Recently I read some papers about how cultural probes evolved since their introduction by Dunne, Gaver and Pacenti. There is one that I found particularly interesting: „How HCI interprets the probes“ by Boehner, Vertesi, Sengers and Dourish. The paper does not critique on the probes as a method directly, but takes the adaptation of cultural probes in HCI as symptomatic for deeper epistemological concerns in the field, as they claim probes to „frame an alternative account to knowledge production“.
The authors’ basic critique is that there has been a desire in HCI to „domesticate“ the probes into an objective, reliable and formal method. They also claim the same attitude to misconstrue many other reflective and interpretative approaches in HCI.
Having examined a large number of paper mentioning the method, they show that there has been adaptation and variation with regard to the field of investigation (identity probes, urban probes, domestic probes, value probes) and the implementation of the probe (mobile probes, digital cultural probes, cognitive probes, technological probes).
While their material form as a package is frequentyl picked up, they are often used not to gather inspiration, but information. As such, they may complement or even substitute social science approaches or be interpreted with the help of social science methods. However, the probes’ sensitivity and provocative stance is rather neglected in the adaptation. In many cases, the initial subvertive attitude of the original probes has disappeared. Also the uncertainty that probes inherently carry is often regarded as a problem to be solved and not as an opportunity; at the same time, the idiosyncrasie of the probes is further neglected, pushing them towards a standartized method.
The authors finally argue that the probe adaptation reveals two fields of tension within HCI: The handling of interpretation (that tends towards positivist underpinnings) and to apply the method without the corresponding research attitude.
It is somehow interesting to see how a good part of the HCI community seems to struggle with the uncertainty of cultural probes. But even as a designer, you can stumble about your own assumptions and attitude. We tried to design our own probe package and some of the tasks we ended up with clearly aimed at information gathering. (Still it was way nicer to do than a questionnaire!) The more open-ended you want to be, the harder it gets to estimate the quality of your questions.
Also if you judge your probe package in terms of its usefulness, it is hard to predict how well it might do. Obviously the success of the probes depends heavily on the designer and his professional abilities. In the paper, the authors also mention how the part between the probe returns and the final design is often left out in the documentation. They acknowledge the difficulty to relate both, as the designer adds another interpretation layer. At this point, I am not sure to what extend the connection between inspirational material and design can be made explicit.
cultural probes in HCI
Hi Katharina
This post is quite timely for me! I have recently read an article about cultural probes in CoDesign Vol. 2 No. 1 March 06 and I was wondering where I might get more information, so some good pointers for me. I am not working in HCI at all, but think there is possibility to use such a probe in broader ethnographic/qualitative work. For example, my research is at the intersection of graphic design and geography - the representation of space - and I am proposing an ethnographic methodology in order to work with different communities within Hackney, London, to explore their understanding of place. It seemed to me a probe would be an interesting tool in this case. I am hoping the probe could both generate content for my design via the inclusion of such items as a camera, and questions or small exercises, as well as insight into their thinking about 'their place' and how it is represented.
Best,
Alison
Geography Probes?
Hello Alison,
I'm glad you found my article review useful. If you are further interested in the relation of cultural probes and ethnography, you might also like to read other publications by Dourish (e.g., "Implications for Design") and his critique on probes as a "discount ethnography" in HCI.
If you are interesed in local differences and personal narratives, probes might indeed be a good tool for you. The original cultural probes also aimed at discovering local particularities of how aged people experience their community in different cities. In HCI, there is a lot of literature about probes; you can find many examples at the ACM Digital Library, if you need further inspiration. Or you look at the Interaction Research Lab and their domestic probe package, which I like a lot. However, I think the probe packages are best when you design them individually to your special purpose. Just be sure that the sort of raw data you create is suitable for you: narrative, individual, probably incomprehensible...
If you try them, let us know how it worked out!
Probing further into place
Hey Katharina
Thanks for the great references! I have just taken a quick look at the Goldsmiths site and it is great - I feel it may inspire me to take this idea further.
I guess I will get a lot of stuff that is incomprehensible, but I kind of feel that is all part of it - I think I am working from Doreen Massey's definition of place as a melting pot of social relations, points of intersections and networks. Never static—a process and a site of multiple identities and histories. With all that going on, there is bound to be incomprehensible stuff, only understood by those who create/experience/live it themselves!
