Design Improv by Nathan Waterhouse

Design Improv an investigation into creating a design method for interaction design that is based on the ideas of improvisational theatre. by Nathan Waterhouse

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea Thesis report 16/5/05 Thesis Coordinators Simona Maschi and Philip Tabor Primary Advisor Neil Churcher Secondary Advisor Heather Martin External Advisor Philip Tabor Director and Chair of Examiners Gillian Crampton Smith

For Lucy.

Acknowledgements My advisors, Neil, Heather, and Phil. Silvia for being such a great hostess at San Siro, Brenda Laurel and Kristian Simsarian for the advice. Erez & Christian for believing in the idea from day one, Gian Luca, Francesco, and Edoardo for their amazing skills, Pei, Aram, and Vinay for the advice, participation & improv skills, Mum for the brownies, Dad for the motivation, & Steve for believing, Jennifer & Ruth for allowing me to prototype their thesis twice. Everyone at Live|Work, especially Lavrans for taking part. The whole of year one for being my ďŹ rst guinea pigs, JC for his endless enthusiasm and encouragement, Richard & Erin at Hasbro for the insights. & to everyone else who took part.

abstract Interaction designers, for example in IDEO and the Interval Corporation, have devised and participated in theatre-like performances to give birth to and develop ideas for approaching design problems. These performances, which may involve other participants such as clients or users, aim to explore unknown territory rather than (as in otherwise similar presentations) communicate known proposals. So they must have at least some unscripted, spontaneous elements. Drawing on improvisational methods used previously in the design context and the performing arts, and on improv experiments devised and conducted by its author, this thesis proposes a set of improvisational techniques and props, which aid the invention, testing, and development of interaction design-related concepts and products. These techniques are delivered to design companies in the form of a service. The results are particularly signiďŹ cant for interaction design as a considered discipline because in some respects, which this Thesis lists and analyzes, the interaction between participants in the improv sessions is analogous to the semi-unscripted interaction between the user and the designed product or service. So this Thesis proposes improv as not only a design tool but also an indicator of the basic nature of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interaction with material or immaterial artifacts and other people mediated by these artifacts.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Background Research

3. Design and Development

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Design Improv: the Service & the Process

4. Economic Study

5. Evaluation and Analysis

6. Conclusion

Appendix

References

Endnotes

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Introduction This thesis is about a new way of solving design problems. All problems start somewhere. Think back to the last time you consciously set about solving a problem. It might have been ‘how can I find a faster route to work in the morning?’ Or perhaps ‘how can I restart my career?’ As designers it is our job to find solutions to the problems other people have. In designing solutions to problems, designers often create more problems for the person using the solution than the user had initially. Can you remember a moment when you have been frustrated with a device or service that has simply not fitted the way you expected it to work? How can we avoid the unexpected side effects of our designs? Over the last 40 years there have been many efforts to create design methods that address this problem: from critics such as Victor Papanek, whose first criticisms of the industrial design process began in the 1960s; to Jacob Neilson who in the late nineties was famous for criticising the usability of websites. Sometimes the criticism doesn’t always marry with the solutions. What is the best way of understanding someone else’s problems? Of course, we could just ask them. We can watch them experiencing the problem, we can discuss their problems in groups: there are many ways. Today we interact with the world in new ways. We experience it in a more embodied way. We communicate with each other in increasingly complex ways. And we live our lives with increased access to data and information wherever we are. In order to understand the situation and position of our users, we can no longer just sit beside our users – we must attempt to empathise with them in ways that give us stronger insights into their context.

What is Improvisation? In traditional theatre, actors follow a script, rehearse regularly, learn the script and perform in front of their paying public audience. Improvisation is used in theatre at many different stages of the cycle of producing a play. It creates a very different effect for everyone involved. Instead of actors trying to get into character by reciting lines from a manuscript, they are directed

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to explore thematic issues present in the form and subject matter of the play. Once they get on stage, the experience is more interactive and engaging for their audience because actors will take cues and build on suggestions from the audience. Arguably the most popularised form of improvisation is the uk t.v. show ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’’, The show, which ran for several years, involved improvisation games for comic effect. The host read out games for four talented actors to perform or play in front of a live audience and TV cameras. It was so popular that it spurred a second show in America a few years later.

Aims Researchers in the field of hci and related fields have explored the ideas of the theatre in the design of digital interactions. The research has mostly focused on the development of models that help us to understand the way people use interactive devices, yet also theatre has been applied practically to create design methods. This thesis argues for improvisation as a more intuitive model for the way we think about interactive experiences. I believe passionately that the design of interactive experiences including those we have with tangible products, services, and environments can benefit from the ideas of improvisational theatre. Therefore, I will introduce you to the world of improvisation, giving a brief introduction to where else it is used, and describe why its methods work for the theatre. I will then proceed to develop methods for interaction design that are based on the ideas of improvisation. I will show how it is useful by testing the approach on designers in the Institute and from professional design companies. Improv is offered here not as a solve–all solution for the discipline of interaction design. I will identify weaknesses, suggest implications, and conclude by suggesting future directions for the concept.

Motivation I am neither a theatre professional, nor an actor. However, during my bachelor’s degree in Product Design at art college, I found myself drawn to the theatre design studio. The things I saw there fascinated me. There was a

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kind of buzz in the studio that I enjoyed – students creating mini worlds to represent classic works of drama. It was there I joined an improvisation group and was introduced to theatre games. The world of acting and performance excited and scared me at the same time. I felt nervous beforehand and exhilarated afterwards. Several years later I was part of a workshop aimed at exploring how theatre could benefit from the techniques and concepts of digital and virtual media. The YMCA’s Ytouring Theatre group was funded by the London Arts Board to create the week–long workshop. It was great fun, and I think both groups learned from each other. Exposure to very physical methods of communicating ideas inspired me and confirmed the growing curiosity I had since college that a synergy of method between the two worlds of design and theatre could bear fruit. My first year at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea increased my fascination with design process. I learned that there exists a plethora of interesting techniques and tools for the designer to use. However, I maintained my belief that there existed more intuitive ways to design in teams especially. Teamwork is one of the hardest challenges for the emerging interaction designer. However, if we are to be true to our industry, which is multidisciplinary, we must find common ground to work on.

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Background Research

While some people seem to have natural abilities for creating wonderful experiences for others (such as the ‘life of the party’ or a great instructor), most of us must learn the hard way: through trial and error. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be taught explicitly how to create meaningful interactions for each other? This is what Interaction Design addresses and, unfortunately, it is a new ﬁeld with few texts, few classes, and almost no curriculum. The best sources for learning these skills—and these are critical to the success of any interactive project or presentation—are the performing arts. Indeed, the most prominent new media Interaction Designers all seem to have backgrounds in some type of performance, whether it is dance, theater, singing, storytelling, or improvisation. Nathan Shedroff1

Improvisation In order to articulate an argument for the use of improv in interaction design, we will ﬁrst look at the historical background to the idea.

History In its roots and in its form, improvisation has many contradictions. When one thinks of improvising, one might think it is simply making up a story, piece of music, or song on the spur of the moment, almost randomly. Yet there are relatively complex theories behind improvisation. Actors, when improvising a scene in a play need a strong foundation in the mechanics of improvising: an understanding of how to create an imagined reality in a group. Ironically improvisers require a strong sense of structure in order to make it work. Bach, Liszt, Handel, Mozart, and most famously Beethoven (who controversially has been credited with being the ﬁrst modern jazz composer), all used something called extemporisation. However, Bach was perhaps the

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most innovative of all, with countless scholars having analysed the structures he used to compose his music. In the following short passage from Johann Nikolaus Forkel, one of Bach’s earliest biographers, he recounts the story of how the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, invited Bach to play for his court. The ﬂute was now laid aside, and old Bach… was immediately summoned to the Palace… The King admired the learned manner in which his subject was thus executed extempore; and, probably to see how far such art could be carried, expressed a wish to hear a Fugue with six Obligato parts.2 Bach took the King’s melody and spontaneously improvised a fugue in six parts. ‘To give an idea of how extraordinary a six-part fugue is… One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all.’3 But how did Bach manage this feat of musical ability? In ‘Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid’, the author Douglas Hofstadter analyses Bach’s methods of extemporisation. The simplest method is the canon. A canon is a composition or passage in which a melody is imitated. The second copy of the theme might be offset by a given time period. Staggering the copy by changing its pitch or key is a more complex method; another is inverting or reversing the entire sequence (known as a crab canon). Bach’s genius is surely that he could process these structural calculations in real-time whilst performing. In 1895, before classical improvisation appeared to die out, Marie Wurm gave a complete recital in London of themes given to her by the audience. Western musical improvisation from this period onwards can only be seen in Irish folk music, Hungarian Gypsy music, Spanish Flamenco, and organ church music. It has been said that the disappearance of extemporisation from classical music meant also that it was not taught. For musical improvisation, the methods and understanding of musical structure are chords, chordscale relationships, and progression. This knowledge is less important in the dominant written score. The exact roots of modern jazz are controversial, and subject to a cultural blurring of the ethnic and racial roots of its birth. However, the two important centres for its development were Chicago and Western Europe. In 1965, Chicago gave birth to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In Europe the Free Jazz or Free Improv group was started around the same time in the 1960s. Though less vocal, the African

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roots of the music could still be felt, and the group made conscious efforts to sound different from their American cousins. The European group was Selbstbewußtwerdung, meaning ‘becoming selfaware’, to Selbstbewußtsein, ‘being self-conscious of its own power and possibility’ 4. This self-awareness is one of the central concepts of jazzimprovisation. As Charlie Parker put it, ‘Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn’. Being aware of both yourself and those in your team is a key factor of theatrical improvisation.

The Birth of Theatre Improvisation Improvisational theatre probably has its early roots in mime and puppetry. The first records of its use are in Italy in the 16th century with the Commedia dell’Arte. Travelling troupes toured the country and performed smallimprovised plays based on other actors and audience reaction. It comes as no surprise that whilst Jazz was emerging in the Beatnik Chicago of the 1950s, modern theatrical improvisation groups began sprouting their roots. Viola Spolin is credited5 with being the first person to apply a refined technique, which she developed initially in the classroom and later with troupes of her students. It was with these troupes that she first began to ask audience members to help with suggestions that the actors made into scene themes. Spolin learned from Neva Boyd, and developed her theories of improvisation to a point where she could perform professionally to the paying public. There are intrinsic differences between traditional theatre and improvisational theatre. For example, actors are called ‘players’; feeling is referred to as ‘physicalizing’. The focus is on the interaction between the players and the audience to create the tension that yields an entertaining and engaging experience for all involved. Spolin defines improvisation as: Playing the game; setting out to solve a problem with no preconception as to how you will do it; permitting everything in the environment (animate or inanimate) to work for you in solving a problem; it is not the scene, it is the way to the scene; a predominate function

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of the intuitive; playing the game brings opportunity to learn theatre to a cross-section of people; ‘playing it by ear’; process as opposed to result; not ad-lib or ‘originality’ or ‘making it up by yourself’; a form, if understood, possible to any age group; setting object in motion between players as in a game; solving of problems together; the ability to allow the acting problem to evolve the scene; a moment in the lives of people without needing a plot or story line for the communication; an art form; transformation; brings forth details and relationships as an organic whole; living process. (Spolin 2001: 361) 6

Theory Acting vs. Believing Every director has his own approach to theatre and to creating engaging action and life on stage. The most distinctive examples of these approaches address the function of the actor in the play. Mamet maintains a relatively functional perception of the actor. ‘To act means to perform an action, to do something. To believe means to hold a belief.’7 Mamet’s approach opposes to the tradition of Method Acting and ‘The System’ devised by Stanislavski. Stanislavski believed that: Unconscious objectives are engendered by the emotion and will of the actors themselves. They come into being intuitively; they are then weighed and determined consciously. Thus the emotions, will, and mind of the actor all participate in creativeness.8 Stanislavski, a famous actor and director of the turn of the nineteenth century, has been credited with inspiring the technique known today as Method Acting. It was Lee Strasberg in the United States who adapted Stanislavski’ technique known simply as ‘the System’. The basic idea is that actors explore the situations present in the play’s script and map their own experiences directly to the motivations of the character’s. Using various techniques to explore emotion and character detail, the actor would then replay the role of the character on stage. Stanislavski method revolted against the ‘representational actor’, he who forms his part in the play by representing the scripted character rather than ‘becoming the role’: Creating the physical life of a role help you experience them intuitive-

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ly. When you believe, you feel that your objectives and actions have become something real, living, purposeful. Out of such objectives and actions an unbroken line is formed. But the main thing in the end is to believe to the end in a few objectives and acts no matter how small. In his directing, Stanislavski used an improvisation technique that focused on releasing emotion and the true desires of the actor. When we begin our improvisations, the point is to put into action all casual desires and objectives that well up inside us. These desires and objectives should be derived, at ﬁrst, not from make-believe facts drawn from the play, but from the actual circumstances that surround the actor at rehearsal. Let his inner impulses as they spontaneously shape themselves in him prompt the most immediate objectives and also the superobjective of the improvisation.

