LITMIR.BIZ

      The Law Firm improv group performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Arin Sang-urai, 2016. New York City.

For the Jagonari Education Resource Centre project, that meant producing models for the client team “to dismantle and re-assemble to assist in agreeing on the final plans,” and in general seems to have meant eschewing the glossy look of ‘final’ renderings and drawings in favour of representations that appear more modest and easily adjusted.¹¹

More recently an appetite for creative business practices has made popular a set of principles loosely titled ‘Design Thinking’, which extends beyond architecture and even design into many collaborative processes. In contrast to the Cedric Price or Matrix models, Design Thinking focusses primarily on the idea-generation portion of a project, no matter what the final product might be, with the insight that a successful design process is not linear but associative and unpredictable. Easily recognizable for its allegiance to Post-It Notes and popularity in the technology companies of Silicon Valley, Design Thinking promotes openness and non-judgemental encouragement among team members. Importantly, rather than the amorphous or difficult to test values of the earlier examples, IDEO, a design research firm and leading proponent of the process, has codified specific rules for brainstorming, which they distribute on small cards: “Defer Judgment, Encourage Wild Ideas, Build on the Ideas of Others, Stay Focused on Topic, One Conversation at a Time, Be Visual, Go for Quantity.”¹² The enthusiasm with which Design Thinking ideas have been adopted suggests that structured creative group processes are generative. While IDEO’s rules provide a framework for brainstorming, the complex phasing of architectural projects and the need to continuously collaborate throughout begs for additional parameters.

Not all improvisational comedy works the same way, so it’s important to be clear for this proposal. A common misconception is that improv happens by accident, but the most enduring and popular formats are in fact hemmed in by clear boundaries. Chicago-style improv, in particular the ‘Harold’, a format developed in the 1960s and ’70s by improvisational theatre groups like Second City and Improv Olympic teams in Chicago, is particularly instructive as a model for design collaboration because it provides a very specific minimum amount of framework to both support the kind of wild creativity IDEO’s brainstorm rules call for and at the same time ensure resolution. The Harold typically starts with a quick warm up game based on a topic of the audience’s suggestion and is followed by a series of spontaneous unrelated scenes that are, with a few more rounds, brought together to a coherent and often surprising conclusion. As performer and comedy historian Rob Kozlowski tells it, “like the television show [Seinfeld], in a Harold three disparate stories recur in a three-by-three structure (three scenes each appearing three times) before ultimately converging in the end. The humour comes out of the ways in which the themes, characters and stories connect and combine, rather than from jokes.”¹³ Del Close, who developed the format, “thought of the Harold as a sonata form. Themes would be established, a group of characters would return again and again in scenes and then the scenes would work off one another.”¹⁴ The important element here is that closure is built into a process that begins with radical openness.

Taking it a step beyond brainstorming at IDEO, which serves to get as many ideas on the wall as possible but doesn’t say what to do with them once they’re there, the Harold empowers individual performers to develop quick scenes out of an initial brainstorm and encourages their teammates to jump on board. The strength of the Harold, and improvisation generally, is that once a piece of information has been established within a scene, all participants are required to accept it as true and to move forward. All performers are equal in their ability to affect and direct a scenario. As described by Matt Fotis, “improvisation is a system of creativity, a mindset that focuses on the cooperation of a group of players to create completely original performances based on set structures and rules that can be performed spontaneously in front of an audience (performance based) or used as a means for generating material.”¹⁵ By establishing an additive process, hierarchies in architectural office structures that normally govern editing are rendered moot, perhaps happily so. Per Del Close’s fifth rule: “Your prime responsibility is to support.”¹⁶

      Thinking through the production of architecture and architectural ideas with the help of the Harold provides a framework whereby collaboration and radical acceptance is productive. It isn’t cynical to invite negative externalities into a comprehensive view of the design process, it’s realistic. The Improv model considers all inputs equally valid. When mapped onto an architectural process, things like building codes, client demands, budget and climate can all be assimilated into a coherent worldview and viewed as similarly unproblematic. By conceiving of design as a performance, as a process with rules and strategies for all involved, it can become the consciously collaborative act Cedric Price and Matrix were aiming for. Per Close’s first rule, every collaborator is a supporting actor.

      The sudden ubiquity of architecture work-sharing tools like Revit is undertheorized and presents an opportunity to inject improvisation’s collaborative ambitions directly into an office’s workflow. The repetitive act of ‘Saving to Central’ when changes made to a local version of a file are pushed back to a shared master file is the contemporary version of “calling a scene” in the Harold—exercising judgment to determine when a collective act has found its end and when personal insight returns to collective knowledge. The software already has the “yes, and” mentality of building upon a collaborator’s work—it pulls up an error message when conflicting information is pushed into the central model—so establishing collaborative processes

Скачать книгу