Saving the experience with drama: 4 — Stacking up the Drama
This article is part of a series ‘Saving the Experience… with Drama’.
Summary
Design systems have been creating a shared language for some time. Reusing design patterns across entire organisations creates interoperable content and a coherent identity. This has led to accusations of conformity and ubiquity. The same cannot be said for research. Findings are not indexed for reuse, by different projects or departments. Design patterns may be indexed by context and demographics, such as accessibility. But they are not matched with thought patterns, such as mindsets or mindstates.
Researchers are not artists. They are storytellers and their stories are transferable.
We need a shared language for strategy, research and design, like those found in the arts, such as dance, music and theatre. One that can act as a notation system to:
- Describe contexts, possibilities, constraints,
- Apply to actors, events and systems,
- Index design patterns with thinking patterns
- Communicate between colleagues, customers, and disciplines.
A shared language brings together diverse applications such as, consent, co-creation and generative AI. If you can specify a context, you can show relevant possibilities. If you know a person’s state of mind, you can use design patterns they can understand, consent to and collaborate with.
Drama can give us a way to pull all these disparate practices together. Aristotle described a framework 2500 years ago, but more of that later.
In the previous episode…
To recap the series, three frameworks were identified; a landscape, a climate and a mindstate.
- Landscape — If you know where the action is, which props are available and who is there, you have an idea of the terrain.
- Climate — You can design a product or a service if you know the constraints and possibilities of a setting. Better yet, if you know the traits and values of the actors.
- Mindstate —But you need to know the way someone thinks to guide them through a scene. As they interact with products, services, and each other.
What you can hopefully see is a set of frameworks that layer on top of each other.
The landscape and climate can be flattened into a SenseMap, which is useful way to profile a person, organisation, project or event.
How do these layers interoperate?
There are events beyond our control, like pandemics, economics, or tornados. These affect our experience, bottom up as it were. More often than not the crisis is an inside job, a distortion in perspective. It is our current mental state that drives the change -ie top down.
Its is not reality that ties us in knots but our experience of that reality.
Our experience of a situation will depend on our mindstate. Mindstates are thinking patterns such as, drifting, juggling, planning, or dreaming. They align with certain traits, values, constraints and possibilities. It also depends on whether we are positive, negative or neutral when in this mindstate. Our personality or archetype may also contribute. More often than not it will depend on whatever is on our mind at the time and what state of mind that evokes. This is called framing.
If you look at the animated graphic above, you are at a play where the scene is set. You may be alive to the possibilities, either because you do or do not know what the performance is about. However, it is your mindstate that will determine how you process what’s going on, what’s happened and what might be. The performance itself may break through the fourth wall and immerse you. But even the most mesmerising scene can lose its lustre when a phone pings or a looming event nags you.
Hmmmm, what about Aristotle?
Let’s face it some of you must be wondering already. It’s all very well describing a dramatic framework, but what about Aristotles Poetics? The Poetics is a description of oral traditions that stretched back thousands of years. It is broken down into six stages; plot, character, thought, language, melody and spectacle. It’s already been applied to the digital world with Brenda Laurel’s seminal piece, ‘Computers as Theatre’.
Poetics is a delightfully robust work that still stands, a couple of millenia later. It is easier to grasp when thought of as a stack, similar to Jesse James Garret’s classic, The Elements of User Experience (EEUX).
Stacks or layers?
Both Poetics and EEUX can be viewed in the context of Pace layers, where the top changes a lot more than the base. We often see this with a new version of a play set in a different time or with novel casting. Or a product or service that gets a brand refresh. But its not always the case. Content may stay the same and the landscape or melody may change. For example when considering a new digital platform. A layer may even be missing. Take a piece of contemporary dance, which has no overt language, leaving us to interpret it. This is the reason for using a stack as each layer can be replaced. Even though ones at the bottom tend to have longer shelf lives.
When compared we can see similarities and differences. Both Poetics and EEUX start from nothing but an idea. It’s a typically anthropocentric view. Aristotle thought of plot as the structure of the action. A landscape by contrast is a structure where the action happens. EEUX is based on a business strategy. Which is then refined by scope. The SenseStack presupposes a landscape where strategies and scope co-occur. This reflects reality when we think of what Cynthia Kurtz calls the confluence between organising and self organising systems.
From a design perspective we can clearly see the problem space and solution space. If the stack is viewed through a psychological lens, it can be reframed as perceiving and acting. Between an inner and outer world. This aligns with Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory.