Improvisation application and use in theatre Improvisation has diverse applications in theatre. From the work of Augusto Boal who uses theatre as a way to address political oppression in Argentina, and other nations around the world, to the comedy theatres of Chicago. Pioneers of the genre have pushed modern improvisation to express different aspects of human societal behaviour. Boal’s work teaches us how we can understand our political nature, how we function in society, addressing aspects that are perhaps hitherto oppressed without such ediﬁcation9. Keith Johnstone, founder of the Theatre Sports format of team improvisation, focuses in his book Impro on the more macro interactions. In his work, he exposes status in one to one hierarchies, families, and day-to-day encounters. Improvisation is used in workshops for reﬁning the actors’ skills and technique, but also workshops serve another function. In order to generating content, test scripts, and rehearse. Finally, it is probably best known used as a delivery format for engaging audiences, and other actors in the direct creation of dramatic action and narrative.

Structure and Form Some theatre practitioners believe that all theatre involves elements of improvisation. Frost and Yarrow for example:

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Improvisation is fundamental to all drama. All performance uses the body of the actor, giving space and form to an idea, situation, character or text in the moment of creation. It does not matter that the play has been rehearsed for a month, with every move, every nuance of speech learned and practiced. In the act of performance the actor becomes an improviser. The audience laughs, and he times the next line differently. He hears the lines of his fellow performers as if for the ﬁrst time, each time, and responds to them, for the ﬁrst time. He keeps within the learned framework of the play; he does not make up new lines, or alter the play’s outcome in any drastic way. Yet, the actor improvises; and the relationship between formal ‘acting’ and ‘improvising’ is so intricate that we might say that each includes the other. Improvisation is a part of the nature of acting, certainly. But, more importantly, acting is only one part of the creative process of improvising.10 To apply improvisation to another discipline, in this case, Interaction Design, it is crucial to understand that improvisation is not just a dramatic form. Improvising is something that we do every moment of our lives. We could call it reacting, responding or adapting. In ‘Information Design’, Nathan Shedroff suggests the perfect model for enriching interactive experiences. Conversation, he says, is a truly interactive process and one of the most engaging we can have. I believe that one of the nicest experiences you can have is to enjoy a stimulating conversation with another person over a great meal. I would rather do this than watch television, read a book, or use any interactive product I have ever seen. But how do you set up and maintain such an experience? We are taught history, science, mathematics, language, and many valuable processes, but hardly anything about having a great conversation, though this is one of the most satisfying things you can enjoy. Why?11 The world of linguistic analysis presents us with many theories which support the idea that in fact conversations are not improvisational at all. The basic rules of improvisation require certain social functions that come natural to us all. However, used in combination they create the necessary balance of group interaction for successful creative drama.

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Rules 1. Grounding in the moment – being present This theory can be seen in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on Flow Theory. A psychologist who began asking his seminal question ‘what makes people happy?’ during this same time. Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time ﬂies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.12

2. Yes, and… encouraging and supporting the team effort of creativity 3. Spontaneity The Jazz movement of the ﬁfties and sixties inspired a generation of artists, writers, and thinkers. Jack Kerouac developed a technique called Spontaneous Prose, the principles of which were directly inspired by improvisational jazz and its theories of spontaneity. In his essay ‘The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ from 1958, Kerouc suggests: Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink ... defray impressions … your way is your only way-’good’-or ‘bad’-always honest … spontaneous, interesting, because not ‘crafted.’ Craft is craft. 13

4. Listen generously 5. Take risks, embrace failure; Don’t censor yourself 6. Say the obvious thing – there are no wrong answers.

Games Playing a game is psychologically different in degree but not in kind from

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dramatic acting. The ability to create a situation imaginatively and to play a role in it is a tremendous experience, a sort of vacation from one’s everyday self and the routine of everyday living. We observe that this psychological freedom creates a condition in which strain and conﬂict are dissolved and potentialities are released in the spontaneous effort to meet the demands of the situation.14 Theatre games are central to the system of improv acting. Games are looked at as problem solving exercises. By setting himself smaller problems to solve bigger problems in the scene, the actor constructs a framework around the scene. However, games are not only used in rehearsal but also in workshops. Workshops are … Play ‘Play results in a movement from unconscious motives to more conscious ones.’15

Building a scene and solving problems When theatre companies prepare for a play, ‘it must be very clear in everybody’s mind from the very ﬁrst workshop session that How a problem is solved must grow out of the stage relationships, as in a game. In must happen at the actual moment of stage life (Right now!) and not through any pre-planning. Pre-planning throws the player into ‘performance’…and preventing spontaneous stage behavior.’16

Who? People show us who they are by their behaviour (as opposed to telling us). This is one of the central tenets of modern user-centred design. We show who through our relationships and interactions with fellow actors or players.

Where? We usually have a need for being where we are and for doing what we do. For handling certain physical objects, for going into certain rooms or places.

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Why? And so, the performer needs to have a reason for handling certain props on stage, for acting or behaving in a certain way. Perhaps Interaction Design will need a fourth category for When? The moment of interaction, the occasion or the event, are important factors for balancing the equation of the above three.

Contradictions evident in improv ‘How can we have a ‘planned’ way of action while trying to ﬁnd a ‘free’ way? Viola Spolin The fact that improvisation must be practiced need not be taken as a paradox. Improvising jazz solos does not consist mainly in inventing new licks, but in stringing together learned licks and references in a greater part of the poet’s work than coining neologisms is.17

Applied Improv Organisational Improvisation The techniques and games of improvisational theatre have been used in management consultancy, and by organisations trying to re-think their business. But why is business looking at improv theatre techniques? Weick describes the shift as being ‘symptomatic of growing societal concerns about how to cope with discontinuity, multiple commitments, interruptions, and transient purposes that dissolve without warning’18. Theatre improvisation is not the only type of improv that organisational theorists have been inspired by. Jazz improvisation has been proposed as an alternative model for thinking about organisations. Duysa Vera argues that theatre improv rather than jazz can inspire businesses more effectively and outlines the key lessons they should extract from the stage. The advantage of the theatre metaphor over the jazz one is that, be-

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cause its raw materials are words instead of musical notes, people in organizations may relate to it better, which contributes to the ability to learn and transfer the skill. Furthermore, while jazz is rooted in speciﬁc cultural traditions, theatre is a universal and timeless phenomenon.19

Theatre–inspired approaches to interaction design From designers using actor’s props to role-playing the user’s experience, drama, theatre, and acting theory have been used in the development of design methods applicable to interaction design. E Emerging from the nineteen seventies’ tradition of design methods in Scandinavia, role-playing has perhaps seen the most exposure (certainly if the number of academic papers written on the topic is a fair judge).

Role–Playing Kristian Simsarian20, building on his previous work in participatory design, has developed with designers at IDEO a framework for the application of role–play techniques in the design process. Later on in the paper, as part of the design development, Kristian has been interviewed as one of my ‘experts’ in the ﬁeld. His work is particularly interesting, as it is one of the rare examples of an academic report which provides insight into how to apply the proposed method. Simsarian deﬁnes role playing as ‘the practice of group physical and spatial pretend where individuals deliberately assume a character role in a constructed scene with, or without, props.’21

Props User centred designers at the Interactive Institute, Eva Brandt and Camilla Grunnet both work within the Scandinavian participatory design tradition too. Their experiments with the use of drama and props are positioned as methods for ‘staging meetings between designers and users’.

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Bodystorming Most people’s perception of brainstorming is as a process to just generate lots of ideas. That is true, but done well; it should not stop there. Usually what is more important is what happens after a brainstorm session: sharing the information, and using criteria to reﬁne the concepts is vital. I was introduced to IDEO’s brainstorming method during my internship there. The rules as stated in Tom Kelley’s book:22

1. Sharpen the focus Well honed questions are better than loose criteria. 2. Playful Rules IDEO conference rooms have the brainstorming rules, and encouraging words of wisdom such as ‘Go for quantity’ or ‘Encourage wild ideas’ stencilled on the walls. 3. Number your ideas This helps with motivation and setting time targets. 4. Build and Jump Maintaining energy In the group requires good facilitators or leaders. 5. The space remembers Write the ideas in way visible to the whole group and use the whole wall space. 6. Stretch your mental muscles Warm-ups are good not just for beginners. IDEO warm-ups include doing some quick research beforehand to immerse yourself in the context rather than being completely new to a problem. 7. Get Physical

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IDEO brainstorms often involve rapid prototyping tools, modelling materials, and often use bodystorming or role-play.

Informance Invented by Eric Dishman whilst at Interval Research, Informance (informative performance) is a communication method in the spirit of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre technique. We render scenarios as plays and interactive environments. Designer “actors” role-play as users with simple prototypes employed as “props”. These performances open up informed dialogues between designers and an audience, to further explore the design issues raised.23 Informance skits are used to show consumers in order to get feedback on applications and devices they might use.

Scenarios Not strictly from theatre, but the related ﬁeld of ﬁlm, scenarios have been used throughout the design process to show a time based process, usually involving personas. Maschi24 describes them as: Scenarios are cognitive models structuring knowledge within design processes. As communication tools they tell stories about the relations/dynamics between products and services, users and producers – which is to say the system to be designed.25

Design Improvisation ‘Improvisation with vocalized subtext can help design students to pinpoint their understandings of the cognitive as well as the emotional aspects of the subject’s experience.’ In the course Brenda taught at Art Center College of Design in California, she asked students to ﬁlm people experiencing difﬁculty with technology. Using that footage, students memorised the scene in order to perform it from the perspective of the user. Then, whilst performing an action, they spoke out loud what they thought the user would be thinking at that moment.

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Then ﬁnally the student repeats the scene (similar to Boal’s playback theatre) this time improvising a solution to the problem at hand.

Theatre learning from design Cybertheatrelaboratory Imagine a theatre company that needs to appeal to teenagers of today. The actors, directors & writers are twice their age. These kids grew up with the technology we live with today. It’s no phenomenon to them that most of their friends have mobile phones – in fact it is a shock if they do not. On the other hand; the theatre company have never been in a chat room, half of them have email addresses, and the idea of multi-player games sounds like a rehearsal format. Ytouring perform forum theatre for teenagers in schools to help them deal with issues such as drugs, sex, and ethnicity. The theatre company and Cybersalon, a group of digital artists based in London, ran a workshop for the theatre professionals to understand how they could integrate technology and the ideas of interactivity into their work, with the intention of reaching out to their audience more effectively. Interestingly, there arose several types of process overlaps during the week– long workshop.

Using LCD projectors to: a) Overlay digital content and therefore new meaning onto the actor. b) Create dynamic backdrops for the stage design (particularly useful for the company, who tour around the UK and need fast adaptable set designs. Learning from open-source paradigms and game culture where the user is involved earlier on in the development process, one of the writers devised a platform for iterative forum theatre where the audience would use an online chat room before, and after the performance to inform the script. As a designer instructing and taking part in the workshop, I was inspired

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by the way in which the theatre group would structure the creativity of the day. For example, we would begin with very physical games, where you vote with your feet. Using the large space of the theatre hall, we had to run to either end of the room to communicate our opinions on certain topics. ‘If you believe the media is overly obsessed with celebrities, run to the north end of the room, if not, run to the south.’ Some people of course could stand in the middle if they wanted to sit on the fence. This kind of physicality was new to me, and at ﬁrst transported me to the playground. All of a sudden I was seven years old. However, as soon as I had to make my opinion known about certain political or social matters, I was grown up again. I discovered this remarkable feeling of spatial expression. I knew what the opinions of everyone were because of this large spatial demarcation. A warm–up game we played was called ‘statues’. We had to pick a partner from the theatre company so that each pair was a mix of disciplines. Next we had to create a statue of the concept at hand. We made images of these concepts. These included ‘theatre’ and ‘technology’ and you can see these two in ﬁgures ii & iii. These frozen statues would be held for a minute or longer whilst the rest of the group discussed the image and tried to understand why it was what was

supposed to be represented. Figure iii An Image of Technology

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Design learning from theatre

Aesthetics of performance art

Figure iv An Image of Theatre

Vanessa Beecroft is an artist whose work uses the live ﬁgure as her primary medium. The appearance of the work is that of a live performed version of a Vogue magazine. Beecroft, a trained stage designer, uses models, often naked, but in her earlier work, uniformed. The work is ephemeral and unmediated. A person standing still is never completely motionless. Her installation creates an image, which is moving very slowly. Beecroft issues instructions to her performers: ‘don’t talk, don’t move too fast, don’t move too slow. Be classic. Don’t act’. Another interesting facet of her work is the repetition. Her pieces are numbered ‘VB38’ for example, or ‘VB56’. She is clearly a post–Warhol artist who understands the necessity for balance between variation and repetition in today’s modern art.

