Exquisite Circuits: Collaborative Electronics Design through Drawing Games

We present Exquisite Circuits, a novel collaborative circuit design approach that remixes the surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawing game for paper circuits. In this pictorial, five participants played the game and documented their design, fabrication, and thought processes during gameplay. From these results, we contribute lessons learned on how game elements like surprise, ambiguous goals, and shared responsibility open new ways of thinking about the expressive and collaborative design of technology. Exquisite Circuits, through paper circuitry's hybrid of aesthetic and functional design affordances, helped reveal tensions between arts and technology cultures and approaches. We invite educators, designers, and technology creators to try their own variations of the Exquisite Circuits and share their results with the creative technology community.