However, I also like Yi Fu Tuan's idea of place as 'pause' and that is partly what I am hoping the probes might do - get people to pause and to think about their 'place' and therefore communicate some of their understanding/feelings of it. It might be seen as completely contradictory to Massey, but I feel the two have potential to work together in some way, via theory & practice.
I'll let you know what happens!
more probing
hi katrina
you have probably moved on form this now, and i haven't quite got round to sending my probe packs out, but i have been doing a bit more reading around probes. so though i might try and reboot the thread.
what seems strange to me is the claim that the probes (in their original guise) are not analysed at all they just exist as inspiration for the designers who then, seemingly miraculously, make/construct an idea from them. i wonder if this isn't a bit disingenuous really. granted they are not analysed in the way of formal methods of qualitative analysis, but there surely is some analysis there, or how else would they move from them as inspiration to ideas.
it seems to me to maybe tie into the idea of (art &) design as 'just' being intuitive, therefore impossible to articulate in terms of its actions. but if we are designing within the realms of a 'reflective practitioner', then shouldn't it be possible to see this 'inspiration' in more concrete terms - in a sense, analyse it - and then articulate it?
off the top of my head i can't remember which article talks about the lack of articulation of this process from probe to design in other papers (and i can't be bothered to find it right now!) but i seem to remember it says that gaver et al do articulate this process. i'm not convinced of that at all - from what i have read they seem to want to keep a 'mystique' about it all. maybe that is because the more they articulate it the less people will see the inspirational possibilities, but i would like to think it were possible to both articulate the process and still subscribe to the original ideas.
best,
alison
The magic moment
Hello Alison,
you are mentioning a critical point in probes and in explaining the origin of design ideas in general. I cannot remember having read any description of how probe returns relate to their resulting designs. Probably the authors just consider this another issue?
I agree that producing design ideas is not a mysterious process, and that we can document and analyze it. Mystifying design is what disturbed me for a long time about many practicioners' self-images. Anyway, I learned from Rosan who conducted a project about transferability in design that the relation of an inspirational source and its interpretation in design is not always an entirely logical one. Probably we can trace the path of associations we take, and describe the sources of inspiration we rely on, but I doubt that this would make the connection entirely transparent, and I am not sure about how this tracing informs further practice (it might, though). Besides, the inspirational value of any given data seems to depend also on the designer's training. It's no miracle, but an expertise that is indeed hard to trace back.
This might be one reason why there is no description about the process from analyzing the probes to the design results. (Besides, one has to consider that many publications about probes relate to HCI, and that even probes are still a widely discussed and controversial method just because of its "dirtyness" and the problems for "scientific" analysis they cause. I admit not to be too familiar with qualitative analysis methods, so I can just rely on my common sense to judge that.)
Having designed and analyzed a probe set myself, I learned how the requirements for data to be analyzed and to be used for ideation are very different. This was one of the major conflicts we experienced in our project when applying probes. Basically, they are an alternative representation of a certain question and often lead to a specific narrative (if they are good). In that sense, they are probably similar to ethnographic descriptions. However, the probes discussion relates to the whole question about how analytic data can inform design at all.
Katharina.
Tracing ideas
Hello Alison,
we had Bill Gaver in Berlin to give a talk, so I could pass your question down to him. What he said about it was that in a design process, probes are often just one resource among others, like general research about an issue, and the designer's experience. So there is no direct way from probes to design.
Besides, as a method they require much interpretation, so that the probe findings are not transferred one to one into the final design. In fact the initial idea from the probes may be present in the result only in a very subtle sense and not immediately accessible. As a designer, you should probably not overrate the depth of a participant's response; much of it may not be well reflected, but more or less random. You don't have to expect everything to be meaningful.
I think he was quite pragmatic about probes: Take whatever works well, and if the result is good, the method is appropriate. That's what I understood. Not much of a mystification, though. It seems you can also look at the probe returns and digest them in terms of a new design proposal without further analysis. You can find it annoying that no one cares about proper tracing of the design process, but sometimes I find this hands-on attitude very sympathetic.
However, if you are more interested in identifying the connection of probes and outcome, this is maybe something nobody else investigated before.
Katharina.