Problem solving & group dynamics Johari Window Used in therapy and group–work, the principle of a Johari Window is for exploring in a group context the shared understanding of a concept. American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham developed the Johari Window model in the 1950s, while researching group dynamics. Figure iv Vanessa Beecroft: VB39

Activity Theory Invented at the Moscow Institute of Psychology by researchers Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontyev, activity theory states that our consciousness is created through our interactions with the world and is the result of subject and object relationships. ‘…Collective and individual activity is realized in the form of material and spiritual social relationships. Communication is a processual expression of these relationships. Communication can only exist in the

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process of different kinds of activity realization by people.’26

Design approaches that support Improv thinking Which design processes support the ideas we have seen so far? The activity-focused ‘En-able’ user-centric design by Shelley Evenson and John Rheinfrank was formulated two years ago. Its focus is on a more human approach to user-centred design. From John Rheinfrank:27 1. Let me do. Make sure the activity is of real value. Let my actions and changes in the resulting array feel as though they have been designed for me personally. 2. Orient me. Give me a journey I can take. Don’t steer, just give me a map to help me visualize what I want to accomplish and plan where I want to go. 3. Let me win. Reward me when I accomplish something. 4. Push me. Help me learn. Help me reveal my potential, don’t let me get by. Combine doing with understanding. Skill me. 5. Sense and respond. Personalize it for me. Let me feel the artifact is alive. Make its operation transparent like a window. 6. Connect me. Help me make connections with the subject matter or across destinations with other people. 7. Immerse me. Plunge me into the experience. I can’t tell the difference between me and it, it is so much a part of me.

Design Kits Method Cards In terms of off the shelf design methods, the most well known within the interaction design profession, though not exclusively for it, is the IDEO

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Method card set. The pack of cards is very attractively designed with thick card stock; clear instructional labelling on the front, and glossy full colour photographs on the back. The pack is a clever marketing and communication tool for IDEO. Clients purchase them as a way of taking a piece of IDEO process with them. Each card communicates very concisely a design method that IDEO uses. For example, Experience Prototyping. Later on in design phase one of this thesis we will discuss one of the drawbacks of the cards.

Figure v IDEO Method Cards

Summary We have seen the range of design methodologies that are inspired by the world of theatre, and had an introduction to improvisation in its many forms. Many of the design methods borrow from drama and theatre, but do not follow through completely with the metaphor, stopping short of performing, or staging the results of the borrowed process. In other cases, singular tools or methods such as props or role-playing have been applied to design process to enhance an aspect of it. Improvisation is a complete method, bringing together concepts of narrative in the form of storytelling, it is physical, inclusive, and involves the playing of games to solve problems. We have seen the different opposing theories from theatre. From Brecht to Boal, and from Stanislavki and to Mamet. It is important when devising a method for interaction design to ﬁnd out which of these approaches works best. Considering that designers are not (usually) actors, it will be interesting to see which method becomes more natural. Can we be our users? Can we empathise with their situation? Alan Cooper, in his book ‘About Face 2.0, The Essentials of Interaction Design’, talks about how to understand a user’s context by researching their goals. ‘You can’t ask a person what his goals are directly: Either he won’t be able to articulate them, or he won’t be accurate or even perfectly honest.’ Instead he suggests that designers and researchers should use observation and clues from the user’s environment, such as book titles on shelves. However, surely this kind of approach doesn’t accurately provide the necessary framework for measuring and simulating solutions to design problems? In this thesis we will explore how the ideas of improvisation can be understood, applied, and synthesised into a usable process, kit, and methods for interaction design.

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Many research papers report on experiments in similar areas of experiential methodology and recording of the design process using techniques like video for example28, there exists few usable exponents from these pieces of work. In essence, they are just written accounts of an experience that someone had. Where is the reusable take-away for the reader? How could one replicate their experiments? Not once have I read a do-it-yourself version of someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new design methodology.

Hypothesis I believe that an interaction design process based on the techniques and ideas of improvisational theatre would free up the designer to design even more interactive and intuitive experiences for their users. By applying the metaphor of improvisation, I believe that designers and researchers will have a usable and practical model for designing whilst understanding at the same time how we encounter interactive experiences.

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Duration

Project phase

Session goal (for participant)

Session goal (for my thesis)

Participants

Initial

Explore running & technology

To just dive in

explorations

Test Assumptions

To test out the adaptation of

Explore relationship of body to phone

established improv games

functionality

To experience and learn how

Testing voice commands.

to direct a session.

(hrs) Jennifer 1

1.5

Functions: passivity, awareness, call proﬁling, status, privacy, call ﬁltering. First

year’s

Pre-concept

Explore new meaning & purpose to existing

Tested acceptance to idea in

phase

hardware.

a large group

Imaginary props Abstract props Real props Circle format

Ruth

1.5

Mid ﬁrst

Exploring alternative concepts

Explore how pre-session

concept phase

Prototype co-op phone

brainstorms can help

Exploring power & status in group mobile

structure improv.

communication

To test out adaptation of

Exploring gift giving

established improv games.

Integrate existing knowledge of design methods.

Jennifer 2

2.5

Prototyping

Generate scenarios

Testing prototype ‘improv

ﬁrst concepts

Test assumptions

design’ structure

Explore ideas for & challenges of input &

Tested abstract props

output of device

Experiment with audience

Attention & distraction

role

Explore location context & mobile

Iterative improvs.

communication.

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design and development The ďŹ rst experiments were conducted in the Institute and my thanks goes to all those who participated. Introduction The design work was organised into phases. Phase 1 was predominantly about understanding improvisation and how it could be usefully applied to problem solving in a design project. Due to its experiential nature, I found that improv demands you to apply it in order to truly understand its usefulness. Phase 2 focuses more on developing and designing a kit that could be used to facilitate design improv meetings. The ďŹ nal phase 3 is concerned with synthesising the knowledge acquired in phase 1 and 2 with reďŹ ned design elements, testing with real design companies, and developing the concept into a service model. Additionally phase 3 is about extracting what has been learned from the entire process and presenting it as a reusable exponent of the thesis. The intent here being to look at the elements designed so far and ensure that they embody qualities of improvisation at a meta-level.

34 | Design Improv

Phase 1

Experiment 1: Exploring mobile technology for Runners 1 Aims of the session The first experiment in using improv in a design workshop involved Jennifer Bove, a fellow thesis student at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. Jennifer’s thesis concerns the opportunities for mobile communication in a fitness context. In this session we were looking at people who run for fitness. In generating a workshop format, I began by interviewing Jennifer on what she hoped to gain by the session. She identified four main goals and I tailored the improv games and structure to them.

Jennifer’s goals: 1. Explore the facility of a mobile communication device whilst running. 2. Prototype answer-phone functionality 3. Placement of device control on body 4. Potential of device

The Session Structure Based primarily on the research of Viola Spolin’s theatre workshop formats, I created my ﬁrst ‘improv for design’ structure. Warm-up games followed a short introduction to the ideas of improvisation. The goal for the warm-up in theatre is to prepare the players for working with each other and thinking in the physical mindset. The games open us up to new associations, and one

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of the reasons I chose to not run outside in a park for example, and instead to stay in the studio was to get our imagination working. The games were organised by the different ways Spolin suggests to explore character and theatrical situations: where, who, and why. Spolin talks about three types of ‘where’29. In our ﬁrst warm up game we explored these to get our imagination thinking at these different depths. ‘Story-Building’ is the name of the ﬁrst game and was adapted from one of Spolin’s original games. It works in a similar way structurally to the surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’.30 The aim of the game is to listen very carefully to what your partner or fellow players are saying. You ask yourself ‘where are they taking the story now?’ Jennifer began by talking about a running outing. The rules were that she had to say a sentence or two to describe the event, and then stop. I followed by continuing it from where she left off. We collaboratively created a narrative.

Figure vi Contact Game. Jennifer is trying to think of what to say next before she makes physical contact.

‘Contact’ followed, a game where you must make direct physical contact with each new thought or concept. We enacted a running scenario, ﬁrst agreeing where we were: in a park. We both had to make direct and unique physical contact with each other whenever we wanted to say anything. Whenever conversation didn’t follow a contact, the word ‘Contact!’ was exclaimed. Next we played a listening game. We both sat down and had to listen carefully to what we could hear around us. Then we compared what we had heard. We found that there were things we could not see or had even consciously listened to before like the sound of a power generator outside. We had different interpretations of what these unknown peripheral sounds could be. A game I adapted from Spolin originally called ‘Seeing a sport’31 I used to follow the ﬁrst listening game. We both agreed what we were going to listen to, and then built up the picture of what we were listening to together, each adding a new atmospheric element. To play this game I explained the principles of where. There are three layers we can think about in imaging a where scene.

1. The immediate: that which is close, the table, its food, the utensils, the furniture, condiments. 2. General: the room, restaurant, doors, windows, lighting.

Figure vii Testing where controls should be place on the body

36 | Design Improv

3. Larger: the area beyond these walls, the space outside the window, the trees in the distance, the birds in the park, the trafﬁc. Following this we continued to expand the where scenarios into longer improv-style games, building each time by asking each other questions to encourage the depth of each scenario. The questions included Where are you now? How do you know you are running? What’s the weather like? Where are you going? How do you know the difference between the park and the road?

Figure viii Longer Improv Style (Other performers are off-camera)

Jennifer had specific ideas she wanted to test in these scenarios, and took the role of the director or lead for the next part of the session. We began by testing how you can receive a call, and this led to more specific details of her prototyping. Interestingly, we tried swopping roles in these games, one of us being the person calling, and the other being the one on the move, trying to answer the call whilst running. Halfway through this second part of the session, during which we were enacting longer scenes and testing specific design details, a colleague walked in. Giovanni joined us, and we noticed a dramatic difference in the dynamic. Initially the addition of the new person caused us to ‘perform’ more, aware that we had an audience. As time went by, we involved Giovanni into the games. An extra person allowed us to try using one person to act as the device. For example, I became the answer-phone for one scene – the interface for Giovanni’s call forwarding to Jennifer, who was running. Using this style of game allowed Jennifer to dynamically change the rules by which she wanted her calls to be filtered. 32

Outcomes and learning By removing the association of the locality, the feeling of running outdoors, we could travel from the park to work, to a gym in seconds using out imagination. However, the space was not large enough, and we kept bumping into each other. This impaired our ability to imagine that we were both in different locations. This first experiment has shown that our capacity to imagine a user’s context and problems can be expanded with the use of improv games. I believe that designers find it difficult to think beyond their own context, their own problems, and relationships. We must be freed for a wider physical relationship with the environment of our users.

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Experiment 2: Reinterpreting the functionality of common objects As part of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea Year1 ‘Strangely Familiar’ course, I staged an hour-long introductory session to the whole year and the two course facilitators Heather Martin and Reto Wettach.

Preparation I spent time beforehand preparing games for the session. The design brief the participants were working on was to discover new ways of interacting with existing hardware: an answer-phone and a radio-alarm clock. I prepared six games, and a list of directorial lines of advice to use as prompts should the session become stagnant or to provide support for the participants. The night before I was so nervous I barely slept.

Figure x ‘Imaginary props’

Session Flow I introduced myself, and my intentions and what I wanted from them. I called them my guinea pigs, and asked them if that was OK. No response. Then I asked a few more things to get them warmed up. I asked them what they thought I meant by improv. Someone said it was ‘making things up, being inspired by things around you’. ‘Anyone else?’ I asked. Instead of telling what it was, I continued. I wanted them to discover what it was through doing it. Next I told them about my thesis idea, and then I said it builds on things like brainstorming. Had anyone tried that I asked. Everyone laughed. I asked if anyone could volunteer an explanation of what it is. Blank faces all around... Someone volunteered: ‘It’s when you get a bunch of people in a room and they think of ideas quickly and they share them’. ‘Who’s heard of body-storming?’ Two hands went up – one was Heather’s. ‘No Heather, you don’t count’. Someone else volunteered, but I elaborated for them, then I discussed role-playing, and finally Informance. The session began with me showing everyone some clips from ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’ the improv comedy show from the UK. They loved that, and complained when I stopped the film short. Next I got everyone to sit in a circle, so they were very close. Immediately I was impressed by the daunting near- impenetrability of this circle of twenty-four people. We played the first

Figure xi Heather walking her phone

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game called ‘echo’ – where one person starts a gesture, the next person has to copy it, then the next person and so on. The gesture can be a sound also, or both. The interesting thing about this was that the game sounds boring - the same thing done by 25 people in sequence? In fact, after 5 people, the game evolved, and people started to change the gesture subtly. Then a wave of change could be seen travelling around the group.

