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.