© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com doi:10.1093/iwc/iws016 Theatre, PlayDoh and Comic Strips: Designing Organic User Interfaces with Young Adolescent and Teenage Participants Janet C. Read, Daniel Fitton and Matthew Horton Child Computer Interaction Group, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, UK ∗ Corresponding author: jcread@uclan.ac.uk This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how to convey the idea of OUIs, how to facilitate the pupils to design OUIs and how to interpret the OUI design ideas. To convey the ideas of OUI, the Obstructed Theatre method, used in other studies with children and teenagers, was used. In this work, the salient features of the OUI conveyed in the theatre were: its malleability, its potential to bend and change shape, its association with the body and its novelty. To facilitate the design, three scenarios of increasing user interface complexity were conveyed in the theatre; and three different media (i) slime and pipe cleaners, (ii) PlayDoh and small Lego bricks, (iii) fabric and sticky shapes that afforded the creation of designs representing future organic interactive technologies were deployed. To enable the design team to make sense of the resulting designs, a Comic Strip approach was used to capture the changes in the designs as they demonstrated interaction. The paper explores this work from three perspectives; first, the effectiveness of the Obstructed Theatre approach to convey requirements of OUIs, secondly, the effectiveness of the three media used in the design sessions to encourage design solutions for OUIs and thirdly, the quality and relevance of the design ideas generated in the sessions and communicated to the design team using the Comic Strips and their applicability to other contexts. The paper concludes with some thoughts on methods and materials that could be used to encourage design ideas for OUIs and offers some of the participants more innovative ideas for the research and development community. STUDY HIGHLIGHTS • Identification of key challenges for carrying out participatory design of OUIs • The creation of three tools to carry out participatory design of OUI with teenagers • An extensive study using novel materials to inspire the design of OUIs • A rich set of 27 diverse organic user interface design ideas Keywords: design methods; teenagers; participatory design; organic user interfaces; energy use; children; adolescents Special Issue Editors: Audrey Girouard, Roel Vertegaal & Ivan Poupyrev Received 6 October 2011; Accepted 29 October 2012 1. INTRODUCTION Desktop computing is not exactly disappearing, but it is seeing its position threatened as devices become smaller, more mobile and are used less and less in the usual desktop settings. In recent times, sales of smartphones have exceeded sales of PCs; this trend was foreseen by the interaction design and the computing Interacting with Computers, Vol. 25 No. 2, 2013 at The Library on February 25, 2013 http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from