Your reports Find reports Can You design Without Some Idea of the Budget Can You design Without Some Idea of the Budget Convener(s): Nick Moran Participants: Sarah, Simon, Peter, (mid career designers) young designers, including Sarah & Ellan, including recent graduates, and a producer Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations: If we stretch the definition of Budget to include other constraints, including venue size, labour costs, truck space etc. then the answer is probably NO. Allow your inspiration to grow first, before thinking about budget too much Keep your collaborations pure and as honest as possible, with the director, other designers, and the producer – who mostly does want to help get your vision on stage And, make good use of every model showing, to sell your ideas to creative, producers and technical teams Find a good, creative production manager, who will be honest with you And we talked about students in training to be designers – should students be taught to design to a budget? – probably not, but we think its useful for them to be taught to budget their designs. Too many un-realized projects results in to un-realizable real projects on graduation! (especially for students of lighting design – apparently) Practical projects with low budgets are good learning Finding out where to get stuff for free of very little also very good Not very profound I know, but we had a good chat, shared some “war stories”, and decided that designers need to talk to each other more about budgets … and other stuff.