A book for architects, designers, planners, and urbanites that explores how cities can embrace improvisation to improve urban life The built environment in today’s hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.
Businesses are sending their top managers to improvisational classes to learn how to give presentations, how to talk to clients, and how to finesse difficult situations. But those same skills can be mastered with the help of the simple and fun exercises found in this book. The authors explain how improvisation comes into play in our daily lives, and the rewards of taking risks in those situations. Improvise This! is filled with true-to-life business scenarios and offers methods for not only surviving but triumphing in those situations, making this a valuable and entertaining resource.
While much has been written about what democracies should look like, much less has been said about how to actually train citizens in democratic perspectives and skills. Amid the social and political crises of our time, many programs seeking to bridge differences between citizens draw from the surprising field of improvisational theater. Improv trains people to engage with one another in ways that promote empathy and understanding. Don Waisanen demonstrates how improv-based teaching and training methods can forward the communication, leadership, and civic skills our world urgently needs. Waisanen includes specific exercises and thought experiments that can be used by educators; advocates for civic engagement and civil discourse; practitioners and scholars in communication, leadership, and conflict management; training and development specialists; administrators looking to build new curricula or programming; and professionals seeking to embed productive, sustainable, and socially responsible forms of interaction in and across organizations. Ultimately this book offers a new approach for helping people become more creative, heighten awareness, think faster, build confidence, operate flexibly, improve expression and governance skills, and above all, think and act more democratically.
CYBERNETICS: STATE OF THE ART is the first volume of the book series CON-VERSATIONS. Driven by cybernetic thinking, it engages with pressing questions for architecture, urban planning, design and automated infrastructure; in an age of increasing connectivity, AI and robotization and an evolutionary state of the Anthropocene - perpetuating angst-ridden anxiety as well as excitement and joy of a future, that we will be able to predict with less and less certainty. The book, with a foreword by Omar Khan, discusses cybernetic principles and devices developed in the late 20th century – mainly developed by Ross Ashby and Gordon Pask (second-order cybernetics), to learn from for a future of mutual relationship and conversation between man and machine. The anthology reviews and previews cybernetics as design strategy in computational architecture, urban design and socio-ecological habitats - natural and artificial. It weaves together cybernetic-architectural theories with applications and case studies ranging from regional planning to the smart home. Nine chapters written by an international group of authors from four academic generations are structured into two complimenting parts. While ‘A Concept and a Shape’ focuses on the history and theory of cybernetics, its temporary disappearance and future impact (Raúl Espejo, Michael Hohl, Paul Pangaro, Liss C. Werner), ‘System 5’ – relating to Stafford Beer’s project ‘Cybersyn’ - discusses applications, the role of the individual and human feedback; also with a strong theoretical underpinning (Raoul Bunschoten, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Timothy Jachna, Arun Jain, Kristian Kloeckl). CYBERNETICS: STATE OF THE ART invites the reader to enjoy a glimpse into the past to enjoy and discuss a cybernetic future. CYBERNETICS: STATE OF THE ART mit einem Vorwort von Omar Khan ist die erste Buchausgabe der Serie CON-VERSATIONS. Auf kybernetisches Denken und Schaffen basierend, diskutiert CON-VERSATIONS Fragen zu Architektur, Stadtplanung, Gestaltungsstrategien und automatisierter Infrastruktur in einer evolutionär zunehmenden Vernetzung durch künstliche Intelligenz, Robotisierung; im Zeitalter der Anthropozän, in einem Zustand der sich verewigenden angstbeherrschten Unruhe - wie auch einer besonderen Lust auf eine Zukunft, die wir mit immer weniger Sicherheit voraussagen können. Das Konzept ‚Kybernetik zweiter Ordnung’ des späten 20igsten Jahrhunderts, u.a. entwickelt von Ross Ashby und Gordon Pask, begründet das Buch. Es