A Theatre of Digital Designing

Higgins, Allen, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Acting the application (Game Thinking, 2017)

This making and doing session recreates some of the interaction involved in the development of an App. We use short ‘impro’ sessions to demystify designing in general and software designing in particular. It enacts and reveals what happens behind the scenes. The audience takes part by improvising an unscripted interaction in pairs or threes, progressing through three stages:

• Problem solving in the conventional mode of design as a formal ‘rational fantasy’ 
• Introducing conflict through a set of distinctive, yet relatively ‘safe’, moods or styles 
• Injecting ‘unsafe’ complications with raw emotion, biography, and personality 

The design play opens a way for exploring the decisions behind algorithms that then become software. Designs and architectures are built up over time through these social-organisational interactions. We (re)discover that designing is an artful exercise in imagination, anticipation, exposition, negotiation, and gentle power. It is also uncertain, political and power laden; sometimes arbitrary, but always personal - in spite of the fantasy of scientific logic or managerial control that tends to predominate.

The lens of theatre offers insights into design action and organisational creativity; design’s actors no longer mere caricatures of architect, developer, user, customer, or market. Human actors, space and place, a putative audience, the tools, props and Deus ex Machina of technology - all speak to how we situate and embody creative action. With theatre informing designing’s practice and routines, the drama of designing takes on new meaning. It may be acknowledged as playful, experimental, forceful, arbitrary, ethical, and political. This move suggests new understandings of what matters - mood, style of involvement, personal relationship - in design crucibles and beyond.

Please come and play.
Link to project: https://seriousplaymethod.blogspot.ie/
Link to related video: https://vimeo.com/231512382

Design Play: 'Acting out' design and planning discussions

Goal
To demonstrate and experience the intricacies of design and planning processes in a team environment when knowledge and expertise is distributed among team members.

Three `real' concepts up for grabs in the Design Play:

• feature/need (F)
• architecture/design elements (A)
• use/deliverables (D)

Role/identity cards for the Design Play

Roles/Identities:

• The architect. Knows how features/needs relate to architecture/design and how architecture/design relates to use/deliverables. Creates diagrams linking feature/need (F) with architecture/design elements (A) and between architecture/design and use/deliverables (D).
• The product owner. Knows the value of each feature. Represents the user/customer. Is the authority to test and accept whether a feature has been developed to the user's satisfaction or not. The product owner can make a trade-off between value and timing of features.
• The developer. Estimates how long it should take to create a use/deliverable. Knows how much effort and uncertainty is involved in creating the use/deliverable. The developer can also suggest and estimate additional deliverables that don't produce quantifiable user value.

Topics for discussion in the mode of a formal `rational fantasy'

• Feature value, feature need
• Feature design, design architecture
• Design/architecture, use-deliverable
• Creative ideas, effort to deliver something
• Done versus done done
• Deciding what to do over the next (backlog)

Impro prompts:

• What do we want to deliver?
• How valuable is the feature/need?
• Show how architecture relates to use/deliverable.
• Does a deliverable satisfy this feature/need?
• Draw a design/architecture diagram of links between feature/need and the thing (use/deliverable)?
• How much time do we have?
• How much effort do we have?

Practice with different moods or styles

• Sense demanding
• Sense giving
• Sense breaking
• Sense making

Practice with emotion, personality, biography

• The idealist
• The pragmatist
• The fool
• The follower
• The leader
• The purist

Debriefing
Is there a perfect solution?

Research and Further Reading

• Agile Game Development with Scrum
• What sort of Games can we play with teams?