Imagine and Play with the Possibilities: Improv Prototyping

Macrostructures are ubiquitous and tend to be easily nameable. In the context of education, macrostructures are orientations, methodologies, tools, objects, and groups/places (organizations, buildings) that characterize our work. They are the elements that make it into our methods sections. Microstructures are embedded in those macrostructures, and they are just as important but easier to overlook. Microstructures include invitations (or questions), how space is arranged, how groups are configured, how participation is distributed, how steps are sequenced, and how time is allocated (Lipmanowicz and McCandless 2014). Even when exigency and time constrict the depth and scope of our interactions, tweaking just one microstructure, such the question we ask, or the way we arrange participants, makes a difference in building reciprocal experiences (Dura et al., J Bus Tech Commun 33(4):376–399. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651919854057 , 2019; Gonzales et al., Working with ladies that UX: building academic/industry partnerships for user research projects. In: Proceedings of the 35th ACM international conference on the design of communication (SIGDOC ‘17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, Article 29, pp 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121217 , 2017; Andersen, Tech Commun Q 20(4):384–411, https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2011.590178 , 2011; The Value of a reciprocal relationship between research and practice. Center for Information-Development Management News. Retrieved from https://www.infomanagementcenter.com/publications/e-newsletter/may-2013/the-value-of-a-reciprocal-relationship-between-research-and-practice/ , 2013). This chapter uses the example of improv prototyping as a way to imagine and play that elicits tacit knowledge and facilitates difficult conversations in classroom and extracurricular settings. It proposes that paying attention to microstructures yields more creative interactions, especially within constraints of time, space, or vulnerability (Hennigan 2019).