

    The clown, with no script, few props, and lightly held plans, has stripped back all the barriers between them and the audience. This stripped-back approach creates an intense feedback loop which keeps the clown on purpose: of making the audience laugh.