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Improvisational Design: Continuous, Responsive Digital
Communication

by Suguru Ishizaki
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003
167 pp., 64 illus. b/w. Trade, $35.00
ISBN: 0-262-09035-X.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dgrigar@twu.edu

A highly readable book and accessible to experts and novices alike, Suguru Ishizaki’s Improvisational Design: Continuous, Responsive Digital Communication is an excellent source of information for digital designers interested in finding ways to improve the process of dynamic design. Based on three overarching principles——namely, that dynamic design is open-ended, functions in much the same way as improvisational performance, and is based on the work emerging from multiagent systems——the book offers, as the title suggests, a new theoretical framework for continuous, responsive, and dynamic digital communication. Defined as both a theory and a method (17), improvisational design "anticipat[es] potential changes in the context and specif[ies] the communicative forms that design agents should perform according to their immediate situations" (9). Although it originated as research for a doctoral dissertation completed in 1995, the ideas the book presents are still fresh. Those of us who produce interactive media intended as dynamic and contextual to the user will find much value in reading Improvisational Design.

The organization of the book is straightforward, offering nine chapters that each focuses on a particular issue related to improvisational design. However, chapters one through five provide the groundwork——that is, the book’s argument, background, and theories. Specifically, chapter one lays out the differences between traditional design methods and those found in improvisational design. Helpful are the diagrams illustrating the major points the author makes. Chapter two provides the theoretical framework for the book. Ishizaki makes it clear early on that he is not developing normative theories, what some of us may see as a prescription, for design, but rather a method that allows others "to design a way of designing" (12). Chapter three offers models of improvisational design. Agents and their properties are fleshed out in detail, as well as the various approaches to dynamic design, from "decentralized and lateral interaction" (44) to "the multiplicity of semantics and the dynamic shift of focus of attention in the design process" (47), are carefully discussed. Finally, chapter four discusses issues related to "temporal forms" or what Ishizaki describes as the "means to describe the design agent’s precise formal actions" (51), and chapter five explains the various methods by which designers "design a design."

The next section, chapters six and seven, presents case studies and the author’s reflections about these studies, respectively. This section is crucial in developing the argument Ishizaki makes. As mentioned previously, the ideas presented in the text are still flesh; however, it is strange that all five examples——a dynamic news display, an email interface, a piece of interactive poetry, a geographical information display, and expressive typography projects——used to illustrate the points he makes in the first section are somewhat dated. So, while these works aptly underscore his argument, it would have served his purpose better, in light of recent developments in nightly news as per CNN and dynamic electronic literary work like those created by Talan Memmott and Diana Slattery, to find more current examples of what he describes.

Chapter eight looks at "computational design systems that are used in digital media to solve design problems at run time" (127), a concept more prevalent and necessary to consider when designing a site today than perhaps it was even in 1995; chapter nine offers a succinct reiteration of the principles outlined in the book.

It is always a source of great consternation to many of us that publishers do not take advantage of strategies, some of them quite simple, to enhance the presentation of their books, particularly books on new media requiring illustrations of design choices, dynamicism, etc. In the case of Improvisational Design, reproductions of color images in the book into black and white could have been augmented by a companion website offering the originals in a dynamic format, just as the examples used in chapter six would have benefited greatly from the addition of a CD-ROM that would have allowed for the lack of "fixity" the author focuses on throughout. At the very least, publishers could pay more attention to editing in order to eradicate typos as well as errors in the bibliography. Work as good as Ishizaki’s deserves more care than has been obviously given.

In sum, Improvisational Design is an important work and should be useful——if not necessary——for teachers and practitioners of new media, interactive arts, and design.


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Updated 1st June 2003


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