Figure xii Abstract Props

The next game was moving an imaginary object around the circle. One person starts by fashioning the object, and giggles could be heard at the initial delight of this mime. Then the next person should build on the object, developing the idea further. They can reshape it, shrink it etc, or show us how it used. Using one of my directorial cues, I interrupted this game once by calling ‘freeze’. The group stopped and where the object had stopped I asked the person what they had received. They said, ‘oh it’s a slice of pizza or something - isn’t it?’ After the game I opened up the discussion to the ﬂoor as to how they felt when the object came near them, were they anxious - did they try and second-guess what the object was going to be? One student admitted the trick they had discovered – that you could think of something 3 people or so in advance and then perform that as to avoid the panic or pressure of having to be spontaneously creative. I encouraged them to avoid this habit – stressing the object of this game was to encourage our sense of spontaneity and our sense of ‘acceptance’.

Figure xiii Re-imagining existing objects

After imaginary props, we tried the same game with some randomly shaped and abstract props - foam rubber shapes, transparent tubes and so on. These can be used in any way at all. However, the students seem to ﬁnd this harder than working with imaginary objects. Maybe the reason for this was that the imaginary objects were actually more tangible, more playful, and because the object was in your mind, you could represent it or interpret it in any way at all. Finally we tried the game with the objects they are currently collectively redesigning: a radio-alarm clock and an answer-phone. This seemed less stimulating for them, and I felt some unease. Some people passed on the object without playing with it ﬁrst (which I encouraged at the start of the session). This was because they couldn’t initially think of something to change it into. It is better to pass it on, rather than let your mind clog up under the pressure.

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It was interesting that the ﬁnal two objects were very generic, dull shapes, and that the one thing about the radio that was played with the most was the aerial. People poked with it, played tricks with it and so on. The radio became a mobile phone, a walkie-talkie, a shaver, a ghetto blaster, and other electronic devices. Perhaps this illustrates how ubiquitous and interchangeable the forms of these everyday objects are.

Feedback There follows a summary of the questionnaire that was sent out to the participants: ‘I enjoyed your exercises, and I think they influenced me in the sense that I was willing to jump up and grab something and use it to demonstrate an idea or concept to my partner. I think it was important in the sense that we had to somehow deal with the physicality of the objects in our project when we didn’t necessarily have the ‘right’ material at hand. I’m not sure whether they influenced our final design of the system, but I think they definitely helped in the process. Like, ‘this piece of paper is a radio, and I’m hanging it on the wall...’ and stuff like that. I think it’s a valuable experience for someone who’s not from a design background, because it shows how you can get a different perspective or develop ideas by involving yourself in the medium (for lack of a better phrase).’ Dave Chiu Other students who said they felt the workshop had given them better group dynamics echoed Dave’s comments. Many took the ideas and combined them with their established methods of designing. For example, James Tichenor (see figure) devised their own exercise inspired by the workshop where they free associated with the radio and alarm clock and put them in situations that were removed from their daily use. ‘I thought it was a brilliant thing to do as it makes aware of each other in creative situations. It was also a great group activity as we have all work no play together as a group...Very cool, hope you can do it again, am available if you should need other guinea pigs...’ Alessandra Sonsino ‘It was scary at first… I’m one of those people that hates these kind of things! But it wasn’t bad at all. I actually enjoyed it, although I was quit stuck at first but as time went by I managed to loosen up! Hayat Benchenaa

40 | Design Improv

Figure ix James free-associating and imagining the radio in other contexts.

‘I think it opened our minds to not think about the common object we are used to. Most of all it got everyone relaxed.’ Hayat Benchenaa

Experiment 3: Exploring group behaviour in ‘mobile teens’. Aims Ruth needed to test out some of her initial ideas concerning group behaviour. Her thesis is about the use of mobile technology by teenagers.

Pre-session interview & brainstorm Knowledge from the workshop with the ﬁrst years showed that larger groups can work better than small ones, so to begin the preparation for the session, Ruth and I sent out invitations amongst the institute community. Before the nine participants arrived to the session, they were asked to think of three stories or anecdotes from their adolescence. This was done to get people thinking in a narrative way before arriving at the session, and to help get the group thinking happening fast. In developing the structure for the session, Ruth and I had two meetings to plan how the session would work.

Session Flow During the session we began with a warm-up game of recounting stories from our teenage years, focusing on memories that involved issues of group

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dynamics. Following this we had a discussion and storytelling session about the oddities of mobile communications, strange service encounters, and losing your mobile phone. Someone kept a record of the key points of the stories that came out. Interspersed with each improv game, we used traditionally design techniques like brainstorming, axis grids, and post-it voting for two main reasons:

1. Could the mixture of known techniques help the acceptance of improv techniques? Figure xiv Using Familiar Design Methods:

2. Could techniques like brainstorming beneﬁt from ideas from improv and vice-versa?

Axis Chart

Summary The session with Ruth did not seem to produce the results we were expecting. We both felt that the flow of the session was not ideal. Based on a further conversation with Ruth, we realised that there were structural problems in the organisation of the session. Perhaps the problem was in trying to predict the outcome of the session too carefully, even in planning it too carefully at all? Specifically the games had been chosen based on their thematic content, not on their goal or aim. What must happen for improv to work as a design oriented activity is that the games need to be organised with the goal or aim first. IDEO cards suffer from this problem also. They are ordered Title, How, and then Why. In order to be more successful, I would argue for instructional cards to be ordered in reverse, with the Why first. This way you can identify which games is right for your type of problem. Ruth told me she needed to think more expansively. I assumed this would be a by-product of anything we would do. I chose games based on her themes, for example we wanted to explore gift exchange in virtual groups, so we played Gifts. Combined with more high-level problem solving games, this would be fine. However, too many of these games, as I discovered with Ruth, can be overwhelming and potentially directionless. Before the session, I analysed her problem and selected themes to explore. However, what would have been better would be to have allowed the

Figure xiv Finding conversational weaknesses in group communication.

42 | Design Improv

problem to be deconstructed by the group, and then to facilitate this. Then encourage the group to ﬁnd the correct combinations. The participants need to have a sense of commitment to the process. Without understanding how the problem has been analysed to begin with, how can they feel part of the process? Improv workshops need to have an improvisational nature, and the session should be structured with all participants made aware of the process. Ruth tried the session one more time, this time using a game called ‘deconstruction’ that I had just designed. The idea for the game came from two factors:

1. In Ruth’s ﬁrst session we needed more group focus, so there should be an activity like brainstorming that we can do together to create material for improvised scenes. 2. There should be a method of creating logical tree structures with the end result being a shared understanding of the range of possibilities inside the problem area. In ‘deconstruction’ we take a design polemic and give it a name, write this down on the top of a piece of paper, and use that as a root. At this point we can linguistically grow a tree of meaning using each proper noun or action word as a branch from which to stem.

Experiment 4: Runners with Mobile Phones part 2 Learning from experiment 3 Building on the previous session with Ruth, I knew that the session had to have a direction for the process to travel in. This direction I speak of is the ﬂow of the problem as it grows and matures throughout the collaborative experience of group improvisation. In this session there was again a planning session with the designer, Jennifer, but we stopped short of completely solving the problem before the session had happened.

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Workshop location and set-up To begin with, we found an apartment we could use that would ensure complete privacy, avoiding interruptions is important to help focus. The space was prepared with refreshments and food. In the centre of the room I placed the abstract props, post-its and pens. On either side of the room large ﬂipchart sheets were placed to give people the freedom to express any ideas that might come to them in breaks.

Session Flow We began by stating clearly the aims of the workshop. Primarily it was to challenge Jennifer’s assumptions about her design problem. Additionally she needed to explore possible input and output modes of her mobile phone for athletes. Jennifer felt that the improv session would be an interesting way of exploring how different contexts collide through the way we use mobile communications. Before the session we asked participants to think of a story from their past ‘We want you to tell us a story of a time when you were doing something and you got distracted - it could be you were out running and someone stopped you to ask directions, or it could be you were trying to meet a deadline and a long lost friend called you out of the blue’. We also asked if anyone felt they were a ‘multi-tasker’, and wanted to hear of a memorable time someone had successfully done two things at once. To warm up, we went running as a group. Jennifer and myself, both keen runners, distributed running apparel and everyone got dressed up. During the run, participants played the game Malapropism. In this game, players have to point at things around them and call out informatively and convincingly what the thing is not. The aim of this game is to free up our associations with objects and to make us more spontaneous. During the walk back to the apartment, we played a game of storytelling. Everyone had come with at least one story in response to our request. The stories included one person who had been running a marathon and had been overtaken by a faster runner at the twentieth mile who was speaking on his mobile phone – imagine the frustration! Other stories involved communication problems whilst performing sports.

44 | Design Improv

After this initial warm-up phase, we deconstructed Jennifer’s design problem using three key words. We brainstormed on each word and afterwards recombined elements from each brainstorm sheet to create quick skits. Using abstract foam shapes as props, each participant created a scenario; the audience’s job was to help them solve the mini problem in the scene.

Figure xv Deconstructing the problem

The skits produced ideas for devices and for scenarios of use. To narrow down, we voted for our favourite scene. ‘Blue plate café’, was chosen, and we produced a longer skit based on the original narrative. Throughout the scene, which involved people from multiple locations arriving at a café in the alpes, the players used different improvised technological solutions to solve their communication problems. Jennifer or I would call out ‘Okay, it’s a GPS chat device, but show us how it works, where is it on your body?’

Conclusion The session went successfully for the participants, and people felt it had been a very creative session. People seemed to feel it had been useful for the project, based on the survey sent afterwards, and the informal feedback received. Jennifer found that she was a little overwealmed at the different ideas and scenarios that were generated from the session. Improv has this ability to powerfully produce lots of ideas - I can see that–but maybe it ﬁts better at different stages...maybe what you need to do is design a system to understand where someone is in the design process.’ Jennifer This point also addresses the need for clarity in the roles of the session: who is directing the process, and how should they be sensitive to the group– thought process?

Figure xvi Abstract props are useful to allow the

Phase One Conclusions

designer to be spontaneous when improvising with objects.

A prototype structure for a type of problem solving Improv Design session has been developed at and tested. The beneﬁts of improv in the design process seem to be: Group Involvement – as Alexandra from the ﬁrst year session put it: ‘I thought it was a brilliant thing to do as it makes us aware of each other in

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creative situations. It was also a great group activity as we have all work & no play as a group.’ Alexandra Sonsino Faster ideation – ‘I think the valuable thing about it is that you have to try out your ideas, which forces you to think about the best interaction, & immediately identiﬁes any design difﬁculties.’ Simone Pia Using physical games and props can help to provide prompts for the improvisation of new design solutions. But game rules need to be clearly communicated, and have good mediation by a facilitator.

The challenges so far include:

Figure xvii The Blue-Plate Cafe

Recording the process is challenging. In Brainstorming you usually have shared evidence. With Improv it is harder. Film can capture only one perspective, and watching the film afterwards it is hard to remember exactly what was happening at particular moments. Steering the creativity must be assigned to one person: the director. Deciding who this is must be done prior to the session. ‘I didn’t know how much I was supposed to play the director, or how to steer the process... I wanted to let people be as open and creative as possible, but also kind of push them towards my context... Later I found that they did quite well within a specific space when i asked them to try it.’ Jennifer The ‘director’ must learn to give encouragement and to facilitate the session, observing when spontaneity is not happening, and helping designers to focus, and to always communicate the goal of the game/ activity. Creativity needs constraints. Deciding when to apply constraints is important. The beginning of a session seems to need less constraints, and as the session opens up, thus the constraints should help to steer the creativity. ‘Technology is often the route to a solution, so how much do you need to constrain the ideas?’ Molly The style of workshop, and the games played needs to fit the design stage. A very expansive creative session might not be the right style for the specific project. ‘Improv has this ability to powerfully produce lots of ideas - I can see that–but maybe it fits better at different stages...maybe what you need to do is design a system to understand where someone is in the design process.’ Jennifer

Figure xviii Storytelling

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Creating the right environment is vital, the space must be controlled. This includes not being interrupted, having refreshments and other resources such as drawing equipment or prototyping tools readily accessible.

