Bringing Humor to the Classroom

Since deciding to steer clear (or think apart from) OMG CMU, (and the Facebook/online world in general), we decided to run some of our “designer improv” games/activities in-class on Wednesday for our second probe. With our most updated question in mind, we thought that through teaching our fellow classmates some of the activities we learned at Steel City Improv we could start to see how improv could be used to delve a little bit deeper into a selected/pre-chosen, but broad topic, such as food services (at Carnegie Mellon). Because the food services at CMU was such a hot topic on the OMG CMU platform, we decided to go ahead and use this topic as the focus for our in-class improv exercises. The two of us, along with a few other chosen classmates did variations of three of the improv exercises we learned a few weeks ago. 

We warmed up with “Salad Toss,” which was involved naming salad topping (or anything for that matter) while establishing eye contact, getting your mind working, starting to break any social awkwardness, and getting used to the idea of “saying whatever came to your mind, no matter how ‘silly’ you may think it is.” The second improv activity was “Rattle Off,” which asked the participants to name 5 nonexistent menu items at a given CMU dining place. It was beyond refreshing to see these first two short activities cracking smiles on not only the people participating, but the people watching in the audience. I know it’s not because we were particularly funny, but there were definitely moments of genuinely good humor, but knowing everyone was on the same “level” and nothing said would be laughed at in a negative way definitely made people more free and willing to just go with the activities and loosen up.

We wrapped up the session with a more classically-recognized improv activity of short skits - starting them off with 1 minute of silence, and a couple minutes of talking/interacting. The only given information to those participating was the location - again, we used on-campus dining locations - more specifically Resnik and Entropy. The ‘actors’ assumed personas that they thought we all could relate to, whether it was the Entropy employees who wouldn’t give you the time of day, or our fellow CMU students waiting in line for dinner, there were definitely laughs from the audience because of their ability to relate to these invented personas - which was a common thread in OMG CMU, (when we polled our OMG CMU audience, the majority of people said they found OMG CMU funny because of their ability to relate to the statements).

The improv session was definitely a great experience - not only because we got to test our theories about humor in another probe, but also purely because it was nice to see our fellow classmates cut loose and perhaps relieve a little bit of stress.

OMG: Back to Improv (Sort of)

Reworking our original question to ensure that our probing done with OMG CMU and our second probe remains true to always answering this question: How can humor be used to break social barriers and foster more open interactions (among people who know each other and/or strangers). [Exact wording still being figured out]

These whiteboard sketches look fairly familiar (flashback to a few weeks ago), but after realizing that the OMG CMU aspect of our research had stalled (with no hope of re-starting), we were forced to go back to even earlier aspects of our research/’wondering.’ We spent time thinking about our very first wonder experience at Steel City Improv and our first idea that came from that experience, our “designer’s improv kit” we had brainstormed prior to thinking of OMG CMU.

Our plan for our second probe is to take the information we gathered from our OMG CMU probe, and utilize it in another context in which designers use humor (via improv) to ‘cut loose’ via improv exercises based on popular OMG CMU topics, in hopes of not only fostering stronger interactions, but maybe some new ideas for design solutions.

OMG JK

We decided to take OMG CMU out of its virtual medium and into a physical, tangible one to see how people’s interactions with it changed. We printed out all of our contributors’ photobooth pictures and taped them to the windows (not walls:)) in the corridor of Margaret Morrison’s 1st floor. We left sharpies, post-its, and small signs that encouraged passer-bys to leave comments on any of the photos.

The “JK” aspect of this post’s title comes from our finding that this physical re-creation of OMG CMU did not add much (at all) to furthering our research probe. We observed the hallways a few times during the day and some one or two passer-bys looking at the photos, but didn’t catch any of them leaving comments. The majority of people didn’t pay any attention to them - which could be due to a number of reasons from size of the photos, to their placement in an ‘access way,’ or maybe even their familiarity with them already. Additionally, the few comments that were left on the photos were not insightful - which is understandable/expected.

We didn’t have high expectations for this physical execution of the probe, but it’s always good to test your assumptions rather than just leave them as assumptions.

OMG, ORLY?

