INTRODUCTION

Design ethnography has explored appropriate ways of conveying the outcomes of user studies (Anderson 1994; Jones 2006). User research is expected to deliver actionable outcomes and provide insights that organizations can feed into their innovation processes (Buur & Matthews 2008). The chosen format to convey those findings has often been seen as ‘representations’, containing an ‘ethnographic message’ that entails some measure of provocation to the expected audience. Far from just collecting ‘user needs’, ethnographic studies may uncover that users say and do things that a company may not like to hear, as these observations challenge perceptions of self and company identity (Buur & Sitorus 2007). Because this itself can trigger innovation, such ethnographic messages need thoughtful preparation, to make them readily understood and acted upon within their specific context. This discussion within design ethnography has explored numerous representation formats, such as personas and scenarios in both academia and industry (Cooper 2004; Boyarski & Buchanan 1994). Diggins and Tolmie (2003) articulate a series of ‘organizational features’ (e.g. form, use and embeddedness) that they elaborate as observations, warnings and strategies for practitioners to consider when creating representations of ethnographic outcomes. Jones (2006) argues that experience models – diagrams that convey a dilemma embedded in use practice – can optimize the communication of ethnographic results. However, such representations ‘can also become reified stereotypes and constraints that inhibit design possibilities’ (Blomberg & Burrell 2008: 982). Ylirisku and Buur (2007: 92) encourage the use of video material to bridge and even merge ethnographic fieldwork and design, claiming that ‘video preserves action in a sensitive and detailed fashion in relation to what originally happened’. This paper will investigate the use of theatre to convey results of ethnographic user studies to organizations. Rather than proposing yet another representation – one that purports to meet all challenges – we suggest that each project, with its own context and stakeholders, warrants specific ways of representing what was revealed during the fieldwork. This may be one of the representations mentioned above, a combination of some of them, or something completely different. Success depends upon how well the chosen representation fits the specific context, and how the design ethnographers manage to engage the project stakeholders with the material.

The context of this study is a project between five company partners within indoor climate control and two universities in Denmark. As the university partner, our role was to carry out ethnographic studies of how people perceive indoor climate comfort and how they seek comfort in their home environments. Over the course of three days, our researchers were participant-observers in the homes of five families and also following one parent along to work and one child to kindergarten. We uncovered that people think and act quite differently from what the company partners expected. We described two of the controversial findings with the headings ‘Indoor comfort is what people make’ (as opposed to something fully controlled by technology) and ‘Indoor comfort is about social relations’ (as opposed to an individual value scale to be determined by climate chamber experiments). These ethnographic studies were followed by the design of a series of provotypes (Boer & Donovan 2012; artefacts devised to challenge the informants’ and the company partners’ understandings of indoor climate systems), then by the development of products that support people in managing indoor climate themselves. The project findings were first shared with a wider audience of indoor climate researchers and practitioners at a 2011symposium on ‘Zero Energy Buildings’. Having seen how difficult it was for the project partners to accept the ethnographic message, the project team decided to use theatre at this event to generate discussion among the expert participants about people’s ‘indoor climate practices’. With the actors, we prepared three scripted scenes to convey what the researchers had observed in homes, kindergartens and offices; these were acted out as discussion starters at the event. A detailed analysis of that session helped us identify ways to foster audience engagement, which helped us greatly when planning a later event at which the same three scenes would be enacted for a different audience.

THEATRE IN DESIGN

Since the early 1990s, there has been increasing interest in using performance to help design interactive systems. Role-play has been extensively explored in the early stages of both academic and industrial design projects. This technique typically aims at providing user perspective on new technical solutions through informal, improvised acting of use scenarios. Burns et al. (1994) suggest that performance can help designers by activating imagination; facilitating empathy with users; communicating within and outside their team; and encouraging less self-conscious contributions. They improvised team role-plays to trigger discussion and evaluation of early design ideas, in sessions that they call ‘informance design’. Sato and Salvador incorporated professional actors in their method ‘focus troupes’ to engage an audience in a richer conversation about design concepts and with sketches based on ethnographic studies. They also identified that the presence of designers can help to ‘facilitate the session rather than fostering an unrelated conversation’ (Sato & Salvador 1999: 37). They proposed a number of techniques that can be used for product development, and recognized that such sessions are not always organized to evaluate specific ideas but can also be exploratory, to provide insights before the actual design process starts. Svanæs and Seland (2004) propose a workshop setup in which users take the main role, observed by designers and developers.

Indeed, by offering the audience an opportunity to actively contribute throughout the session (Sato & Salvador 1999), performances can play a transcendent role in eliciting knowledge that would not otherwise emerge (Iacucci et al. 2002). In their review of past studies on performances within the user experience, participatory design and embodied interaction areas, Macaulay et al. (2006: 951) point at the improvement of ‘quality and utility dialogue within design’ and suggest that ethnography is capable of shifting discussion in that direction. Buur and Sitorus (2007) similarly point to the unique ability of ethnography to challenge conflicting conceptions within organizations, and argue for new representations of ethnographic material. We find this well aligned with the exploration of live performances within organizations that helped Buur and Larsen (2010) recognize how ‘qualities of conversations’ may steer innovation.

