Bodystorming

011 min

Why a plan on paper misses physical problems

Picture a product team designing the check-in area of a small clinic. On the whiteboard the plan is clear. Patients come in, join one line, give their name at a counter and sit down. Everyone agrees that it works.

Then the team stands in the empty room and goes through the plan on foot. The counter is close to the door, so the third person in line is already in the doorway. A patient with a walking frame cannot get past the people ahead. The receptionist has to turn away from the waiting room to reach the forms. None of this appeared on the whiteboard, because a whiteboard shows what people say and not where their bodies stand.

Going through a design on foot, in roles, is bodystorming. The clinic team's next hour shows how it works.

022 min

How bodystorming works

The clinic team needed three things: a short scenario, stand-ins for the real objects, and people willing to play roles.

The scenario is one situation, such as a patient with a walking frame arriving on a busy morning. The stand-ins are whatever is at hand. A table or a cardboard box can be the counter, and tape on the floor can mark the door. Guides to the method ask for rough props on purpose, because a rough prop is easy to move and nobody is shy about changing it.

A role does not have to be a person. One teammate can play the patient and another the receptionist, and a third can play the check-in screen and read its messages aloud. Nobody follows a script. The group improvises, reacts to each other, and says what they would do next.

Why moving finds more than talking

Kristian Simsarian, a designer at the firm IDEO, wrote in 2003 about two things that acting adds to a design meeting. One is being in the moment, so the group's attention stays on the scene and not on slides. The other is using the whole body to explore. Among the gains he listed is a shared physical experience that stays in the team's memory.

Guides to the method give a second reason. Acting out the user's part gives access to tacit knowledge, which means things people know without being able to put them into words. Nobody can say in a meeting that a counter is too close to a door, but a person standing in the doorway feels it at once.

Bodystorming and role playing

Bodystorming borrows from role playing, where people pretend to be in a situation in order to understand it. Bodystorming adds idea generation: the team invents changes during the scene and tests them straight away. The aim is a better design at the end, not only a better understanding of the scene.

031 min

Where bodystorming comes from

The clinic team did not invent this way of working, and the name has a known start. In the early 1990s a group of researchers asked whether performance could help designers, alongside methods designers already used, such as scenarios and storyboards. Four of them, Colin Burns, Eric Dishman, William Verplank and Bud Lassiter, reported the work in a two-page paper at the CHI conference in 1994. Its title was "Actors, Hairdos & Videotape—Informance Design."

The researchers expected performance to make design more imaginative, to build empathy by letting designers briefly take a user's role, and to help designers, clients and users share one view of a problem.

The word bodystorming came from this work, and IDEO later used it in client projects. Simsarian's 2003 paper describes how.

Acting out a layout is older than the word. A well-known kitchen redesign used the same method decades earlier.

042 min

Running a bodystorming session

Back in the clinic, the team ran its hour in a fixed order.

1. Write down the problem and pick two or three short scenarios, such as a patient with a walking frame arriving on a busy morning.
2. Choose the place. Most practitioners prefer the real location, though it can be hard to book or distracting. A prepared room, with a table standing in for the counter, also works.
3. Spend a short time in the real setting first. A team that already knows the place well can swap the visit for telling stories from experience.
4. Mark out the space with tape, furniture and cardboard, and hand out roles: at least two actors and one observer.
5. Act out one scenario, improvising and using whatever is at hand.
6. When ideas slow down, the observer calls "freeze" and asks a what-if question that changes the scene, such as giving a character a backstory, adding a power cut or removing a piece of furniture.
7. Keep a record. The observer writes notes and sketches and takes photos. Video is an option, but finding one moment in a recording later is slow.
8. Debrief for 10 to 15 minutes, then repeat with the next scenario.

In the clinic scene, one person plays a patient with a walking frame and another plays the receptionist, while two more stand in line at a cardboard counter. On the first try, the counter stands near the door, and the third person in line waits in the doorway. They carry the cardboard counter further into the room and run the same scene again. On the second try, the whole line fits inside, and the patient with the frame can pass.

