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stage design

The Evolution of Stage Design Tools

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Back when I started in this sport the new hotness for stage design were a bunch of templates for MS Office products like Word and Excel. This was a HUGE step up from the green plastic stage design template many had been using for years or freehand drawing. Some were using Corel Draw as well but that required a Corel license (or at least a bootleg copy of Corel) and “laptops” were under powered and over heavy so portable stage designing wasn’t a thing. Things have come a long way since those days.

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Revisiting Freestyle

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At a recent class a couple students approached me during a break because they were confused by the concept of freestyle as I had explained it during the lecture. Apparently a lot of the stages they shoot at their local matches are designed with and rely on heavy use of the 1.1.5.1 exemption from Freestyle (1.1.5) even to the extent of applying it to Long courses…which 1.1.5.1 explicitly forbids. Most of the stages they see involve boxes and the only time there is true freestyle occurs in larger contiguous shooting areas. Thus, they had come to associate freestyle with larger shooting areas and thought that shooting boxes precluded freestyle entirely.

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But we’ve always done it that way!

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In my day job, when I sit down with a customer and talk about business processes one of the first questions I ask after they explain the process to me is “Why do you do it that way?” The answer all too often is “Because we have always done it that way.” And that is my cue to take them on the journey of reimagining that business process. What we often find is that as rules/laws/requirements/whatever have changed over time they have bolted on some other sub-process to maintain compliance instead of reworking the entire process to make sure it was efficient. In one notable case from several years ago, a physical piece of paper was hitting the same two desks in adjacent departments three separate times over the course of a few days instead of just taking care of everything necessary the first time it hit each desk. Needless to say, that got fixed.

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