In summary, theatre within design has most commonly been used as an active way of harvesting user requirements and user-centred ideas in specific goal-oriented activities. Such performances tend to be ‘happy stories’ of how technology eases the lives of users and solves all eminent problems. They help projects progress in a given design direction, but may also gloss over fundamental conflicts between different perspectives of who ‘users’ are and what they do. In contrast, ethnography’s capability of generating impact should not be underestimated. Performances that represent ethnographic findings offer the possibility of generating insightful discussion within organizations before focusing work efforts in particular design directions, allowing teams to open up fundamental issues that arise only through such conversations.

ORGANIZATIONAL THEATRE

The kind of theatre we employ here derives from another tradition – that of theatre in organizational change, in particular forum theatre (Boal [1979] 2000). Developed by Boal in 1970s Brazil to encourage people to escape oppression (indeed, it was known as the ‘theatre of the oppressed’), forum theatre enacts a situation with built-in dilemmas to a point of impasse; the audience is involved in suggesting the next moves, either by telling the actors what to do or by trying out their own intentions on stage. For instance, the actors might play a conflict between manager and employees that deteriorates into chaos; the facilitator will then invite the audience to intervene in the next enactment, stressing that ‘Unless you do something, the situation will end just as desperately’. While the actors repeat the play, anyone from the audience can stop it at any time to change the course of events by instructing an actor to act differently, or even by going onstage and taking over the role of manager or employee. Forum theatre has been taken up in several strands of organizational change (Jagiello 1998; Meisiek 2006; Nissley et al. 2004). There is, however, ongoing debate around how theatre performance contributes to change. While some authors claim that theatre requires adequate change management activities to follow up on the experience (Schreyögg 2001), or that change depends on audience reflection after experiencing the theatre performance (Meisiek 2006), others maintain that the sense-making process does not result from theatre, but is itself part of theatre activities (Larsen 2006). In our use of theatre, the focus is less on oppression than on disagreements within the audience, the actors bring out the different perspectives present and play them out against each other.

Improvisation is a vital part of this form of theatre. Improvisation draws the audience into the action; it encourages spectators to see that they too can influence how a situation develops. Keith Johnstone (1981) suggests that new creative ideas emerge and develop in the relationships between players, rather than as a result of an individual genius. Improvising is relational; it is not about acting, but about re-acting. Larsen and Friis (2005) link Johnstone’s work to Mead’s understanding of communication as gesturing and responding (Mead 1934). According to Mead, the gesture of one person provokes a response in another, but the response simultaneously gives meaning to the gesture in a relational process; thus, improvised theatre can be seen as actors and audience in a mutual sense-making process that can lead to novelty. In our theatre events, the actors first act our scripted scenes to trigger discussion with the audience. They then improvise responses from the figures they enact, or even jump into new, improvised roles to explore the audience’s suggestions for resolving the situation.

THREE INDOOR CLIMATE SCENES

For the first event, the researchers and actors together prepared three scenes based on fieldwork findings in homes, kindergartens and offices. The controversial findings are clearly embedded in the scripts, conveying how contradictory someone’s behaviour can seem in different environments, and showing that technical low-energy systems may not align well with people’s practices (Figure 1).

Home: Closing doors – A young couple, Marianne and Paul, rented a zero-energy house six months ago. Paul took that initiative, because he values being environmentally conscious. A wall display indicates how much energy they use, and tracks air humidity, temperature, etc. Paul likes to keep an eye on energy consumption, making a game of achieving the best possible figures. In this scene, we see Paul asking Marianne to keep the door closed to maintain a balanced indoor climate; but with the kids playing outside, she is not happy being told what to do. She has just hung clothes outside in the spring weather, and enjoys the fresh smell and the contact with the outside…

Kindergarten: Waving goodbye – One morning, Paul drops off his son at the kindergarten. The child usually waves goodbye to his father from the corridor between two front doors, the inner door intended to eliminate drafts. However, the children like to follow their parents to the outer front door and wave goodbye through the glass, so a bucket usually holds the inner door ajar. Noticing that the inner front door is closed, Paul tries to squeeze the bucket in place; but the teacher Ellen stops him, explaining that the draft isn’t healthy and increases energy consumption…

Office: When is Cold cold? – Marianne works in the open-plan office of an insurance company. Though it is 27ºC outside, both Marianne and Lis, her colleague at the next desk, feel cold inside as the ventilation is turned on. They want to call the janitor; but Søren, the head of the office, who arrives sweaty after a 15 km bike ride, feels warm and does not understand why the ventilation should be turned off, given that the temperature in the room is a perfect 20ºC…

FIGURE 1. Images from three scripted theatre scenes on comfort practices