Cultural Probes

Cultural Probes are a research method that can be used for both data collection as well as ideation, especially at the early stages of a design process. The method was first described by Bill Gaver and his peers as a collection of artefacts that afford creativity to evoke ‘inspirational responses’ in research participants¹. A collection of cultural probes is often referred to as a ‘kit’ and comprise of artefacts such as notebooks, disposable cameras, postcards, maps and written prompts, which all aim to facilitate reflection on an individual’s experiences, attitudes and feelings. Due to the highly personal and subjective nature of data produced by cultural probes, it is often used as part of a larger set of methods and can even be employed to scope and refine methods used at later stages of a research project – e.g. to inform interview questions or further scope prospective user groups.

The rich data produced from cultural probes is difficult to analyse or produce any definitive conclusions from beyond themes or groupings of related findings, meaning the method should not relied on as the sole basis of producing findings for a study. This being said, data produced from cultural probes is often valuable in informing and inspiring new design directions for a project, as participants are encouraged to reflect on aspects of their lives that could be easily overlooked by observing them or them not willing to share overly personal information when being interviewed. Herein lies the value of cultural probes, as when they’re well designed, they enable participants to share latent information that may seem mundane or inconsequential to them but may be invaluable to a researcher or designer.

While the overarching aim of cultural probes is to facilitate divergent ideas and exploration, tailoring kits to suit a specific context (i.e. interaction design) can be especially useful for emerging designers as the findings will often be easier to organise. Another key aspect to keep in mind when designing your kit of probes is that the tasks you expect to participants to complete must be engaging! A key issue with this type of method is the expectation that someone will simply engage with the probes because you have asked them to. It is up to you, the designer, to carefully craft probes that engage your participants as this engagement is the ‘reward’ for participating in your research.

Activity

Before you start

When developing a cultural probes kit there are a few important questions to address, as responding to these will inform and shape the kinds of probes you include. These questions include:

• What is the primary research focus?
• How do the probes address the research?
• What kind of data will the probes offer you?
• What are the time constraints?
• How will you gather your participants?
• How will you ensure participant engagement?
• How will you deliver the kits, and ensure they are returned?
• What incentives, if any, will you offer participants in exchange for their involvement?

As you can see from this list of questions, carefully crafting and executing cultural probes successful takes time and be quite a laborious task. Don’t let this discourage you from exploring cultural probes in your projects but do keep the logistical difficulties in mind when deciding whether or not this method is suited to your project constraints.

While it might seem impractical to consider using cultural probes as part of an assessment item, given the short time frame, we have created an activity that focuses more on the process of implementing probes that are accessible and allow for a relatively short turnaround time. The activity below focuses less on the design of context-specific probes and more on gathering general insights into the day-to-day lives of prospective users, which are recorded digitally and appropriate technologies they already have access to.

Activity steps

1. Select your participants. A group of 3-4 people is well suited to a project with a limited timeframe as this will enable you to deploy, track and collect responses and should leave enough time to integrate your findings into further design development.
2. Prepare your kit of probes. Firstly, choose a digital platform that enables image and text uploads. Blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr are all accessible and offer the basic upload functionality required, although there are plenty of alternatives. Consider working with your participants to determine the sharing platform that suits them best is another option, which also may reduce the learning curve and time commitment expected from them.
3. Use images, text and diagrams to explain tasks. Open ended questions allow participants to provide more detail about their experiences. Set a small series of tasks that each participant can complete and document via your chosen sharing platform. Images can be documented and uploaded using a smartphone – the key here is to encourage participants to work with the technologies they’re familiar with to reduce their perceived effort.
4. Brief the participants on the expected time commitments and process.
5. Deploy the probes – about 1 week with daily documentation from each participant is a good amount of engagement to aim for.
6. You can keep track of participant engagement by checking in on their blogs/wherever the kits are hosted. Check in with participants to see if they have any questions about tasks.
7. Once the time period for your probes has elapsed, collate the data and consider using an organisational method to interpret and analyse it such as Octopus Clustering.

References

1. Gaver, Bill, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti. 1999. ‘Design: Cultural Probes’. Interactions 6 (1): 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224.291235.