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Engaging Teens in Dialogue on Potential Technological Futures with User Enactments

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Perspectives on HCI Research with Teenagers

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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Abstract

Teens are a fascinating, dynamic population; they are on the vanguard of emerging technologies, often defining the behaviour and social mores of these products and services. At the same time, teens are still exploring and developing into the person they want to become, making them a terribly sensitive group to work with, and making it all the more crucial to critically and carefully consider how new technologies might shape their lives and practices. There is a clear need for a multiplicity of methods for working with teens in the HCI and interaction design communities. User Enactments has been developed as a design approach that aids design teams in more successfully investigating radical alterations to technologies’ roles, forms, and behaviours in uncharted design spaces. In this chapter, we motivate and develop user enactments as a method for moving beyond studies of teen current practices and generatively engaging them in experiencing and making sense of possible technological futures. In this, we describe and reflect on our own experience of putting user enactments into practice through developing five different scenarios within a teen bedroom and, subsequently, conducting a study with 14 teens. Our goal is to surface and reflect on best practices and also potential pitfalls of using the User Enactments approach with teenagers. A higher-level goal of our work is to help better support future research and design practice aimed at engaging teenagers in critically playing a part in determining the roles that technology will play in their lives now and well into the future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See (Odom et al. 2012a) for in depth reporting and interpretation of empirical findings and discussion of suggested design opportunities for the HCI community.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NSF grant IIS-1017429 and by Google. We thank the teens (and their parents) that took part in the study. We also thank Hajin Choi, Stephanie Meier, Angela Park, and Alena Tesone for their help in developing the teen bedroom user enactments, Pablo Bariola and Haakon Faste for their photographic assistance, and Scott Davidoff for his foundational work on the Speed Dating methodology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada

    William Odom

  2. Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    John Zimmerman & Jodi Forlizzi

Authors
  1. William Odom
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  2. John Zimmerman
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  3. Jodi Forlizzi
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Correspondence to William Odom .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. PaCT Lab, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom

    Linda Little

  2. Child-Computer Interaction Group, School of Physical Sciences and Computing, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

    Daniel Fitton

  3. Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, York St John University, York, United Kingdom

    Beth T. Bell

  4. PaCT Lab, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom

    Nicola Toth

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Odom, W., Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J. (2016). Engaging Teens in Dialogue on Potential Technological Futures with User Enactments. In: Little, L., Fitton, D., Bell, B., Toth, N. (eds) Perspectives on HCI Research with Teenagers. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33450-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33450-9_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33450-9

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