Improv Class, part 1

At Shaba we are participating in a 3-Day workshop on Improvisation for character design. The workshop is given by professor Brenda Harger (bharger at andrew dot cmu dot edu) from Carnegie Mellon's ETC program where it is a required course. Shaba has hired some of their students.

Some of the principles of Improvisation are really useful to inform design thinking. In fact I think it is a heighted form of brainstorming. Traditional character design starts from the character in and then goes out. Designers start with the characters psyche as a basis. Whereas improv is tottally opposite. Improv begins with the character's environment as a basis for design. The difference would be nature vs nuture, I guess.

The first day we did several interesting exercises and games:
enemy-defender - players standing in a group had to privately choose one enemy and one defender. They must keep their defender between them and their enemy at all times.
call it something else- observe an object closely and then give it a name other than what it is. This is very difficult and a good way to get your mind out of a rut.
Describe a painting - in a group of 3 describe a painting by building off of what everyone has said. Start a description with "yes and"
Design a product - given a product with a random attribute determine a market, a name, spokesperson, commercial, jingle and box cover. The challenge is you have to agree with everything people say by using phrases like "yes and"
Lead with one part of your body - thrust one part of your body forward like only it is touching an invisible pane of glass and walk. Think about what type of character would walk like that. What are they like?

These exercises match some of the same exercises we did in my Dance improvisation classes. I think everyone should learn how to improve, it truly would make us better people. At it's core it has three rules that if I applied would make all of us easier to live with.

Improv Rules
1. Be fun to play with.
2. Serve the narrative.
3. Make your partner look good.

My assessment is that improv is also good for design. Improv-designing is faster than brainstorming. Though it tries to avoid it, brainstorming is prone to early evaluation. By saying "Yes and" to everything you can build product ideas 3 times faster. In our session we designed a collander that squeaks like a mouse that was marketed by Kathy Ireland and Annie Macdowell. It took us 5 minutes to design and pitch the entire thing. How is this useful: it's easier to ground 3 crazy ideas than to come up with 1 innovative idea. This is a concept that Scott stated during our IDEO tour on Friday. IDEO has cultivated it's own well-regarded design thinking process.

She began with these two quotes:

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
Confucius quotes (China's most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, 551-479 BC)

"Play is the highest form of research." Albert Einstein.


Interesting start to the three day workshop. I missed day two but I'll summarize day three here in a few hours.