Research Preview: Using Improvisational Theatre to Invent and Represent Scenarios for Designing Innovative Systems Martin Mahaux1, Anne Hoffmann2 1
PReCISE Research Centre, University of Namur, Belgium,
[email protected] 2 Software Engineering Institute, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands,
[email protected]
Abstract. [Context and Motivation] Scenarios are a well-known tool in Systems Design. In particular, they are recognised as an effective means for communicating requirements between business stakeholders and system developers. When designing innovative socio-technical systems, describing creative user experiences is probably one of the first steps. [Problem] However, the question of how good scenarios are invented has not been widely discussed in Requirements Engineering. We can also wonder if the written and/or drawn form is the most appropriate for documenting stories. [Principal ideas] Building on works inside and outside Requirements Engineering, we suggest that improvisational theatre can be an effective way to invent user experiences in a collaborative way, and to have them instantly documented. [Contributions] During a workshop, we showcased one possible form of doing this and discussed it with the audience. We relate this experience here, mention some observations and present our research agenda in this direction.
1. Introduction We know that scenarios are one of the best techniques for discovering requirements [1]. We also know that, in many situations, requirements are more the result of a collaborative creative effort than they are gathered or translated from the users [2]. The goal we set when using Improvisational Theatre (improv) during this collaborative requirements session is the efficient and effective generation and communication of creative scenarios. In doing this we follow recent advice in Design to focus scenarios on user experience instead of on the system itself [3]. We also introduce fun and play in a rapid prototyping process, as suggested by Schrage for example [4]. In this extended abstract, we briefly present some related work and describe the 30 minutes demo showcased during the 2nd International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (CREARE’12). The video extracted during this presentation is available online from the first author’s blog [5]. We finally make some observations and give an insight of our plans for future work.
2. Related Work We are not the first in thinking about generating scenarios in Requirements Engineering (RE). The most important body of work in this direction probably lies around the CREWS-SAVRE method from Maiden and colleagues [6]. They have developed and experimented a software tool (desktop, then mobile; text-based, then multi-media) to generate scenarios from a use case, based on heuristics for systematic alternate course identification. However, this approach requires a pre-existing scenario or use case. Our technique is more concerned with creating those initial scenarios efficiently. CREWS-SAVRE is also heavily engineered, while our technique would be more natural, and lightweight. More recently, Atasoy [7] has been incorporating techniques from film and sequential art into a tool to provide design teams with an experiential approach towards designing interactive products. Our technique is more dynamic and lightweight, with a focus on the creativity and agility that improv can provide. Both techniques are likely to be complimentary with ours.
Creativity in general has received significant attention in RE. A recent review of these works can be found in [8]. Many creativity techniques exist, but few have been applied to RE. In a prior work [9], [10] we and others have suggested that exercises from the improv world could be used as a training to help RE teams to be more creative in teams. In related domains, many authors have suggested the use of drama, role-play or storytelling in various ways for different purposes, including requirements gathering [11–17]. They indicate many possible ways to use theatrerelated concepts in design, with various degrees of success, but lacking scientific validation of empirical results. We build upon this work to suggest the course of action described in the next section.
3. Using Improv as an Experience-Centred Participative Design Technique 3.1 Improv for inventing and representing scenarios Improvisational theatre, or improv for short, is when actors simultaneously write, direct and play theatre in front of an audience. Actors build on and act out ideas to interpret a theme given to them in real time. Each is unaware of what the other is thinking but acts as if in the same world, imagining what others are doing, seeing and hearing. Each responds to the other actors with new propositions that take the show forward, no matter how bizarre the direction might seem. These propositions build the performance piece by piece. While this discipline exists since the ancient Greeks times, we are interested in its recent modernization as described by Johnstone [18] or Spolin [19]. Along with many followers, they have provided a comprehensive body of knowledge that can be used to invent and represent scenarios on the fly, in a collaborative way.
The expected strengths of using improv as a design technique in RE are the following:
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Improv supports collaborative creativity: improv as we use it can be seen as mechanism to create novel, unexpected stories from diverging raw material, and adapts well to stakeholders groups. Interaction between players, and between the audience and the players, is key to improv. Improv is quick and cheap: given the cost of N people locked in a meeting room, improv’s immediacy makes it a very cheap tool compared to other slower techniques. Improv is flexible: the lack of fixed recording media makes it for a total flexibility, while video recording and a-posteriori editing remains possible. Improv is intuition-based: improv taps into your intuition to build stories. This neglected idea source complements well with more rational moments in your creative process. Improv is experience-centred: the focus is not on the designed product, but on the user experience around it. Improv enables a high degree of representation: actors playing can say much more than a UML diagram or a list of actions in a process diagram, or a drawn storyboard. Emotions in particular are naturally represented.
3.2 The Demo Session at CREARE To demonstrate our technique at the CREARE workshop, we asked the workshop audience to imagine they were the stakeholders of a project dedicated to build a software application to enhance car-sharing between people. We initially asked for three minutes of informal brainstorming on possible personas and mobility situations. The result was documented on a flip chart, so that they could easily look at it throughout the exercise. The brainstorming gave rise to two very basic personas (a business woman and a conference participant from a foreign country) and some indications on a situation (car-sharing to a conference in Paris in winter). We then immediately started a 5 minute improvised play using the given input. Both of us are trained and experienced improvisers and one of us has worked on a car-sharing project. A third character from the audience who was untrained in improv entered towards the end of the play. During the play, we asked people to note down bits of experience they liked, or disliked, and to derive desired or undesired functionality for our new product. After the play, the audience shared the notes they had made during the improv, and this discussion prompted the generation of further ideas, in conjunction with the unused ideas from the initial brainstorming. 3.3 Observations from the demo session Despite its limited duration, our improvisation at CREARE workshop resulted in the generation of numerous creative and interesting ideas. It was interesting to see how the audience was continuing the story collaboratively during that discussion, inventing alternative courses. Some participants seemed to become even more
creative throughout the discussion of further possibilities. It is clear that a novel and useful scenario had been invented and represented for the stakeholders in an effective way. “Unrealistic” and “crazy” behaviors during the play were not seen as irritating, but rather served to release the audience members from constrained thinking and thereby triggered more novel ideas. Overall we received good feedback, and the audience had both enjoyed themselves and generated a significant number of requirements and solution concepts for the car-sharing domain.
4. Future Work The above described session can however certainly not be considered as a validation of our technique. It is in our plans to do this validation work in a near future. This will on one hand let us assess the strong and weak points of using improv compared to other techniques, and on the other hand refine our techniques and prepare guidance on when and how to use improv, which improv form to use in which circumstances, how to facilitate improv sessions, how to document them and how to train people. Empirically assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of such a technique will however not be easy, for two main reasons. First, representative measures will be hard to define, and to observe. To mitigate this, we have done some preliminary work to understand creativity, and in particular collaborative creativity, in RE [8], [20]. This work should help us define measures, however imperfect, in this “soft” domain. Second, there are many potential complex variables that have an influence on the final results, including the desired kind of creativity (in [8], we show there are many different kinds of creativity), the level of details of desired requirements, the freedom in the scope, the product type (custom or market), the place in time within the process, the training or team building previously received, the available time, the organizational climate, the experience of the facilitator... This requires doing as many experiments as possible and carefully recording the state of these variables during experiments, keeping some of them fixed.
5. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the organizers of the CREARE workshop for providing us with this unique opportunity to trial our approach and for their useful advice on this paper. We also thank Alistair Mavin for playing with us and reviewing the paper.
Part of this work is sponsored by the Walloon Region under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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