Prototype Structure The result of the format iterations is the following workshop structure. In its prototype form it seems to work, but inevitably it will not ﬁt every design phase or problem. Figure xix Navigational aid and Communicator

1. Introduction Explain the problem; discuss any concepts or previous knowledge that need deﬁning. Establish the aims of the session. Remind everyone of the rules of improvisation.

2. Warm-up The aim of the warm-ups is to get people off their seats, to get them trusting each other, and to generate an atmosphere of spontaneity. It can be a good place to thematically introduce your problem context. However, don’t force this point as it may lead to assumptions early on.

3. Deconstruct problem

Figure xx Handlebar Direction Finder

Discuss the problem openly in the group. Use mind-mapping to discover the central themes. Try to narrow it down to 2-5 maximum points. Make an idea hat, or use ﬂip charts; allocate each one a theme. Brainstorm in a circle, and ﬁll the hats or the sheets with ideas.

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4. Reconstruct & improvise Now one by one, using a circle format, recombine the themes by randomly (or if you are using ﬂip-charts, selectively if you wish) choosing two pieces of paper one from each hat. Call out to the group what you have got and show your group your interpretation of it. The group must act as your design team, and suggest solutions to the problems that you encounter. Props should be used and offered by the group, it is your job to show how the solution ﬁts the problem. Anyone can join in your scene, and if you feel stuck by a problem, ask for help.

5. Vote for favourite improvs The recombinations should be kept together, so that the group can remember what has happened and discuss the scenarios. Collectively the group selects which they think there the most successful scenarios and ideas that arose from the session. It might help to ﬁlm the session, and also to allocate someone as scribe to record the ideas that occur as the workshop is occurring.

6. Evaluation Warm-down games should be played here. Discuss the beneﬁt of the session. Write a plenary.

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Phase 2 The beginning of the second phase began with taking the process outcomes from phase one, and asking two industry experts for their opinion on them. This gave me an opportunity to also check that I was not duplicating work that other people had done before, but that may not have been covered in my extensive background reading.

Interview with Brenda Laurel Brenda is one of the pioneers in the ﬁeld of HCI, and her work has been discussed earlier in this report. Up until about 2003 her syllabus at the Art Center included improvisation for the graphic design students there./I interviewed her to discuss some of the things I had learnt so far about the use of improv in design. Brenda began by talking about how she has used theatre games in design projects. Starting at Interval Research, through to her teaching at Art Center where she is currently chair of the design program. Working with companies like HP, she has used improv games to help explain a designed experience for teenage kids to the client. She found that you can help clients to understand the context of a design problem by providing cues on cards and step into a space pretending they are 14 years old.

— Nathan: Does Improv affect the end result of design work in your opinion? — Brenda: Yes, deﬁnitely, I see much more imaginative solutions… interestingly students tend to end up doing time-based media like animation further down the line. Brenda admitted that she has used improv mainly as a tool for creativity, rather than as a route to solutions.

— Nathan: You talk about your students being taught how to use improv to quickly sketch new ideas, but does real pen and paper become replaced

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by this now? Do you find that students sketch less with pencil and paper? — Brenda: Not really, the improv enhances the real sketching. I find their ideas on paper are really better thought out. Brenda spoke with enthusiasm about my findings so far, and shed some light on why she thought improvisation fitted interaction design especially:

— The more we live with embodied experiences in our lives, the more we become mobile, as people get connected to the world around us, you begin to need methods based on improv, because it is about that embodied experience. Brenda gave me some direct advice for running sessions, and sent me a copy of her improv games ﬁle.

— Give people limits - give them three minutes to complete an activity - I really believe that is important. Brenda’s background is in theatre originally, and she started to get into design when she joined Interval research in the nineteen–nineties. Whilst at Interval, she formed an improvisation group more as a social activity more than anything else. She told me how it was hard at ﬁrst to get a committed troupe together from eighty researchers who were used to sitting at their desks. ‘You’ve got to create a culture of improv’ said Brenda when I told her about the workshops I had been doing.

Interview with Kristian Simsarian I interviewed Kristian on his use of role-playing techniques at IDEO. In particular I asked him questions regarding how he uses the results of the process, whether he records them in a special way for example.

— I’ve never felt much pressure to need to capture the process. One of the things we do is do some brainstorming, come up with a bunch of ideas, and then you take one of those ideas, act it out, and think about how these props might take life. You spend maybe an hour with a group of

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people doing that. Then once you have something that is compelling, they work out a kind of 2-minute commercial, like a skit. Then you can do that in front of the camera, and you can capture that. We spoke about our individual experiences using theatre games and improvised scenarios. My experience so far had been mostly in creating teams to help one person’s project. The other participants after the session had experienced and learnt something very useful about the project. However, maybe when the whole group does it, you get more value, and improved group understanding of a problem.

— Don’t underestimate the power of a group experience. We’ll have a shared understanding of what this thing is, that is beyond language. … One thing about doing these skits and things, they tend to unify people and work out the wrinkles. You know a picture is worth a thousand words, and a prototype is worth a thousand pictures. … Someone could say a kiosk is used to easily vend tickets, and everyone will say ‘yes, yes, that’s what it is’, and if you stopped there, then you’d have a marketing group that would agree that a kiosk should vend tickets easily. And then you’d say well how would you do that? And they’d say ‘well it should spit the ticket out at waist height’. And then you’d go a little further down removing ambiguity. You’d ask ‘what does the actual screen look like?’ ‘What does it do between frames - how does it fade?’ You start working out the experience, until it gets better and better. How does it work for the tourist, how does it work for the frequent user, and things like that, this is the emotional experience that someone should have. — You definitely get more fidelity of the idea, and it’s different to the fidelity of a prototype. It gets more detailed the more you create around it. And it’s hard to get a group aligned around an experience until you actually go through it a bit, and doodle around, and it’s like ‘oh, I didn’t think of that - or that.’ And you could go really far, and still there would be things you didn’t think of. All the way down to when the designers decide how many pixels to make the thing, and how it behaves when you do something, and how it works when you roll-over it. — So don’t underestimate the group sharing experience. I think it’s good to capture but focussing on capture might be a little bit of a red herring.

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Design development Design Speciﬁcations From my phase one ﬁndings I can conclude that the designed touch-points of the process must meet the follow requirements:

1. Time: Provide people with limits and structure the time carefully. 2. Rules: The rules of improv, which help create engaging group action and problem solving need to be explained and learnt tacitly. 3. Encourage physical expression: This is not desk–improv. People must be active, don’t let people sit for too long, switch the roles around, and play games that help people to use their whole body. 4. Role assignment: It must be made clear that everyone is a participant, and that is their primary role – to be involved. It is the coach’s role to do that, and ensure the group works successfully. Someone must be a scribe during any session after warm–up, and this role should be rotated. Finally, when you are not performing, you are still playing – everyone is playing the game and is part of the problem solving. 5. Space demarcation: The location is important and the construction of an ad-hoc stage helps to focus the problem solving space. We remember ideas in three–dimensions and controlling the space can help us to remember where an idea was. 6. Support the recording of the activities & result: Different games require different levels of recording depending on the goal. For example, let us suppose for a moment we need to design a new children’s toy and we are improvising the moment the child opens the device for the first time. We would explore first the initial situation, through improv, and write down what the requirements are as the scene is happening. Once the scene feels real to everyone, you would then iterate on it, repeating it, evolving the design to support the situation, and write down the new specifications.

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First Concepts Fabric Post-it Notes. Following the concept of physicalizing an idea, it seemed appropriate to create a way to write ideas on other people or even yourself. A full outfit was designed with Velcro fixtures at specific places on the white garments. A system of Velcro shapes was designed on which annotations or ideas could be written.

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Concept

2-6 players

What

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Abstract Props The abstract props were ﬁrst used in the second workshop with Jennifer Bove. They were laid out in the middle of the group, and participants would grab whatever shapes they felt they needed for their performance. I prototyped a more reﬁned version of these, this time covering both sides with Velcro to allow for quick outline shapes to be made. These shapes could be produced in libraries or custom made for each session, but for this session, basic geometrical forms and the outlines of everyday consumer goods was used.

‘Improv Design’ Game Cards ‘Every game is its rules.’ The Oxford History of Board Games33 The cards were probably the physical element that changed the most in the design process. Beginning life as sketches in notebooks transferred to a word processor, and then ﬁnally iterated throughout six improv workshops,

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they changed a great deal. The basic elements of the cards began life being directly inspired from the classic improv games of Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone. Yet I soon discovered that the goals of theatre are different to those of interaction design. The cards had to be designed and written accordingly. A game’s goal is defined by its rules and is tightly interwoven into the formal structure of the game as a whole. The Rules of Play34 Experiment three with Ruth showed that the cards have to be designed like software. Just as successful software design applies a goal–driven approach, the Design Improv cards should do the same. The goal must be explicit, and be the first thing that is communicated. In workshops, the cards become a vital part of the interaction between the instructor or coach and the rest of the team. In the appendix you will find a complete set of Design Improv games, but here is one to illustrate how the games work.

Peg Board Once you have selected a game card, you can keep your session cards together in a holder, and mark the stage you are in on a colour coded board.

Design Stage Based on the phase one results, we know that it is important to support the physical demarcation of the performance space. In designing the stage space, consideration was made of set design principles, and traditions of theatre. Commedia dell’Arte performers travelled and created impromptu plays

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wherever they stopped. The design stage should be designed with a similar intent, with the ability to set up and define the investigative space, almost like a detective. Large floor shapes help with the construction of quick stage sets. They help the team to layout a physical where context. They were different colours at first to experiment to see what worked best. However, the final versions were just one colour as colour association’s confused people.

Dynamic Backdrops Using aluminium tent poles, I made a modular projection screen which allowed back projection and could be rolled and folded away quickly. The aim was to have a portable screen with scenes projected onto it. These scenes would either be pre-made for the session or selected from a bank of images. Starting with photorealistic, working to purely illustrative, I tried out different levels of ﬁdelity. Four scenes were produced and tested in experiment ﬁve with Pei’s Book Sharing project.

Game structure Recursion Recursion, which you can see being used in this sentence, can be seen everywhere. If you are familiar with programming you will understand why. Earlier on we touched on the concept whilst discussing Gödel, Escher, and Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid. So what is it exactly? Taking the ﬁrst sentence in this paragraph as an example, the ﬁrst whole clause beginning ‘which…’ could be totally removed and the sentence would still make sense: ‘Recursion can be seen everywhere’. This separated phrase is on the top level, and the clause embedded inside it is a detail or elaboration to give us more information. So recursion is like drilling down into an idea.

Alice in Wonderland We can see something similar to recursion in software design. The waterfall model is a classic model for developing software. However, it is a cascading

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model and never goes back to the top level. I would propose the improv process as being more like the Lewis Carol, Bach or even the Escher Model. Like the lizards walking in and out of Escher’s drawings, we walk in and out of the user’s shoes and the improvised performance. The construction of meaning through the creation of recursive dialogue is one of the things we do linguistically when we improvise. Therefore what the designer needs to understand is how recursion works in ideation and problem solving. In creative thinking we use the words ‘diverge’ and ‘converge’. I would prefer to use terminology that is closer to the linguistic event that caused this kind of change in our thinking. As deﬁned by Hofstadter, we can dive into a sub-structure beginning at a noun, and work from there. In linguistic terms, recursion here is called a push. There is also a pop. We can push and pop out of design problems. In design we can do this thematically: we can explore Who the user is, giving background on them. We can explore Where they are, detailing that. Both of these things tell us more detailed information on the problem context. But by improvising each of these ﬁlters, we are pushing deeper into the meaning of the interaction. We pop back out each time to check we are still on path. When we push in, we are exploring the Who, What, Why, When details. But what stops us from diving too deep that we get lost in an idea chain? To pop back out again, our trigger is either the time-up warning, or the prompt from another performer to lead us back on path. Or we can use a Pop card. The Pop card asks us to go back and check the problem’s root. Someone should be on hand to keep a record of the idea thread. It is their job to choose a word to associate with each level of the recursion structure. The idea of structuring here is similar in thinking to Story Spine. The story spine is used by business improv group Story net. These structural ideas are good for longer session structures where improv games can carry into the more developed production style typical of the Harold Style.

Experiment Five: Pei & Book–Sharing Service Aims of the session Pei wanted to develop more scenarios for her group’s project, and reﬁne the concept.