A little more than a week after we launched OMGCMU, it has 600+ fans. I think we really hit on something that people relate to. We tried to take it further in terms of research by approaching people with “traditional” research methods juxtaposed with humorous but realized that it was at the end of the day, the idea is not about research, it’s about the small moment of laughter each image brings.  

The uploaded photos have been receiving a decent amount of feedback, some reaching as many as 60 likes and comments. 

Some statistics on feedback we have received so far on our page:

We initially mapped out the interactions based on comments, similar likes, and shares. But we soon figured out that the posts were being made faster than we could physically link the interactions. It was an interesting exercise to visualize these interactions though. 

The next step is to create some sort of public physical display of these images and watch those reactions. This may also be on display at the final show. 

Curtains close on “design improv”, but open to “OMG CMU”

After presenting our experiences at Steel City Improv to the class on Monday, we decided to continue exploring the ideas behind improv, particularly how we can help designers brainstorm more creatively using improv as a tool.

This lead to our “what” question of: “How can we make the brainstorming process more fun and effective for designers?”

We decided to specifically target designers (and other people they may work with, such as programmers and engineers), and so we could conduct test experiments in studios on campus doing improv activities such as “Scenes from a hat.” 

We started to list out all the things you have to think about when it comes to designing something. Stemming from the first step of “defining a problem,” to the basics of “establishing users,” and “social context,” and deeper steps like “naming,” and “marketability.” We grouped these steps into chronological, “like” categories, and started to label improv activities that could be utilized to help the design process in these steps.

We started to outline, from start to finish, how we would execute these test experiments with our volunteer subjects. The example problem/prompt we defined was “grocery store checkout process,” and from there, devised how our test sessions would run, and what improv tools & activities we would have our subjects partake in to help them creatively re-design the checkout process.

^ Utilizing the warm-up exercises we did at Steel City Improv to break the ice among the stranger subjects, and get their creative “gears grinding.”

^ Designing how our “scenes from a hat” activity would run, and how they would de-brief after each activity to discuss the ideas that came up during the activity.

^ Recognizing the importance of still using “traditional” brainstorm methods such as drawing and storyboards, as well as using more improv “name games” to help with the marketing aspects of design.

However, even after all of this careful planning, after talking with Kristin about our “designers improv” idea, we started to realize that our idea itself, was straying away from our original idea of making brainstorming fun. There was so much careful planning that was complicating our original idea of fun, that we started to feel more and more detached from this idea. Additionally, we all recognized the fact that role-playing is already very much an established tool for designers and brainstorming, and that our time and efforts might be best utilized going in another direction.

We listed out things that just interested us in general, from the idea of spontaneity, to the use of photography, to the idea of self-image. After a few hours of brainstorming and throwing around random ideas, we started to become more interested in the idea of connecting CMU students. I think that most CMU students would agree that our campus is a pretty divided one. Friend groups are pretty restricted to a person’s major or activities, and there isn’t much opportunity for interaction because of everyone’s busy schedules and work ethics. One of the words we pulled at the beginning of the lab was “comedy” (hence, our improv experience), and so we started to play with this idea of comedy/humor, and how it could be utilized to connect CMU students.

This idea, along with our recent discovery of the new effects on PhotoBooth, lead us to the idea of OMG CMU. Since humor is a great way to connect people, why not connect CMU students based off strictly “CMU humor.” We all go to the same places on campus, and have relatively similar mindsets in terms of our work ethics, so much that one can view these similarities in a comedic light. Also, who wouldn’t love to take a little work break for a good laugh?

Our new question: How can humor be used as a way to connect strangers on Carnegie Mellon’s campus?

Classmates presenting their adventures.

The topics we picked for Wonder Lab were Playground, Comedy, Seniors (65+) and Trophy. We decided to explore one of these topics (comedy) by going to an inprov class. Both of us are pretty reserved people so this was definitely a step outside our confort zones. To our surprise, we actually had a lot of fun with the activities and learned a lot about performing in front of strangers. We are now trying to formulate some sort of question from this experience. 

Here are the finals printed and in context. The ads are slipped into Better Homes and Gardens opposite other ads. Some are cleaning products and some are ads that “camouflage” the guerrilla ads.