Three habits keep a session useful. First, warm up. Acting feels odd to many adults, and a game from improvisational theatre such as "Yes, and" helps. Second, keep it physical. When people start to discuss, remind them that discussion comes later. Acting a scene out often makes the discussion unnecessary. Third, make the scene hard. Groups tend to let every idea work with a perfect customer and perfect technology, so the facilitator can add a broken printer or an impatient patient.

A longer workshop

Simsarian described a longer format. It runs for half a day or a full day, with 8 to 20 people in teams of 3 to 5. The group begins with field observations or a talk about what it already knows, then brainstorms and votes on ideas with sticky notes. Each team takes one chosen idea, explores it by bodystorming, and builds a short scenario from the best parts. At the end each team performs its scenario for the others, and the performances are recorded on video.

061 min

What one study of bodystorming found

A story like the tennis court shows the method can work. It does not say whether the method beats the usual way of generating ideas. One small study gives a partial answer.

In 2014 Jaasma, Trotto and Hummels, researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology, presented a poster on a two-month design project in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. They ran two workshops that brought together residents of the Vaartbroek neighbourhood, employees of a housing cooperative and civil servants from the municipality. The groups were asked for ideas to help the neighbourhood organise itself, and the researchers compared body-based methods with ordinary brainstorming.

The researchers saw more engagement and cooperation when people used their bodies, and they call the work an explorative experiment. That label matters: it points to a tendency in two workshops, not a measured effect. They also reported that body-based work moved people away from abstract talk toward concrete ideas.

071 min

Bodystorming across a design project

The clinic team used bodystorming early, to generate ideas, but acting can serve other stages too. Simsarian tied different forms of role play to the phases of an IDEO project. In the first phase, the team walks through the problem to find where to look. In the second, it re-creates situations seen in the field. Bodystorming sits in the third phase, where the team generates new ideas and new uses by exploring the setting.

Two later forms use the same physical skills for other jobs. In the fourth phase, which Simsarian called debugging, the team builds scenarios of use and works through the details before delivery. In the last phase, a team stages an informance, short for informative performance. It is a physical performance made to tell an audience about a developed idea, issue or scenario.

IDEO used these methods with clients that included a financial services company designing travel services, the U.S. National Institutes of Health planning ways for researchers to work together, and a hardware manufacturer exploring services for handheld computers.

082 min

Where bodystorming is used

The clinic and the kitchen are rooms, but the method is used in many more places. A common description says it suits physical spaces, such as the interior of a shop, and can also be used for physical products or software.

Some researchers also run sessions inside VR, where service users play out a service scenario in a virtual environment.

Research ideas in science

The word has also reached science. In 2009, Carl Flink, who directs the dance company Black Label Movement, worked with David Odde, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, in a project called Moving Cell. They found a way to test research ideas by having people act them out under rules set by a choreographer. That is a different use from the design method in this article, but it relies on the same belief that acting can reveal things that talking does not.

091 min

Bodystorming vs. nearby methods

People confuse bodystorming with its neighbours because all of them involve acting, prototyping or both. One question separates them: what the team does with its body, and what it wants at the end.

A storyboard draws a scenario as a series of pictures. Bodystorming performs the same kind of scenario, and the performance often shows what the pictures left out.

101 min

When bodystorming does not help

Acting out a design costs time and does not suit every problem. A session has to be planned and run, it fits small groups in one place better than remote or large ones, and some situations are hard to recreate with a body and a table.

It also gives less depth than slower methods. A service design handbook describes it as faster and less structured than investigative rehearsal, another method based on acting, and says it gives less depth of insight.

111 min

Trying bodystorming this week

Choose one physical decision your team has only discussed, such as where a counter goes or how a person moves through a space while carrying something. Book 45 minutes, mark the space with tape, and give out two actors and one observer. Start with the hardest scenario, not the easiest. If it runs smoothly on the first try, make it harder and run it again.

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