Cultural probes
A pack of materials with open-ended tasks, such as postcards, maps, a camera or a diary, that people complete on their own over a few days and then return to the team.
What it’s for
Helps you get close to the lives of people you can't observe up close, and find ideas an interview wouldn't bring out.
Key elements
Open, playful tasks
Questions that invite people to tell and imagine, not to tick answers.
Each person does it at their own pace
With no one from the team present, at home and in their daily life.
To inspire, not to measure
What comes back is read as clues, not as data to be counted.
How it’s done
Design the pack with tasks made for that group of people.
People complete it over a few days, on their own.
The team reads it together and draws design ideas from it.
Applications in design
When to use it
At the start of a project, when you want to learn about a group's daily life and open up new ideas.
Avoid
Treating them like a survey and counting answers.
Don’t fall for it
What comes back is incomplete and chosen by each person: complement it with conversations.
Connections
Authors and works
- 1999
Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti
They created probes in a project with older people in three European communities: they sent packs with postcards, maps, a disposable camera, and a diary, and made clear they weren't after an objective view of people's needs, but inspiration.
- 2007
Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish
They reviewed how probes had been used in human–computer interaction and showed that they had often become just another way to collect data.
Sources
Original sources
- Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes. interactions, 6(1), 21–29. View source: Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999)
Academic reviews
- Boehner, K., Vertesi, J., Sengers, P., & Dourish, P. (2007). How HCI interprets the probes. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’07) (pp. 1077–1086). ACM. View source: Boehner, K., Vertesi, J., Sengers, P., & Dourish, P. (2007)
Last reviewed: