The nature of the built environment in today’s hybrid cities has changed radically. Vast networks of mobile and embedded devices that sense, compute, and actuate can enable active as well as interactive behavior that goes beyond planned and scripted routines and that is capable of changing and adapting in a dynamic context and in real time. In this presentation I draw a parallel between this dynamic and that of improvisation in the performing arts. By expanding on earlier and alternative models of interaction design I propose an improvisation-based model for interactions in today’s hybrid cities. Turning to improvisation for design matters today as that domain has a long history of frameworks, techniques and practice that embrace notions of adaptation, resilience, responsiveness, unpredictability, and emergence.

Coming from its Latin root “proviso”, which indicates a condition attached to an agreement, a stipulation made beforehand,  im-provisation indicates that, which has not been agreed upon or planned, and presents itself as unforeseen and unexpected. Improvisation is often misunderstood as doing something in a makeshift manner until a plan that was lost can be recovered. Instead, in the context of the performing arts, improvisation refers to the playing in the moment, a composing in the flow. More in general – and of particular interest to the design domain – it is a process characterized by a simultaneity of conception and action, where iterative and recursive operations lead to the emergence of dynamic structures that continue to feed into the action itself. To talk about improvisation means to consider the notion of inventiveness, involving both elements of novelty and repetition. Improvisation recasts unpredictability as critical mobility and is fundamentally based on the openness of systems (social, technical,etc.) and modalities of interaction that foster spaces for initiative and agency.

Adopting such a systems view of improvisation helps in identifying a number of key positions that are recurrent in different types of improvisation and that I propose as foundational elements for an improvisation-based model of urban interaction design: (1) Design for initiative ensures openness, (2) Awareness of time ensures the relevance of actions,  (3) Forms of action are understood in the making, (4) Interactions themselves are other than expected.

“The worth of cities is determined by the number of places in them made over to improvisation,” notes sociologist Siegfried Kracauer. An improvisation-based perspective is a compelling way to better understand and formulate interactions in the context of today’s hybrid cities. Design, in this perspective, moves the behavior and the performance of things center stage, taking inspiration from non-scripted forms of interaction and embracing the unforeseen and unexpected as constructive aspects of its production.