We are constantly making predictions based on information from our senses. According to Friston, the purpose of life is the ablility to distinguish ourselves from everything else. We do this by reducing surprise. Surprise leads to entropy. Entropy means we ultimately get assimilated back into the universe. This requires prediction and interaction. The better we can map reality, the less surprising it is. Of course surprise has benefits like creativity, humour and serendipity. And our state of mind can frame the way we see this. Karl Jung remarked of James Joyce and his daughter. ‘They were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving'.
This is also where the SenseStack departs from Poetics. Presentation is often called the mise-en-scene or backdrop. From a Poetic or Pace Layers perspective it is the decoration or window dressing. But that is to mistake the power of scenography. There is considerable debate in drama about the primacy of the mise-en-scene vs the plot. If you look at post dramatic theatre, the plot is emergent. The same is happening with facilitation, where the space is where it all starts, allowing for emergent exploration, based on affordances and constraints.
‘Space is the medium into which we are born, the borderless box that we invade as we go, and help shape and make as we learn and grow.’ Francis Laleman
With a SenseStack, the Landscape is reality i.e. a forest, while the Presentation is a representation of reality via experience and interaction, i.e. an idyllic walk or a dangerous wilderness. This is what the scenographer does with light and sound, amongst other things. They also build the set. However, a set has to fit the space it is given. The ancient Greeks didn't really have sets, just a stage. It was narrative theatre. The battle scenes were narrated, off stage.
When you think about it, we will often make an assessment of our surrounding and then take action. The landscape creates possibilities and constraints filtered by our mindstates. This will then provide value propositions or ideas which we then implement by interacting with that landscape. The result is some kind of spectacle, which will depend on how much our idea maps with reality. We are all familiar with a joke that falls flat, a botched renovation, and a story with plot holes. Equally we know that feeling of flow, when we are in tune with our surroundings, can intuitively sense an outcome, and immediately relate to a person, object, event.
Hopefully you can see the interplay between:
- Landscape & Presentation — the map is not the territory
- Climate & Interaction — strategy vs execution
- Mindstate & Content — language and thought
Sometimes the action may take place at certain layers due to time constraints, habit or intuition. This is reflected by concepts like system 1&2 thinking, probing vs analysing, or between mindstates such as planning/dreaming vs juggling/drifting
This can also be scaled from the moment-to-moment experience to product/service design, as exemplified with Indi Youngs problem/solution space framework.
A robust research and design framework needs a consistent notation system. One that uses the same language for strategy, research, content and design. A SenseStack provides a system where different fields can interrelate by defining the experience. This is more front stage than back stage. The stack could be split into front and back stage, to show how each layer is supported operationally.
Language, Melody and Spectacle
Now that we have resolved the way we perceive and make sense of the world, let’s focus on how we interact in it. Let’s transcend the if-this-then-that mechanics of human computer interaction. To something more like a dance, a performance and the interplay of overlapping events. Content, interaction and presentation needs to embody language, melody and spectacle.
A good place to start exploring language, melody and spectacle is with Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’. It shows how language, spectacle and melody can render everything else obsolete. Because it is everything. It puts spectacle at the forefront. Melody, language, thought, character and action are stacked in reverse order. I’d be surprised if you can remember very much except that it will now stay with you forever.
And this is where I want to leave you… in a hot mess. I’ll be devoting a standalone article to one of the biggest design challenges this century. One the world has drifted off and given up on. Notifications.
In the next episode we are going to be focussing on the first part of the solution space, value propositions.
Hopefully, you have already found value. Reconciling ancient dramatic theory with the design process and modern neuroscience. It is not something you come across everyday. But maybe it is the way we should be thinking.
How do I find out more?
If you’d like to find out more, you can:
- Learn about the Mindstates Framework with this 5 minute overview.
- Read the series “Saving the Experience… with Drama”
- Join me every Thursday 12pm (UTC+1) for 1 hour ‘Ask me anything…about Mindstates’ sessions where I’ll be available to answer queries about Mindstates and testing out some content modules and exercises for an upcoming training course.
References
Brenda Laurel — Computers as Theatre is classic work applying Aristotle’s Causes and Poetics to computing and gaming.
Cynthia Kurtz — Participatory Narrative Inquiry is a good example of co-creation that’s been used in other fields. It leverages storytelling and participant sovereignty to surface insights and help with decision making.
Francis Laleman — Resourceful Exformation is an inspirational guide on how to stop training and start learning again
Indi Young — Great resource for all things research oriented.
Karl Friston — Free energy Principle is heavy weight framework that marries physics and neurocognition
