The RSVP cycles, designed as a look into collaboration with biological, natural, manmade materials/objects/ideas. The work includes a multitude of event scores, illustrating with various diagrams and pictograms actions performed by a said group of people or objects (usually with human interaction). A key feature of the collection of various event scores is the idea behind including people in the art or performed action. At the time, around 1969, the idea of human-centered and interactive arts was obscure, making this work stand out in the loud action it called others to do.
Halprin, a musical composer, was first introduced to this idea when asked by his wife to help direct a choreography setting. Used to scoring musical components, he formulated a score for activities. His scores were first used to instruct people how to move across the stage and other theatrical actions. Troubles he faced arose when it came to feedback, as the pieces he was writing were quite subjective. Halprin coined the term “valuaction”, the V in his acronym, allowing for analyzation of the decisions individuals made when performing the score. The full acronym, RSVP, in his opinion, believed to describe all the steps needed to complete the creative process; Resources to work with, Scores to describe the process of the performance, Valuaction to analyze the results of the actions, and Performance to illustrate and categorize the result.
The abbreviation became to be applied universally, its goal to get people involved and engaging their creativity to think differently. Halprin’s philosophy and chosen examples incorporated in the work inspired a series of workshops and points of reflection of a community’s interaction, later evolving into the digital field. Nowadays, we have evolved Halprin’s ideas and methodology into a popular, upgrowing field- UX and UI design, rely on the shift of people’s needs and actions via friendly, specific design choices. Thus, Halprin’s intriguing principle can be universally applied to various time periods in art, creating a timeless model of human-engagement and prosperity of thought.
