Cultural Probes

Anne Burdick, head of the Media Design Program, organized a roundtable today at the South Campus of the Art Center College on the topic of Cultural Probes in design work. Probes are defined as designed objects and activities used in qualitative research studies. They have emerged as a robust tool for designers to gather rich insights into people’s lives and values. Probes are really good at revealing experience, yet do not produce knowledge – that must be interpreted from the results.

information collected from one of the probes displayed above

All speakers talked about probes as creating a place for self-reflection – a place where the users (or people under research) stop whatever they’re doing, and answer a question or follow through with a certain activity. They self document through these actions. They talked about the differences in approach between designers and anthropologists, claiming that the latter do not accept intervention, while designers seek it. Using the language of design, these probes somewhat externalize a person’s interior thoughts. So instead of just “saying” (as in an ethnographic interview), the person can “show”, instead of writing, they may draw.

This practice also aims to collect data from the subject’s point of view – handing them cameras so they take photographs (instead of the researcher taking pictures from an external perspective). Lisa and Sean showed one really great example of a probe, where three families were given a paper and pens. The Parents were to use the red pen, and the teens the black. They were all supposed to note sounds they heard during the day. In the first family, the parents wrote on one side of the paper, while the teens wrote on the other. The second was much more integrated, while the third was mostly pictures and not text. Simple probe, big differences in interpretations, which lead to a basic understanding of these families.

information visualization & analysis above (from the probes)

Still, the probes have a multi-dimensional quality, which positions them at the intersection of design and the social sciences. within the human-centered design research community, probes have been used primarily to inspire empathy and new approaches for design. In the super studio class at MDP, students designed a probe which included the chumby – essentially a casing of plexi-glass enclosing the chumby, which displayed images from a live webcam (in the picture, the chumby is turned off):