Improvisation as Technique and Practice for Design

This chapter explores the richness of practice-based frameworks and improvisation techniques in the performing arts. It illustrates how these can become a resource for an improvisation-based design approach by developing a concrete hybrid city application. Participatory design methods use improvisation to develop applications in collaboration with users. They attempt to unlock tacit kinds of knowing and gain firsthand appreciation of existing or future conditions by engaging participants and designers together in a concrete situation. In role-play techniques, for example, cards are handed to each participant that introduce the scene and contain information about rules associated with that specific scene, goals to be achieved, and the roles that participants enact.

Interface, Interact, Improvact

This chapter is dedicated to models of human-machine interaction (HCI) that have been influential for the design domain and that form the basis of how we think about designing human-machine interactions today. Digital networked technologies have become increasingly pervasive in today's urban environments. But regardless of the urban dimension, the domains of HCI and interaction design have long examined design approaches that take into account the ways in which humans relate to technologies. Different ways of thinking about the interaction between humans and machines have informed the way we work with technologies. The mental models one adopts when working with technologies contribute not only to how they are viewed but also to how these technologies are shaped in substantial ways.

Improvisation as System

This chapter examines the nature of improvisation as a concept and practice, drawing on literature from the social sciences, humanities, performance studies, and the emerging field of critical improvisation. By providing an understanding of the nature of improvisation, some of its key characteristics, and its historical ties with the urban context, this chapter provides a basis for the work with improvisation for the design in a hybrid city context. The radical and experimental work from the 1960s has gained new significance today, and networked information technologies have reached levels of performance and pervasiveness that were unthinkable half a century ago. Past works have used improvisation predominantly as a concept and metaphor. This chapter suggests, instead, that we consider improvisation more thoroughly to inform a method for the design of interactions in hybrid city environments.

Introduction

This introductory chapter argues that technology-mediated interactions in cities today can be better understood and conceived of by adopting an improvisation-based design perspective. This allows one to better disclose the potential of today's technology-saturated urban environments for urban dwellers. Improvisation is here examined as a framework for making, for the design of interactions in what this chapter refers as the hybrid city. It leverages the essence of improvisation as an art, a practice, and a concept to construct a system of ideas to help better understand the current condition of the hybrid city. And to facilitate the design of urban interventions, the chapter puts forth a set of four principles, or positions, that underlie the design of interactions in hybrid cities.