Representational Improvisation: Collective Ideation at the Intersection of Embodiment and Affect

• In Event: Designing for Affect and Embodiment: Ethical Attunements in the Futuring of Education

Abstract

This paper analyzes a sequence of studies that engaged groups of co-design partners in shared-embodiment activities. Groups used unfamiliar materials or infrastructures to accomplish emergent expressive and affective purposes that they identified as they worked together. Articulating similarities across these studies, we identify a novel participation structure, Representational Improvisation (RI), which we connect with Vygotsky’s (1978) double stimulation experiment. We thus contribute to this symposium a design resource that stands at the intersection of embodiment and affect.

Vygotsky (1978), and later Engeström (2007) and Sannino (2015), presented double stimulation not only as a novel experimental design but also a theoretical advance for studying the emergence of new cultural activity when participants accomplish a defined task (Stimulus 1) by incorporating “neutral” or ambiguous tools, most often representational resources (Stimulus 2). Vygotsky highlighted the individual actor, while Engeström and colleagues highlighted organizational collectives.

However, the Change Lab is not the only possible group-oriented instantiation of double stimulation. We propose a new group-oriented form, RI as a modified double stimulation experiment, where a group intentionally takes up a novel representational resource and explores emergent expressive purposes they can achieve with it (Figure 1). Thus, RI reverses the order of stimuli and invests the group with collective agency to choose the task stimulus.


Figure 1. The structure of a Double Stimulation Experiment (top) and Representational Improvisation (bottom).

We give four examples of RI, showing how double stimulation dynamics are realized in these settings. Two come from work with a professional dance company, Novel Tectonics (a pseudonym)—first, a study where company members engaged a novel, researcher-proposed prop (Authors 2019); and second, an analysis of the company’s own signature approach to ideation, “physical research” (Author, 2021). The third involves an activity co-designed with Novel Tectonics members for a middle-school math, coding, and creative movement camp. Finally, our fourth example involves groups of high-school students designing embodied participatory simulations (Authors, 2022)—using a novel technology infrastructure to create activities for younger learners to engage affectively with a topic they selected: sustainable ecosystems (Authors, 2025).

For each example, data sources include extensive video recordings of co-design sessions with participants, analyzed and interpreted in conjunction with field notes, memos, and physical and digital artifacts. We applied Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and discourse analysis methods across these studies and revealed common structural dynamics aligned with double stimulation. Our findings reveal that RI supports microgenesis at two levels. First, in framing a task, the group uses the representational stimulus to align toward emergent goals expressed provisionally and iteratively via proposals with the novel representational means. And second, in achieving and refining the task, the group realizes new expressive potential through the representation.

Theoretically, our paper contributes to cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), introducing a construct, Representational Improvisation, that enhances the Vygotskian heritage of that tradition. We show how RI can expand our understanding of group-level ideation in the performing arts and also support student-centered inquiry linking embodied and affective ways of knowing.

Authors

• Corey Brady, Southern Methodist University

• Lauren Vogelstein, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Tessaly Jen, Vanderbilt University