An Improv Inception or Solving Problem-Solving Improvisationally

I’m trying something new for my class this first week of November. I’m going to reverse engineer the next Interdisciplinary Improvisation class that I teach for the Master of Digital Media Program—one that disassembles and analyzes the inner workings of what I’m going to teach in a reckless (and likely impossible) attempt to answer, “Why would you teach that?”.

 ballplay

Boring Stuff Already Said

I’ve already written about the why’s of improv in a digital media school or digital media environments—exercising:

  • the embodiment of trust
  • risk-taking
  • culture building
  • listening
  • being receptive to what others offer
  • building on other people’s ideas

… and many more valued competencies. Why those particular collaborative oriented competencies? Think of the improv course as one designed and persistently refined to in part ‘solve’ identified problems that learners may/will face when tasked to work together and deliver client-driven digital media artefacts.

Inception Moment (Level 1)

One of the biggest problems learners have is understanding the steps they need to take in solving ill-structured problems.These are the kinds of problems that are not easy to identify, that are multi-layered—that cannot be solved until attempts at solving them are balanced by equal attempts to fail at solving them. They tend to include the following:

  • Defining the problem
  • Generating possible solutions to the problem
  • Evaluating alternative solutions
  • Implementing the most viable solution
  • Monitoring the implementation of that solution
  • Repeating the process (Jonassen, 1997)

The Marshmallow Challenge is a great example of trying to solve a problem. Another way to emphasize the message of the challenge is to allow a group to do it more than once. Now many of you are likely reading this thinking ‘yes, yes…iterate, build-it, prototype’, and you’re right, and we do, particularly with our Projects 1 course handily facilitated by my colleague Larry Bafia.

spaghettix2peoples copy

Inception Moment (Level 2)

So what is the problem my next improv class will try to ‘solve’? Years ago, learners in our second and third cohorts often asserted the need for the Master of Digital Media Program to support “learner ownership of the problem solving process”. It is, in fact, one of the most important, challenging and rewarding competencies that learners can develop, and iterative attempts at facilitating an environment of practicing those problem-solving muscles occur regularly in all our courses. Herein lies the puzzler. How can learners emerge from our first semester relatively unscathed and leap forth ready to ‘own’ the problem solving process on our projects? 

For those of you heuristically inclined (which is everybody), one possible answer is to create an opportunity for individuals and teams to become increasingly conscious of those tools and/or processes and/or rules of thumb that help them solve problems more efficiently.

Reclaiming Improv

So why exercise problem solving in an improv class?

Many people associate the word ‘improv’ with improv comedy. And although that’s partly true, each time I teach improvisation I need to reclaim the word. This isn’t necessarily because I have a background as a piano improviser, nor that improvisation is common to all artistic processes. It’s because improvisation is a mechanic that permeates all human activities, including problem solving in digital media.

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The Improvisational in Problem Solving

Now, although we all rely on heuristics when we solve problems, each design problem that we face at the MDM Program (and beyond) and the project that propagates it, has it’s own unique challenges. In our projects, teams of learners who may or may not have worked together need to align on a common process to manage a digital media project and work with a client they have likely never met before who has an emerging design idea for a digital artifact or prototype, and who is also dependent and reliant on the team to develop it. Like it or not problems will surface. Typically, these problems can be categorized as:

  • Individual (buy-in)
  • Collaborative (team, culture)
  • Management (time, communication, scope)
  • Project (ideas, content)

Sometimes the problems are simple but most of the time they are layered, like properly scoping a project you’ve never ‘built’ anything like before over the course of 12 weeks, so that a client can be assured that you will be delivering some kind of working prototype.

Or, realizing after 3 weeks that as a team you didn’t really identify the real problem or core need but the only way to find that out was by building a series of prototypes that the client realized, didn’t really match what it is they imagined.

skybox

The Heuristic Toolbox

Each of us has different approaches to solving ill-structured problems. We each rely on previously applied problem-solving processes, and some of us have cultivated a certain level of expertise informed by our experience in our particular knowledge domain(s). In the case of learners at the MDM Program, they have the additional joy and pain of leveraging a series of user-centred design oriented tools from different design traditions, collaborative tools to address, resolve and avoid some team conflicts, tools to estimate tasks and prioritize features and tools to maintain persistent alignment throughout a project pipeline.

