Cultural Probes as a Research Method by Ben Matthews

(Associate Professor, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark)

Cultural Probes are something of a can of worms. It would be nice to make a sharp distinction between design methods and research methods and say that Probes are not about attaining knowledge about the world, but about facilitating the creation of something new. Unfortunately, it would be misleading to do so.

Much to Bill Gaver's chagrin, and despite his protests, probes have frequently been used as a method of doing research about user populations, rather than what they were originally intended to be (according to Gaver), which was to subvert a data/research-based approach to design, and establish a more designerly, open-ended, ambiguous, pluralistic way of inspiring design concepts. Just to confuse matters, Gaver et al. (1999) introduced probes as a "research through design" approach, though exactly what the 'research' bit consisted of can be a little hard to pin down. There are a couple passing remarks in the '99 probes paper to the fact that probes provided insights into the rich textures of local cultures, but there isn't much more specific than that to go on.

Others' subsequent work that has applied (or bastardized) the use of probes is largely different to the original though, and it depends on which incarnation of them you are considering as to whether or not they constitute a 'method', and then what kind of method: whether they are used as an inspirational design method or a method to do research about users for design. Two recent (and contrasting) discussions of the probes literature are good reads, if anyone's interested: Boehner et al. 2007 and Graham et al. 2007, which represent two different takes on the information versus inspiration interpretations of probes.

References

Boehner, K. et al., 2007. How HCI interprets the probes. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.1077-1086.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T. & Pacenti, E., 1999. Cultural Probes. Interactions, 6(1), p.21-29.

Graham, C. et al., 2007. How probes work. In Proceedings of the 2007 conference of the computer-human interaction special interest group (CHISIG) of Australia on Computer-human interaction: design: activities, artifacts and environments. Adelaide, Australia: ACM, p. 29-37.

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