Full Circle Associates

Amy Jo Kim blogged this today and I can't help a quick comment - then I really will get to work. Mobile mah-jongg a $3.8 billion game | CNET News.com. AJ was one of the first people to point me to the implications of games in this new distributed world. Mah-Jongg is a structured game. What will happen when we get better at improvisation online? Games without the structure?

John Smith, Alasdair Honeyman and I are going to play with this idea a bit on June 14th at the Ifonortics Virtual Communities Conference. A hint for those going. We plan to disrupt things a bit. A game? No, far more than a game. Improvisation!

John Smith, Nancy White and Alasdair Honeyman
Improvisation and design in distributed communities

Learning is a fundamental aspect of community experience. It is arguably an improvisational activity, as are facilitation and community cultivation. But the discourse about online communities of practice usually focuses on design, not on improvisation. Why is that? What if we looked at how we design technologies from the point of view of learning and improvisation? Does it change what we think and say? From our experience the answer is yes. Design seems to imply the arrangement of known elements. But we all work on a global, multi-cultural and multi-literate stage where nobody can know all the elements involved. Among other things we give examples of how:

* Design is an ongoing activity.
* Design is the (re)-arrangmenet of known and unknown elements.
* Everybody is (potentially) involved in design.
* Straddling technologies changes the game once again.

In practice, what elements are more appropriately improvised or invented on the spot? What is the difference between design and improvisation?