HCI 2005 Feature: Making a Drama out of User Requirements

Catriona Macaulay of the University of Dundee led the "Design and Performance" workshop at HCI 2005. It promised to bring together a diverse range of participants to exchange experiences of performance in design activity, and to develop an agenda for future research in this emerging field.

And it certainly achieved the former of these goals. After a few words from Catriona, the day was opened by a presentation from Carlo Jacucci (see the picture on the left which gives an idea of his costume), Further presentations followed on how drama, and performance more generally, had been used in specific settings. Then the afternoon was turned over to Maggie Morgan of Foxtrot Theatre to lead a participative session where simple dramatic techniques were tried out. The workshop closed with a brief review of uses of performance but fell short of setting the agenda it had hoped for. There was just too little time left to begin the process of considering how research might continue.

That's the day in a nutshell. The rest of this piece takes contributions in more detail.

'How does one undertake people-centred design in a meaningful, rather than a token, way?' Catriona asked. Experiments with using performance as an approach have been taking place in Britain, America and Scandinavia, she said. But this raises further questions: 'Performance is an intimate and personal thing. How do you take that into a corporate setting? Workshops like this both help to address people's fears and establish the case for doing so.'

Carlo took the group through the way that his group has been using Johnstone's 'Impro' methods and Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed' techniques for building relationships between people. (Both these practitioners embody people-centred philosophies in their work and would repay greater study than can be supported in this article.) He has been working with tangible interfaces to media, designing the means for children to tell their own multi-media stories, using what he called 'the wisdom, if not the methods, of performance.'

The principles of Theatre of the Oppressed that he saw as particularly pertinent are:
* seeking multiple points of view;
* avoiding abstraction and debate;
* creating the conditions of action;
* providing a way of working within the constraints of the situation;
* breaking physical habits;
* putting order into chaos, or chaos in order.

He was followed by a presentation from Tomi Kankainen of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. With colleagues, Sanli Tiitta, Vesa Kantola and Katri Mehto of Stadia, Tomi has been using drama techniques at successive points through the product design process to manage the amount of data they typically gather before committing to a design.

'This research is a form of future studies, as the products don't exist yet,' he said, outlining a process of employing photo diaries, social maps and narratives so that these can be pulled into examples of more general phenomena and turned into motivations and scenarios. From there, roles games, paper prototypes and body storming techniques (re-enacting user narratives in real settings) test out the ideas captured. Then he showed video of a group of retired and part-time working over-50s involved in Forum Theatre (another Boal technique) as they evaluate their own needs by playing them out.

'We have devised a theatrical approach applicable in interpreting user needs. It cuts costs and time involved in moving on from user research,' he concluded.

Alan Newell of the University of Dundee outlined the evolution of his videos for improving the design of products. Talking about 'Theatre as intermediary between designers and users', he explained how the group had met the challenge of keeping focus groups of older people focussed by using videos with them, with gaps left for discussion. 'This way, for instance, we find out what a technical presentation of a monitoring product would not have extracted,' he said, suggesting there was not much difference in this respect between showing video or using live theatre: both engaged the users directly in the issues. (For a fuller description of some of Alan's work see UN story: Tools of Inspiration).

Hamid van Koten of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee gave a case study of using drama in designing the sales booths for the Edinburgh Festival ticket sales centre, a centre that needs to be folded away when not in use.

Using the prototypes he had constructed, he said, he found that the users were almost spontaneously doing role play, with staff electing to play both typical and 'extreme' users as they tested the design out.

It led to useful changes, solving the 'cash drawer issue' in situ and impressed the client. Hamid said that staff were more engaged to use the new booths as a result. 'Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.'

'Designers are solution-focussed so they can act as anthropologist, observing what happens. But go in before your ego is involved,' he advised. 'Go in as early as possible to users.'

After the talk of the morning, the afternoon was given over to doing. There were two kinds of drama exercise of use in this context: the kind one conducts to warm a group up, disarm nerves and bond the team; and the ones that actually take a scenario and play with it. Lack of common agenda would necessarily restrict the relevance of the second type to the group present, but Maggie gave a taste of how to work with both. The link with experience design and the extra complexity of trying to understand 'the user' as a more holistic entity were apparent.

Even without time to set an agenda, the outcome of the day was a growing conviction that the value of linking drama/performance with design is beginning to show itself.

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