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Session Flow Beginning with a quick warm up of Malapropism, followed by Catch, we dove into Pei’s Book Sharing context. We took the concept of book sharing and created a couple of scenarios using a game called Dubbed Movie. In this game the players on stage have to mime the scene, and two other players off stage have to be their voices. The game helps to create group ideas, and the pair of speaker and actor become one through the joint solving of problems in the scene. Following this we tried Bug Testing. Using this game format, we played out Pei’s original scenario normally, and within one minute of the action, we found a ﬂaw in the concept. The scene takes place in a bookstore. Aram played the part of the customer. Whilst browsing through some books, Aram ﬁnds a book he is interested in buying and approached Pei, who is playing the part of the cashier.

— ‘Hello, can you help me? I wanted to buy this book, but don’t know anything about it. Can you tell me something about it?’ — ‘Hello, errmm, well no I’ve never read it’ — ‘Oh, well isn’t there some way I can find out about it? Some kind of service maybe?’ — ‘’No, I’ve never heard of that’ At this point, I shouted ‘freeze!’ We stopped and discussed the problem. Aram clearly wanted to find something out about this book, and did what was natural to him, and approached the only other person in the store. He assumed that the store would be part of the Book Sharing service. This is something that Pei’s group had over looked. We discussed the merit of having the Book Store be part of the service ecology: increasing customer community, anticipating demand and increased sales, finding our about buying habits and so on. We changed the service structure and unfroze the scene. The scenarios carried on and more ideas emerged. This time Pei was happy to help, and using an improvised computer screen she showed Aram how to use the service.

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Outcome Lots of different scenarios for use came out of the session. However, the most signiﬁcant thing was the change in the service ecology. Feedback ‘It pushes things to extremes, which is good... you see things you wouldn’t have thoughts about just working through a scenario on paper.’ Vinay. ‘When you are making a video (scenario), you don’t think about what you will need until it’s too late.’ Pei ‘Humour actually helps...if you have a weird, humorous situation, it helps, it keeps it light... if it is too stiff, people get worried (and it’s not creative).’ Vinay ‘The reason improv works is that the crunch makes you work - it makes you solve the problem fast.’ Aram.

Extracting the instructor’s knowledge To ﬁnd out just what I had learnt as a facilitator, and as test to see how easily the knowledge could be transferred, I ran a tutorial session with Aram. At the end of the session he said he felt he could run a Design Improv session if there was someone else present who knew the process too. Along with Pei and Vinay, who had had exposure prior, they did just that in the Mattel workshop. This important activity became the blueprint for the instructional design of the process.

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Phase Three During phase three the transformation from process and learning to synthesised solution took place. Beginning with a visit to London’s Live|Work and Hasbro Games companies, and concluding with the design of a service that delivers Design Improv to design companies.

Figure xv The game platform as used at

Live|Work, Quadro business networking services

Live|Work.

Session Aims: Live|Work wanted to explore a regional development project35 for a business incubator in the North East of England called Quadro. They had told me very little about the project prior to the session, and I intentionally tried not to ﬁnd out any more. This was to see how effective the structure of the process was at adapting to a new problem. Admittedly the capacity to improvise like this is dependant in part on my skill as an instructor. However, I tried to focus the activity on the game platform, and rely on them rather than skills I had acquired during the process of the thesis. Upon arrival, Lavrans Lovlie, who co-runs the service–design company, briefed everyone in the studio. The project, he explained, is about the design of services for a business incubator building. These services, rather than traditional start-up help such as help with business plans, should help connect potential business partners, and allow the ﬂuid sharing of resources amongst entrepreneurs.

Figure xvi There are six stages to choose from:

Flow of Session:

Warm up or learn Improv, and ﬁve stages that represent different design phases.

An introduction into the rules of improvisation kicked off the session, followed by a brief explanation of the concept of playing games to solve problems. ‘Exposure’, a game that splits the group in half, one side becomes the audience, whilst the others are performers. Both sides stare at each other, without laughing for 30 seconds. Then the performers have to complete a simple task: count the number of post-its in the room. The game teaches the idea of focus, and how having focus changes our ability to perform, and

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eases our nervous stomach. This is an important point to teach new players at the start of any improv session. It demonstrates the use of space straight away, even on an imaginary stage, because the space is created through the tension between the two formations of people. The audience plays out the spectator role, and the ones standing become the watched. There is a sense of expectation and tension. Even more important here is to show how everyone gets stage fright, but how it can be overcome very rapidly by changing your attention to focus on a simple task. We then played ball, a catch game. Everyone enjoyed this simple exercise, which teaches the ideas of agreement and offering between players. I showed the game board to them, and explained how you use it to help choose which design phase cards to choose from. After a brief discussion, they decided they were between Ideate and Develop. We took a look at the cards in there, and chose deconstruct and reconstruct, two complimentary games. Deconstruction was discussed in experiment four, but for this session it had been developed and refined. This time, to help get to the requirements for a dramatic scene; we used categories to create a matrix of the problem in almost no time at all. For example, I asked them to take the three words, assign each to a giant 3M post-it, and then I gave them all mini–post-its and pens. ‘Name who the characters or people that spring to mind for the first key word, business… Now do the same for community… and now networks… Now beneath that write motivations for each word, for example, I network because…’ I took them through why, where, who, and when, and then we played reconstruction. The group quickly selected a who, what and why from across the grid of the three–by–four grid of post-its to create a scene, we stuck these to another flipchart, and discussed what the scene was that contained these key elements. They loved this, and we got one scene that was about a peer-peer church of credit. You could be a minister for a day, and you decided who got credit and who didn’t. It gave them an idea for how to set up credit networks in this business park we were improvising on. Another scene was about sharing of equipment. The scene was set up with three players, and the team decided that someone had to borrow the photocopier. During the scene, the person whose machine it was decided to be in a rush. This exposed the need for instructions and a contract system for borrowing. A mediation service that a borrower can go to and access borrowing instructions and so on was one idea

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that came out of this scene.

Outcome: Live|Work said immediately after the session that it had been very valuable as they had got two ideas that they thought could be developed further. The equipment sharing service and the peer to peer credit system were both interesting concepts they said.

Figure xxi Church of

Feedback:

Peer-Peer credit

After the session, we had a feedback session where the group reﬂected on the process and how they thought it might work professionally. Following this, a survey was sent and completed electronically. On the whole, Live|Work felt that it was a great exercise, and seemed pleased that they had produced some concepts for their project. They seemed convinced that the process should be delivered as a service, rather than being bought as a kit. Athena Anagnostopoulos: ‘I was interested to hear what the process was and how it can be applied to the design process, so it was deﬁnitely an engaging proposition. I really like the idea that a design consultancy could hire out the improv service rather than run the improv sessions themselves…Perhaps actors (rather than designers or clients) do the skits as part of the service that, and the rest observe and think about what the skits mean for the project.’

Hasbro Games

Figure xxi Borrowing and equipment sharing service.

Design Improv has to be good at selling the concept and demonstrating the service to both internal design departments and design consultancies. I visited the design manager and senior designers from Hasbro to prototype this experience. Hasbro is the manufacturer of classic games such as Scrabble, Monopoly, trivial Pursuit and kids toys such as G.I. Joe, Play-Doh, Tonka toys, Nerf balls, and Action Man. The Company’s offerings encompass a variety of games, from traditional board games to interactive and electronic toys for user groups ranging from infants to pre-school kids and above. After presenting and demonstrating how Design Improv works, Hasbro explained where they saw value and challenges in the idea. Hasbro UK

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recently lost their user research department, and said that something like this would be a more ﬁnancially viable method for doing quick tests on ideas. Richard, the design manager, pointed out the acceptance problem, just as Live|Work had done, to the idea of having an in-house kit. He also preferred the idea that there is a service that delivers the process to you. However, Richard suggested that you could increase the value of the process if you could also encourage people to solve problems in their personal life. Hasbro’s proﬁt margins over the last seven years have suffered from the increase in video game console sales. To counter this, they focus on social interaction, and said that the Design Improv games would be a great thing to help them explore this opportunity further. One of the problems with the way they work is demonstrating the value of a game to different people internally and externally. ‘What’s nice about this is you could act out the research data, and demonstrate the value of an idea in a spontaneous way. We could use this to show buyers the thinking behind a product… That thinking is usually the hidden thing the money guys never see.’

Figure xxi Hasbro’s design team started using Play-Doh in their creative sessions after the introduction to Design Improv. They sent this box as gratitude.

Domus Circular: San Siro Football Stadium, Improvising Ruth’s thesis for the general public. Developed speciﬁcally for this experience, ‘Performance Testing’ is a game where we spontaneously create a scene based on speciﬁc criteria. Breaking down the design context into Who, Why, When, and Where, we can do two useful things. By using these questions in a design context, we are creating design requirements through which to understand a solution that has been designed. Also it allows for a dramatic scene to be created as long as we have at least two or three of the W’s (in fact talented improvisers can create a scene from just one, but it is more useful at this stage of the design to use more criteria to help us narrow our focus). The experiment at San Siro was unusual in comparison to other ones because it involved members of the public who were neither the target user group of the project being improvised, nor designers involved in the project. Taking Ruth’s Buddy Beads thesis project, I created a format that would allow the public to get into the context of her project and experience the effect of the solution. Using this platform, ideas about how the Buddy Beads system could be reinterpreted and her communication code personalised could be observed.

Figure xxi Instructions for San Siro

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Aims Because Ruth’s prototype was not sufﬁciently complete to demonstrate its full functionality, she needed a way of engaging the visitors to the exhibition in the experience of Buddy Beads. We wanted to ﬁnd out in addition if such a participatory design experience can work in a public exhibition setting.

Figure xv Participants to San Siro took a Who,

The Experience

and a Why, and then collectively chose a Where or a When to construct a scene.

Taking three greenhouses (a modular unit provided by the exhibition unit), we put the improv games in the first house, Ruth’s prototype in the middle house, and made the last room a teenage bedroom. The space in front of the houses was marked out with a fluorescent painted dotted line using a stencil. This space was the performance space. Using the improv mats concept from previous designs, I made twenty-five floor mats using the shapes and colours of Ruth’s message beads. We guided visitors into the first house, and explained the concept of Ruth’s design. Each participant (usually in groups) was told that they would be improvising a teenage girl and had to pick a character to start with. This version of Performance Testing uses who, when, why, and where to construct a scene with. Placing the Velcro–backed photograph of the teenage girl on their pentagon, participants chose a why motivation for their character. At the beginning of the exhibition these cards were blank. As the evening progressed they were filled with visitors’ suggestions. Finally the group had to chose together a where or when for their scene.

Figure xvi The shapes represented the colours

Now the participants would enter Ruth’s house, and try her prototype. Ruth had set up a system to allow groups of 2-5 girls to be created. This was a simulation of what would happen in a store selling Buddy Beads. Using the persona data collected in the ﬁrst house, the participants could more easily complete the prototype, which required names to be allocated to each member and group messages to be thought of. I think the personas certainly helped the men who were trying the prototype.

and forms of Buddy Beads.

Ruth’s software printed out a record of the coloured shapes that the group members had chosen, and which messages they had collectively decided to allocate to them. Next they chose the improv mats that matched their

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message shapes and we played games and created scenes based on their new group identity. The simplest game was to create a scene with one person at a time saying a line about their character. Once the group and the audience agreed that the scene felt real, they used the mats to communciate their pre-chosen message. Scenes evolved like this, and the Buddy Beads code system became the focal point of action, sometimes being completely reinterpreted.

Outcome Figure xv The view from above.

Improv participation meant that the public bought into the idea at a deeper level. Feedback from one participant: ‘It’s great, it really helps you understand how this (Ruth’s) idea could be meaningful for girls’. We had a ﬁxed idea of how the participatory experience would work, but the participants evolved their own games, and by the end of the night we had ﬁve new games. For example, one game was to stand off the mats, and stand on them when you wanted to send that message. Then after a few moments, the two players would swop mats, meaning their messages were swopped.

Figure xvi An example of a game evolving. The couple here have just swopped their message mats, and are now creating new messages.

Ruth’s project is now using scenarios where message swopping is an option. Performing improv in this way meant that we needed a lot of control over

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the space. Being positioned in front of the stadium entrance meant that when the ﬂood of people intensiﬁed, we couldn’t control the space well, and the performances at this time were chaotic. For this kind of performance to work, you need a more dramatic sense of stage demarcation. Using lights could work: perhaps even curtains and a raised platform. However, part of the effectiveness of the exhibition design we used was its ability not to make people feel too ‘on show’.

Figure xv The Dragon Game

Although the content of the messages were perhaps not the real ones teenage girls would use, Ruth learnt about potential group dynamics in the use of her system and it was interesting for her to see how people behave when using the device.

Case Study: Mattel Workshop A competition between five interaction design universities, the aim of this project was to design never–before–experienced interactive toys for children. One group from this workshop used the Design Improv methods that had been taught to them in a previous session at the Institute. Perhaps it was because Pei, Aram, and Vinay had participated in Pei’s improv workshop that they formed a group for their proceeding first year project. I interviewed them to find out what had happened.