By the end of the next improv class then, learners will be able to leave the class with the beginnings (or continuings) of their own problem-solving process map—one that is malleable and ever changing. And importantly, they will embody the practice of drawing from this exquisite corpse of heuristics that they can eventually apply to solving problems in our Projects 2 course. That practice, a spontaneous, sometimes adhoc one, smothered in risk, where you never really know what new insights will emerge that will lead you to the discovery of an unexpected solution, maybe even… an innovation—an improvised process that once upon a time provoked one client to exclaim in a burst of cautious excitement— “You identified a problem we didn’t even think we had!!!”

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The Terrifying yet Possibly Fantastic Unknown Client

When you provide a service to a client you never really know what kind of client your going to get. So what to do with that wild card? There are many ways to mitigate the client if perceived as a threat. The hardest thing to do and the one skill that we all think we’re good at, is being crystal clear on what a client’s problem is, ensuring that there are few uncommunicated expectations and that they are not promised the world and given one continent. Another skill you can develop when dealing with a client is to prepare all possible reactions that they may give towards what it is your pitching, creating or designing, before, during or after your first meeting. You can prepare for this in a few ways:

  • work with your team on role-playing the client as the rest of the team presents the idea
  • draw a persona map of your client as below

Ultimately, when you think of a client as collaborator and engage them in that way, the work will be better for it, you will be challenged to grow and improve and you’ll also make a better client for someone else one day.

the stereoclient

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Crowd Surfing Love @ the CDM’s IDEA-X

What better way for a brave group of Chinese students from the Communication University of China to start our fifth IDEA-X @ the Centre for Digital Media Program in Vancouver.

Crowd Surfing is a fun and engaging way for learners to embody trust—to know what it feels like to support others who depend on you, and in turn to feel supported by them.

This is just one of the many tools that we use at the Masters of Digital Media Program to empower young professionals to become aware of and improve their collaboration skills.

 

crowdsurfingloveattheCDMVancouver

 

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Assume that your learners don’t come empty headed!

sharingdrawings
I’ve seen so many teachers think that learners need to be broken down. I n order to understand what you are teaching they have to be re-trained from scratch and moulded afresh. This is not only dangerous since it assumes that you have the authority, the wisdom of a guru to do so, but I’ll tell you now, it doesn’t work. If you think it does, then I’m not sure how well you’ve been listening. That’s because every learner comes to the table with their own intelligence, strategies, habits, and learning patterns. They, like you, see the world and relate to knowledge through a particular lens. They don’t need to be reconditioned to your way of thinking—they need to be inspired to think reflexively about how they think and learn. When learners are challenged to reflect on the value of the knowledge you are presenting to them then an interesting thing happens—they become more open to learning and they coincidentally challenge you to articulate it betterly. Part of my job is to inspire learners to challenge the habitual way in which they learn, and do this by example. In other words, I must also challenge the habitual ways in which I teach, and constantly iterate on the way in which I articulate what I know. How is it that you have come to know what you’ve learned? How do you improve the process of learning new things and have them stick? How do we make sure that what we are teaching is still relevant?
learnerteacher
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How learner-centred is your design?

chokethedirector

If we are not in the classroom for the learners then we shouldn’t be in there at all. Obvious right? And yet, what does it mean to be fully present and engaged for the learner? From my POV it means that you need to adapt your curriculum according to the uniqueness that each learner brings to the situation. I’m not exactly sure why we would think any other way really. Each learner brings with them a set of knowledge that is unique, a specialty perhaps, a way of learning, a way of collaborating with others, a communication style or pattern. If you design your courses with a one-way information highway style, then there is no dialogue. Without dialogue, then you’ll never know anything about your learners, except that they are just as eager to be present as they are to be acknowledged. The challenge is, how do you design learning for multiple learners while considering the needs of individuals as well? One solution is to ask learners at the onset of deploying your design that knowing what they think they course is, what do they want to get out of it? This can also be asked prior to the first class. The goal after that is to uncover new ideas, extract common themes and allow them to influence your design.

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