Cultural Probes
April 21, 2017 - Mistakes in Education
Tonight we read five different articles on cultural probes and started a debate on the purpose and value of this design research method. During my (bachelor) graduation almost 7 years ago I stumbled upon this method for the first time. I was graduating at Zilver Brand Driven Innovation, a company by Erik Roscam-Abbing professor at the TU Delft. They invented a digital cultural probe called ‘7 days in my life’ in which several participants gave insights in their life through several assignments. They used these insights for several clients in the beginning of the project.
As invented by Gaver the Cultural Probe is meant for gaining insights on a specific topic. Gaver argues that we should not extract data from this method to gain new insights, but let the insights speak for itself. – Gaver
The problem is there has been a strong tendency to rationalise the Probes. People seem unsatisfied with the playful, subjective approach embodied by the original Probes, and so design theirs to ask specific questions and produce comprehensible results.
I recognize the desire to rationalise results. I acknowledge the importance of the unknown and unexpected, but I also notice a design element in analysing which can reveil even more insights than the insights itself. Not for scientific reasoning, but for creating even more inspiration. Personally I think the appliance of the method is missing in the debate on cultural probes. There are a lot of articles on the gained insights and the use of this method, but it seems to miss out on maybe the most important part: relevance. How can designers use these method to gain insights and for what goal? What do you do after you gained all these unexpected insights. I experienced the translation of the cultural probe method myself when designing a insight driven researchinstrument. As part of my mission to inspire other designers, makers and inventors (that research is not just something you do at the beginning of the project, but is the red line which connects all the dots) I used a more iterative process in which research took an important role. I notices that the designers / researchers at Brand Driven Innovation were using these insights along the way of the design in the form of pictures, quotes, drawings and so on. The value of the cultural probe method is that it is the beginning of a new processloop.
According to Terry Hemmings, Karen Clarke and Mark Rouncefield probes are tools for designers to gain inspirational data to come up with a speculative design in the end.
Probes objects are viewed primarily as a way of capturing a sense of emotional forces that shape people’s home lives. Designers draw upon Probe returns as “inspirational data” for their design work.
This makes it important for designers to understand and interpret the findings.
The Cultural Probes approach, Gaver argues, “acts as a design intervention that elicits inspirational material while avoiding the understood social roles of researchers and researched”.
For Gaver, the ‘inspirational’ approach brings the user closer to the design space in a way that is seemingly different from conventional ethnographic methods. Professor Eric Roscam Abbing even broader the perspective of the use of cultural probes (diaries).
Because of the visual and rich character of the diaries (anecdotes, stories, pictures), they are an inspiring and powerful communication tool encourage customer-driven thinking within the organisation
So the cultural probe may have more to offer than only insights for designers. Using these tool as designers, and transferring the outcomes to several groups can create more insights on a lot of topics. We are about to reveil more about human beings. I realised that my research can really use this way of thinking in my current state of making. I need more insights from makers. In my research I really would like to gain more insights on making mistakes as part of the making- and/or design process. The debate about this method made me realise that a cultural probe, especially because it’s origin, can offer a lot of inspiration which can be helpful throughout the project. Let’s do it. Let’s make it! My next step: design a cultural probe about making mistakes.
References in this post