Wild Watches

Figure xv The prisoner game, which stemmed

The group’s project used improv games to explore the design of children’s games. The results of the improv sessions directly affected the results of their project. After a fairly deductive process which involved researching existing toys, the group knew they wanted to design a watch like device. However, they weren’t sure what games should be designed. Knowing that they couldn’t possibly design the games using traditional techniques, they decided to stage a session using improv.

from the hollow cylindrical prop that Vinay fashioned.

‘Post-it notes and sitting around a desk doesn’t make sense for this age range, we needed a way of opening up.’

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Session Aims Part one: 1. What can you do with your wrist? 2. Devising rules for games 3. Reﬁning and selecting 2 from 5 ideas 4. Generating situations for use of the watch 5. Getting into the mindset of kids Part two aims were focused more on : 1. Detailing the interaction and game play. 2. Conﬁrming the results from the previous session.

Session Flow: Beginning with the warm up game Malapropism, the group quickly got into the moment for improv. They then took a natural step from this and began by evolving their own games starting with the game Catch, where you pass an imaginary ball around the circle. As they played, one person would ﬁlm the action and write keywords on a piece of paper to keep reminders of the games. Before the session, Vinay made some quick props in the workshop. A cardboard roll was used as a kind of hand-cuff device to indicate imprisonment in one game. ‘When you stuck your hand in the tube, you were captured, and when it was free, you had to escape.’ Basic wrist–watches and masks were fashioned for role-play games such as a game about dragons.

Concept testing 1. Watch + Something. This was the idea that the situation of the watch inﬂuences the behaviour of the device. For example, when you submerge

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your watch in water, it becomes a ﬁsh. If you open the watch at night, it becomes an owl. 2. Magic Spyglass. Causes anything magniﬁed to spring into never ending magical associations. 3. Underwater Play, mask, bathtub becomes aquarium. 4. Improv Play Places. Building forts, and so on. A make-believe place that accepts suggestions of location, a desert, an island, and an improvisatory theatre set for kids. Figure xv Wild Watches being user tested. The interaction of the device evolved directly from

5. Share Secrets. Wireless encrypted communication between buddies.

the Improv sessions the group did.

Outcome The session was productive for the group because one of the ideas that came directly from the improv activity was developed and made it to the solution phase. The Virus Watches are… Reﬁnement of the ideas over the two ideas came naturally to the group as they invented, played, and discarded new game experiences. As Vinay put it: ‘The session allowed our minds to ﬂoat free, and break away from our preconceived notions.’

Feedback It was enormously encouraging to witness a group take the process that had been taught to them and produce ideas. It was even more rewarding to see the quality of the ideas that came out. During an interview with the group, I got some insights into how they felt it had worked. Pei: ‘It gives you somewhere to start…You might just surprise yourself with what you come up with…Users often come, and they feel that they have to please you. They want to help you, ﬁll in your expectations, and they want to know what you want. You need a way of loosening them up.’ Vinay mentioned that he thought it was a useful activity because of the spontaneity and adaptability of the process. ‘Brainstorming only helps when you need to do it. Brainstorming has become so cliché for me, I run through

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this checklist, and the same ideas pour out everytimeâ&#x20AC;Ś I have become tired of the process, and I want to try something new.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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design improv the service & the process Design Improv is a service delivering improvisational techniques to design companies. It uses a kit of instruction cards (suggesting improv games and techniques) and props (like Velcro shapes and mats), which aid the invention, testing, and development of interaction design-related products and services. It draws on improv methods used previously in the design context and the performing arts, and on improv experiments devised and conducted in this thesis.

Step 1/9 Make sure you know the situation. A full system diagram is missing here.

The service, represented by a facilitator (or ‘master of ceremonies’), is typically hired just for a short duration during a project, particularly when large groups, perhaps including users and customers, need speedy coordination. The Improv kit provides a game ‘platform’ allowing designers and non-designers to ‘speak the same language’ and address the problem area through lightly structured and relatively uninhibited role-play and coinvention. The game’s ﬁrst stage teaches the rules of improvisation; later stages (six in all) each aid a particular design stage: Explore, Ideate, Deﬁne, Develop, and Deliver. The service arrives with a toolkit to help the running of the session. Examples of these tools are, (but not limited to) the following:

1. Velcro Props 2. Timer Ball 3. Improv Mats: Assign aspects of your problem to the space. Helps you to quickly set up a user’s context and build a scene. 4. Do not disturb sign, to be attached to the door of the room. 5. Clapper–Board: Used when ﬁlming to aid the recording of scenes and games. Made from white-board material, the facilitator writes the particulars of the scene, and shows it to the camera. Stickers are used to help structure the notation of the ideas and outcomes from games.

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6. Improv Stickers that suggest what to record from a scene.

The Process Diagram here (To be inserted): props Space games Recording Clock Velcro shapes Floor shapes Improv games recording graphics and stickers Service manual DND sign

Qualities of the service Every part of the service has been designed in a way that imbues qualities of the Design Improv process. The aim was to remove ambiguity about the process of improv, and assist the tactic learning through a kind of osmosis. For example, the way the illustrations have been drawn is an attempt to be suggestive, rather than too explicit about what each game should look like. The form of the game is not important, but the outcome is. The qualities of the service include:

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1. Personality – for example, the do–not–disturb sign and the rules are all depicting actions, such as the onomatopoeic ‘Shhh!’ to the ‘Listen!’ sign, were inspired by Italian body language. 2. Spontaneity and ﬂexibility – the Velcro props are a good example of this. Of course, anything can be used to help the construction of physical props, but this quick tool helps to get people started with freeing up their associations and augmenting their skits.

Figure xv Do Not Disturb, Design Improv in

3. Accepting offers – for example the service website allows customers to make a proﬁle of their job, and comment on which games they liked, and make suggestions for new ones.

progress.

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Figure xv Game Board without the cards. Notice how there are squestions which guide you

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economic study

The Economics of Improv Before we look at the business side of the Design Improv service, let’s take a brief look at the conceptual and strategic overlaps between improv and business.

Spontaneity in Business The Economist wrote in 2002 about ‘the real-time economy’. According to the economist, there is a growing awareness in the delivery of services and products that things are happening faster. There is a change happening at a managerial level and in the way organisations are reinventing themselves to respond to this market change. Organisations are becoming more spontaneous.

Making mistakes and being discovery prone In 1989, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in England discovered a new molecular compound and named it UK-92,480. Drug development is a long procedure and most drugs fail at various stages of the development cycle. This molecule failed initial trials for the treatment of the heart condition angina. However, some rather surprising side effects were noticed in the scientists’ initial tests. It was only through being open to the discovery of new compounds whilst being focused on the existing development of an angina drug that the scientists at Pfizer made the breakthrough. Male test patients reported poor results at the relative efficacy of the compound for relieving their Angina symptoms. However, they did report the unusual side effects that would lead to the discovery of Viagra, curing an entirely different medical complaint, namely impotency. Being ready to accept new discoveries, through the acceptance of apparent failures is symptomatic of improv actors on stage. However, this behaviour

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can be seen in the discovery of Nylon. One day at the Rayon plant, engineers were playing around whilst their manager was out of the ofﬁce. The game was to create the longest single strand of Rayon as it came out of the machine. The strand went half way around the building when they were ﬁnished. Afterwards, someone has the bright idea of testing how tough this strand was. They discovered it was much stronger – they had in fact cold drawn Rayon producing a new material: Nylon.

Business Modeling ‘Design Improv’ is a service that delivers a design method that helps designers and their customers and users collaborate on design projects. The agency ‘design Improv’ features a core team of designers and hires freelance actors who assist in dramatising the design problems. There is a website that helps the service to manage projects and sell their service. The consultants use a kit to help facilitate the improv–workshops. It contains specific games for each stage of the design process, and props that apply to specific styles of game. The market for the service is internal design departments in software houses, manufacturing firms and design agencies.

Critical Success Factors The service must establish a strong client base and will need several clients per week to keep making money. Actor’s guilds or agencies would need to be contacted and a strong relationship of trust should be established to maintain a steady stream of reliable part-time or freelance actors. The regular staff of Design must be educated in order to speak with a consistent voice. A lot of this training is tactic knowledge, and must be acquired on the job. The service must improve project jobs by:

a. Speeding up initial burst phase b. Focusing on problems c. Helping to generate collaborative working atmospheres amongst design teams. d. Increasing spontaneity, freeing up associations, increasing team

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acceptance of new ideas, and ultimately helping to create engaging concepts for people. e. Reﬁning concepts and assisting decision-making. The service relies on being able to immerse clients within the culture of the Design Improv company during visits by creating a mobile space or environment. If a design company does not have a suitable space, the Design Improv studio space can be used. This is a ﬁxed space that is purpose built to assist in Design Improv.

Competitor Analysis Design consultants who offer similar kinds of a service are few and far between. IDEO’s use of role-playing has been discussed earlier in this thesis, but it is worth mentioning the range of services they offer. Role-play is often used in design projects especially in the initial phase when clients are present. IDEO-U workshops are focussed on the innovation of a company’s process and strategy through the use of IDEO’s design methods. These sessions have been known to use role-playing extensively. Though not active anymore, Interval Research’s Informance offering can still be seen most strongly in company’s such as Intel Research, who have a strong balance between user research and design.

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Who is the client/ customer?

Designers:

Non-Designer

Internal

External

Intel

IDEO

Hospitals

Adobe

Frog Design

General

municipalities/

councils/

government organisations Microsoft

Fitch Civil engineers

IBM

Pentagram Immigration services

Sony

Ziba Game manufacturers

Telecom Italia

Live|Work

Nokia

Marketing & Communication The service could promote itself with two main strategies.

Strategy One: Direct marketing to design ďŹ rms selling the idea that Design Improv helps them innovate with their customers and users. A free two hour trial run could be offered or a demo. During these sessions, and also in marketing materials such as brochures and the website, previous case studies could be shown. The goal here would be to present how the goals of the example were met, and how unique solutions were produced, whilst at the same time demonstrating the value of the process as being exciting and desirable. Strategy Two:

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As the service segues between the design company and their customers, it would be wise to develop the company’s public image. In the style of Commedia Dell’Arte, design troupes could tour public exhibitions and events where design was a focus. At these events, the service would distribute ‘Problem?’ stickers, designed by the service to help the general public highlight problem areas which they find around the event. When you find a problem, you label it with the sticker and specify the details by filling in the blanks provided. Once you have done that, keeping the backing of the sticker which contains instructions, you would report the ‘incident’ to the Design Improv website. The service would descend on to the location like a detective solving a crime. Marking out the incident with Demarcation tape, they would perform improvised solutions to the problem. This kind of publicity would ideally present the service as innovative and people–focussed, imaginative and willing to break norms. To make it successful, however, they would have to maintain a seriousness of process and communicate hard value to their customers who hire them.

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Costs Infrastructure Materials

Approximate Cost

Office Running costs Initial costs Office supplies Kit Cameras/ film Transport Marketing Web hosting People Freelance rates Salary for Full time staff Benefits/ keep people happy costs Accounting Lawyers

Revenue Stream/ Cash ﬂow The company makes money by selling their time on an hourly rate. During the prototype with Live|Work, Lavrans Lovlie said he could imagine a company like his paying a thousand sterling per day for the service. He envisaged that the service would be hired once or twice per project. Additionally there would be a revenue from sales of the Improv Lite and Design Improv kits. These kits would come with an optional subscription cost which would offer regular updates on new games.

Strengths and Weaknesses Using the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) model, we can analyse the strength of the offering.

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Strengths

Weaknesses

Footloose and location independent.

Increased travelling means higher transport costs, though these would be billed to the

Not tied too strongly to one industry, and

client on a per–job basis.

should market deﬂate, service can shift tack easily and focus

Opportunities

Threats

Few competitors in the market offering this

External services such as PR and marketing

kind of service.

are often the ﬁrst to go in a recession.

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evaluation and analysis The unexpected and surprise have followed me along every step of my design process. I never thought I would ﬁnd myself learning about the things that I have explored along the way.

Methodology The process of this Interaction Design thesis has been somewhat unusual. The first challenge of the thesis was to absorb as much theory on improvisational theatre; the second was to apply it. The two of these processes overlapped when I first began to learn how the theories of theatrical improvisation could be applied to exploring design problems. One of the biggest challenges was to be objective about my role as facilitator of the Design Improv workshops. I had to accept criticism on a non-personal level and work it back into the iterative process of finding formats and processes that were successful.

