Using Embodied Design Improvisation as a Design Research Tool

Embodied design improvisation is a generative and evaluative technique to elicit tacit knowledge about embodied experience. It incorporates storyboarding, Wizard of Oz prototyping, domain expert improvisation, video prototyping and crowdsourced experimentation. We have been developing this technique to design physical interactions with expressive, robotic everyday devices, eliciting the tacit rules and behavior patterns that comport with the social expectations established by human-human interactions. By codifying and providing an example of this technique, we hope to encourage its adoption in other design domains.