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There is a growing group of people in the US and Canada, outside of mainstream publications, experimenting with new forms of bodystorming and are supporting these performative modes of knowing with fairly substantive theory. The term "bodystorming" describes at least 3 modes of performed prototyping, including Oulasvirtta's work and IDEO. They are forms of informance, but the mode I believe important to empathy is not in acting and performing skill but in the action-ideation cycle itself. Dennis Schleicher (http://tibetantailor.com ) recently worked with me and one of our graduate students in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes program at OCAD. We hold what are called Design with Dialogue workshops http://designwithdialogue.com in Toronto, and Dennis joined us virtually when his travel to TO didn't work out. A group of 15 mostly first-time bodystormers demonstrated their first-ever prototypes in the two videos you see at the DwD site. They were as good as any I've seen in working with the method, and yet Dennis was only with us on Skype. Dennis' style of bodystorming is meant to be participatory and to avoid thinking too much about generating ideas. Designers often spend too much energy creating cognitive solutions to human problems. Varela's notion of embodied cognition, not the HCI version, observes an act first cycle of knowledge and learning. "Schleicherian" bodystorming can be seen as following Varela's axioms. It is pretty fail-safe because it is naturalistic. The working theory we are seeing at play is that this process works as an act-first embodied practice simulation. We put participants in a situation (or scene) and have them act right away, just start behaving as "thrown" in the situation, as you would in real life. We observe the play together and debrief ideas from the performance. Dennis has not published this as citable (yet), but his works on his site are well worth reading. Peter H. Jones, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, Strategic Innovation Lab Faculty, Strategic Foresight and Innovation ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN http://designdialogues.com Robin, To my mind, a prototype is only as good as the acting skills of the person handling the proto- type in a test-scenario. If that person is a 'user' then s/he needs to be actively re-imagining the prototype as real, embodying the way the designer sees the design. If that person is the 'designer' then s/he needs to be actively becoming the target user using the design in the richly- pictured use-case/-scenario. Consequently, 'inform- ance' is designed to enrich the fundamental empathy of designing. A colleague and I argued in a badly written paper and hasty presentation that something like 'infor- mance' is crucial to 'service design', particulary in relation to the politics of designing the activ- ities of service providers: http://www.slideshare.net/cameront/theatrical-politics-of-service-design-253 9008 See the references of that paper for articles on the use of theatrical techniques in design research and service designing. In addition to the Buchenau and Suri piece that Jeff just mentioned, see also the special issue of Interacting with Computers Volume 18, Issue 5 (September 2006) on performance in HCI: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1220979.1221451 Cameron On 4/4/10 9:56 PM, "Robin Adams" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi all, > > Is anyone familiar with the research tool of "informance"? I'm > looking for sources and any insider knowledge on the use of this > method. I'm also trying to figure out how it differs from other kinds > of techniques. > > fyi - this is a method where research team members perform actions to > help understand the lived experiences of the people for whom they are > designing. > > Thanks, > Robin Adams