Testing In the ﬁrst experiments, I worked predominantly with other thesis projects. This was a tough thing to do, though morale boosting for all involved. It did cause some stressful moments, especially because there were shared deadlines involved.

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Conclusion What have you discovered? Where does your project ﬁt in the world of interaction design and related ﬁelds? If you could keep working on the Thesis, what would you do next?

Concluded results Innovation in Design Methodology Thinking about the way people experience the world through the lens of improvisatory activity is a new design method for understanding motivation, character, and situated behaviour. This model is useful to interaction designers because it provides us with tools and a way of thinking that shortcuts ethnographic research and is akin to just enough prototyping. It differs from role-playing for two reasons: ﬁrstly it provides a more structured and yet free way for generating design requirements, and secondly it taps into and accepts the opinion and instincts of the participants involved. Role–playing’s root is in the Brechtian and Boalian world of method acting, where you ‘become’ the user. Design Improv methodology, combining with ideas from Mamet and Johnstone, proposes you never forget who you are as a person, yet use the situation and its particular constraints to understand motivation.

The challenges of Improv as a design tool There is an acceptance barrier to get over with any activity where it requires social groups to expose themselves and get our of their chairs to perform. Some of us are naturally sceptical to rules being imposed on us. However, from my experience of working with in the most diverse mix of cultures in my career, I found myself surprised at the willingness of people to try Design Improv. It is important to make very clear to people that this is different to acting, and that it is about playing games to solve problems. If you don’t want to play, you don’t have to, but you must participate in the process in some way, whether it is being the scribe or being the spectator. Actors and comedians who use improv suffer from the problem of ﬁxed in

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their behaviours. Eventually their joke structures and instincts become set as their sub-consciousness’ ﬁnds it easier to rely on pre-experienced successful patterns of association rather than truly being original. Improv gets harder once you become a true veteran. However, it is likely that this tendency is true of any activity. Why would brainstorming as a method for group thought not suffer the same problem? Perhaps also, whereas the comedian and actors troupes work with the same people, in groups of designers, users and clients, there will always be a large enough mixture to produce variation and fresh stimulation. Bed-bound

Beneﬁts of Improv as an Interaction Design Tool Action and Interaction Johnstone deﬁnes ‘interaction as ‘a shift in the balance between two people… unless someone is being altered, it’ll still feel as it nothing’s happening.’

Physicalising Particular types of project may benefit from improv more than others. As we have seen, some projects benefit so much that the improv becomes a direct influencing factor on the solution.

Further Study With more time and resources the design of the service could be taken further to explore how the internal culture of the company functions and grows. It would be interesting to model how over time the service can create a community of game sharing between its clients, allowing for a kind of open-source feedback system. A system like this would allow the customer to make comments or suggestions on the games they had used in workshops. Existing or potential customers could read submitted case studies of how the speciﬁc games had been used.

The Growth Factor Extending the concept is almost natural. By their nature, games change

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through their use. This is natural process and games almost rely on adaptation for their adoption. Just as jokes can show their age by their content and meaning, so too can games designed for a speciﬁc activity. The games designed in this thesis will need to evolve to adapt to the new kinds of experiences designers will use them for.

Finding New Problems How would the service promote itself? Imagine if the Design Improv team distributed stickers to the general public with which to mark difficult to use things that they find in everyday life. After they had done this, they would register on the service website the location of the ‘incident’ or difficulty. The service would arrive at the scene, almost like a detective, and perform Design Improv in situ. Aside from the comical aspect of this, there are two serious reasons for doing this. The first is for promotion and communication of what the service does. The second is to give the public an outlet for frustrations they find in their everyday use of things. The concept becomes a kind of improvisation by taking suggestions from the public. The idea would work most suitably for public services, rather than domestic hardware, due to the increased exposure and lack of current feedback or sensitivity in most municipalities of the world. The service website could catalogue the ‘scenes’ or ‘disturbances’, things they have found frustrating to use, and visualise them in a meaningful way.

Improvisational Service Structures We use the phrase ‘service delivery’ but services aren’t delivered, they’re performed. Services are human relationships across the counter. Matching supply and demand is difﬁcult – you don’t know if no one is going to turn up or if too many people will do so. Too often the customer is treated like a passive consumer, which is a real problem. The Government is especially guilty of this, which stops it moving forward in service delivery. Nick Durrant36 Many service rely on a real-time economy of demand, supply, and reaction. Using the knowledge communicated in this thesis, and extracting a higher level of synthesis from it, we can move sideways to see how the application from one domain can be applied to another. Could improvisation be a model for the experience of services in general? In this thesis we have seen

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how the Design Improv service has been imbued with ritualistic qualities. These qualities make an effort to reﬂect the nature of the activity being experienced by its users. It becomes a meta-experience. The instructors are following improvisational instructions designed in a way as to encourage spontaneity, agreement, and risk taking.

Afterthoughts In phase three it was exciting to see how one group I had worked with a few times began to take on board the ideas of Design Improv and start to use them successfully in their own work. It provided the thesis with validation for how the process can affect the outcome, and supported something that Brenda Laurel said in the interview with her. ‘You have to create a culture of Improv… I have to warn you now, It takes time and patience.’

Final Word This thesis presents an exploration into the use of techniques derived from the world of theatre improvisation for the design of interactive experiences. It delivers improv as a model for how we think about interaction design, both in the way we as users experience the world, and as designers. It has been a fascinating journey for me, yet also a very ambitious one. I hope that further research can be done in this area to advance the foundation of knowledge presented here. I began this thesis with a hypothesis and expand on it here. I believe that Interaction Designers need to design using methods from improvisation theory and practise for the following reasons:

1. In order to design successfully we must form multi-disciplinary teams. Improv is an excellent tool for creating a collaborative mind set for solving design problems. 2. Improvisation games help us to increase our focus on a design problem and create design requirements through the mixture of physicalising ideas, trying out roles, and exploring a user’s context.

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3. Though Improvisation helps us to empathise, through its unique approach to character development and empathy, it helps us to maintain a sense of self–identity, without focusing on the ego. 4. The methods of improvisation can be done by all, you don’t need talent. Improv focuses on playing games, working effectively with others, and being truthful to a situation. However, it yields sharper results when facilitated by a director or team of experts who can help steer the creativity. Aside from the knowledge relevant to the ﬁeld of interaction design, elements of the work could be useful for the improv community and applied improvisation in business. In particular, I feel that it is only right to give something back to the discipline, as I have been so inspired by the work done by Johnstone, Spolin, Laurel, and many others. In researching the structure of improvisation, I looked also to music. Based on a classical concept and a relatively new one in software programming, I believe the game ‘Push, Pop’ will be a useful addition to the Improv community.

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Appendix

Games Database High level map of all the games so far Detailed catalogue of all the games in order of their use. Service ďŹ&#x201A;ow map (or maybe in body of paper)

Technical Drawing of Kit

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References Augarde, Tony. The Oxford Guide to Word Games. Oxford: Oxford University press, 1984. Barker, Clive. Theatre Games, A New Approach to Drama Teaching. London: Methuen, 1977. Berendt, Joachim Ernst. Das Jazzbuch: Von Rag bis Rock. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976. Berendt, Joachim Ernst. Ein Fenster aus Jazz: Essays, Portraits, Reﬂexionen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1977. Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Second Edition. London, Routledge,, 2002. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, New Edition. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press, 2000 Brotchie, Alastair. A Book of Surrealist Games. London: Shambala Redstone Editions, 1995. Cooper, Alan and Robert Reimann. About Face 2.0, The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2003. Creswell, John, W. Research Design, Qualitative & Quantitative Approaches. London: Sage Publications. 1994. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Dourish, Paul. Where the Action is, The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Massachusetts:Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001 Durrant, Nick. in proceedings of ‘D-Futures 10’, Design Council, London, 2 March 2004. Are you being served? When does the service end and the experience start?

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Engeström, Yrjššö, Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamäki. Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Frost, Anthony, Ralph Yarrow. Improvisation in Drama. Macmillan Press, London, 1990. Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005 Hebdige, Dick, Subculture, The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2001. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Penguin Books, New York. 2000. Ishizaki, Suguru. Improvisational Design, Continuous Responsive Digital Communication. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2003 Jacucci, Giulio. ‘Interaction as Performance, Cases of conﬁguring physical interfaces in Mixed media’. Oulun Yliopisto, Oulu, 2004. Johansson, Malcolm. ‘Participatory Inquiry - Collaborative Design’. PhD. Thesis. Blekinge Institute of Technology 2005 Johnston, Keith. Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1981 Johnstone, Keith. Impro for Storytellers. London: Faber and Faber, 1999 Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation, New York: Doubleday 2001. Koppett, Kat. Training to Imagine. Virginia: Stylus Publishing, 2001. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Boston: Addison Wesley Longman Inc., 1991 Laurel, Brenda. ed. Design Research, Methods and Perspectives. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003 Mamet, David. On Directing Film. New York: Viking Penguin, Penguin Books, 1991

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Mamet, David. Three Uses of the Knife, On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. New York: First Vintage Books, 2000 Mamet, David. True and False, Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Mateas, Michael and Phoebe Sengers ed. Narrative Intelligence, Advances in Consciousness Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003 McKnight, Brent. Collaborative groupware Technology Expands the Reach and Effectiveness of Organizational Improvisation. McMaster University 2001. Nelms, Henning. Magic and Showmanship, a Handbook for Conjurers. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Potter, Norman. What is a Designer? Things, Places, Messages, Fourth Edition. Reading: Hyphen Press, 1980. Sawyer, R. Keith. The Improvisational Performance of Everyday Life. Journal of Mundane Behavior, Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theatre, Third Edition. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999 Samsarian, Kristian T. Take it to the Next Stage: The Roles of Role Playing in the Design Process. CHI 2003: new Horizons. Posters: Supporting Design. Stanislavsky, Constantine. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall 1989. Suchman, Lucy A. Plans and Situated Action, The Problem of Human Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001 Vera, Dusya & Mary Crossan. Theatrical Improvisation: Lessons for Organizations. 2002

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Endnotes

Shedroff , Nathan: Information Interaction Design: ‘A Uniﬁed Field Theory of Design’ in ‘Information Design’, Ed: Robert Jacobson, The MIT Press, 1999 2

cited in Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Berendt,

See Spolin Improvisation for the Theatre.

Spolin Improvisation for the Theatre

Mamet True and False, 69

Stanislavsky, Creating a Role. 52.

Boal Theatre of the Oppressed, New Edition 120.

Frost & Yarrow. Improvisation in Drama.

Jacobson, Robert: Information Design.

Cziksentmihaly Flow

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~aﬁlreis/88/kerouac-spontaneous.html

Boyd, Neva L: Play, a Unique Discipline. Cited in Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theatre. 15

Engeström et al. Perspectives on Activity Theory 254

Spolin Improvisation For The Theatre 35

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Hebdige Subculture, The Meaning of Style 180

Weick 1998b: 551

Vera Theatrical Improvisation: Lessons for Organizations

Simsarian Take it to the Next Stage: The Roles of Role Playing in the Design Process 21

Simsarian Take it to the Next Stage: The Roles of Role Playing in the Design Process 1 22

Kelley The Art of Innovation 56-62

Burns et al. Actors, hairdos & videotape—Informance design 1

Maschi Design Driven Innovation, The Role of Scenarios Within Design Processes. 25

Maschi Design Driven Innovation, The Role of Scenarios Within Design Processes. 26

Engeström et al. Perspectives on Activity Theory 47

Rheinfrank & Evenson Activity

Buur & Brandt, Taking Video Beyond ‘Hard Data’ In User Centred Design. Johansson & Linde, Playful Collaborative Exploration. Brereton, Donocan & Viller, Talking about watching. Taylor, Bontoft & Flyte, Using Video Ethnography to Inform and Inspire User-Centred Design. 29

Spolin, Viola: Improvisation for the Theatre 87

Gooding A Book of Suurealist Games 25

Spolin Improvisation for the Theatre 56

This style of object acting was pioneered in the HCI context by Brenda Laurel whilst at Interval Research in the early 1990’s. 33

Augarde The Oxford Guide to Word Games viii

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Salen & Zimmerman The Rules of Play.

http://www.onenortheast.co.uk/

Proceedings of D-Futures 10, Design Council, London, 2 March 2004 Are you being served? When does the service end and the experience start?

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This book was designed and set into type by Nathan Waterhouse, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and printed and bound in the Bluhaus. The text face and captions are Janson, designed by Miklós Tótfalusi Kis, ﬁrst issued by Linotype, 1985. Page titles are set in Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk, designed by Günter Gerhard Lange, in 1896 and is published by Berthold Types Ltd. The paper is local Ivrean stock.