Engaging Teens in Dialogue on Potential Technological Futures with User Enactments

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.