genießt einen Rückblick und eine Vorschau in eine kybernetische Zukunft der gemeinsamen kausalen Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Maschine. Die Autoren schlagen Kybernetik als Entwurfsstrategie für computer-generierte/-gestützte Architektur, Stadtplanung und natürlich und künstliche sozio-ökologische Lebensumwelten vor. Das Buch kombiniert kybernetisch-architektonische Theorie mit Fallstudien reichend von Regionalplanung zu ‚Smart Home’. Neun Kapitel, geschrieben von einer internationalen Autorenschaft aus vier akademischen Generationen, sind in zwei sich ergänzende Buchteile strukturiert. ‘A Concept and a Shape’, mit Kapiteln von Raúl Espejo, Michael Hohl, Paul Pangaro, Liss C. Werner, diskutiert Geschichte und Wissenschaft der Kybernetik sowie ihr temporäres Verschwinden und Einfluss auf die Zukunft. ‚System 5’ (in Anlehnung an Stafford Beer’s Projekt ‚Cybersyn’) mit Kapiteln von Raoul Bunschoten, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Timothy Jachna, Arun Jain, Kristian Kloeckl, beschreibt kybernetische Praxis, die Rolle des Individuums und ‚Human Feedback’ - ebenfalls mit einem starken theoretischen Fundament. CYBERNETICS: STATE OF THE ART lädt den Leser ein, einen aufschlussreichen Blick in die Vergangenheit zu werfen, um eine kybernetische Zukunft zu genießen und zu diskutieren.
Most people know The Second City as an innovative school for improvisation that has turned out leading talents such as Alan Arkin, Bill Murray, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. This groundbreaking company has also trained thousands of educators and students through its Improvisation for Creative Pedagogy program, which uses improv exercises to teach a wide variety of content areas, and boost skills that are crucial for student learning: listening, teamwork, communication, idea-generation, vocabulary, and more.
On both sides of the stage improv-comedy's popularity has increased exponentially throughout the 1980s and '90s and into the new millennium. Presto! An original song is created out of thin air. With nothing but a suggestion from the audience, daring young improvisers working without a net or a script create hilarious characters, sketches, and songs. Thrilled by the danger, the immediacy, and the virtuosity of improv-comedy, spectators laugh and cheer. American improv-comedy burst onto the scene in the 1950s with Chicago's the Compass Players (best known for the brilliant comedy duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May) and the Second City, which launched the careers of many popular comedians, including Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Mike Myers. Chicago continues to be a mecca for young performers who travel from faraway places to study improv. At the same time, the techniques of Chicago improv have infiltrated classrooms, workshops, rehearsals, and comedy clubs across North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Improv's influence is increasingly evident in contemporary films and in interactive entertainment on the internet. Drawing on the experiences of working improvisers, Whose Improv Is It Anyway? provides a never-before-published account of developments beyond Second City's mainstream approach to the genre. This fascinating history chronicles the origins of "the Harold," a sophisticated new "long-form" style of improv developed in the '80s at ImprovOlympic and details the importance and pitfalls of ComedySports. Here also is a backstage glimpse at the Annoyance Theatre, best known on the national scene for its production of The Real Live Brady Bunch. Readers will get the scoop on the recent work of players who, feeling excluded by early improv's "white guys in ties," created such independent groups as the Free Associates and the African American troupe Oui Be Negroes. There is far more to the art of improv than may be suggested by the sketches on Saturday Night Live or the games on Whose Line Is It Anyway? This history, an insider's look at the evolution of improv-comedy in Chicago, reveals the struggles, the laughter, and the ideals of mutual support, freedom, and openness that have inspired many performers. It explores the power games, the gender inequities, and the racial tensions that can emerge in improvised performance, and it shares the techniques and strategies veteran players use to combat these problems. Improv art is revealed to be an art of compromise, a fragile negotiation between the poles of process and product. The result, as shown here, can be exciting, shimmering, magical, and not exclusively the property of any troupe or actor.
