Probes: A Critique

The idea of a ’Cultural Probe’ was initially coined by William Gaver as part of an EU research project investigating how elderly people can increase their presence in a community (i). I have chosen to adopt the probe methodology and when doing so I have understood that the method does not transfer straight away to my project and in fact this raises some questions.

One:

The participants in the Gaver study were provided by the Presence Project. Therefore, one of two assumptions can be made. First of all, the participants were being paid to do the study. Or (and most likely) they volunteered to take part in the probe study due to a strong personal interest. In my case, the participants in my probe study are people who I have selected. With people who are volunteers, there is an essence of self-motivation which I do not have in my participants. This problem also made me think of other probe work that I have seen. Jane Wallis has frequently adopted probes and again, it is in her clients best interests to complete the probes. So this brings me to my first challenge. How can I engage people to complete my probe tasks. My probe needs to be short and engaging. Not too difficult so that no answer or just a generic one is produced. Finally, in Jane Wallis’ probe “dress pattern” the participant spent a whole afternoon looking through old dress fabrics that she used to wear. The reason for this commitment to the task was because of the great willingness of the participant due to the gain that they were going to get from the project.

Two:

The context of Gaver’s original probe was Amsterdam which is both a known location and in the context of an individual, is something quite impersonal. This made it easy for Gaver to produce mapping tasks and make comparisons with (such as the ‘if Amsterdam was New York’ task). However, my probe is going to be deployed into an unknown, personal research space which immediately raises too problems.

1. It will be difficult to come up with something that all the researches can compare their rooms too as they are all going to be unique and individual.

2. I have no real idea what each of the participants rooms are like so I can’t provide maps to each participant to ask them to draw on. A solution to this would be for them to draw maps of their won rooms however this can be time consuming and may limit the quality of the results gained from the study.

Challenges

1. What can I provide to people to motivate them and make them want to complete the probe tasks?

2. How can you capture peoples spatial environment in ways other than drawing?

3. What do you need to know about an unknown environment to create a full picture?

4. How can you map something in an abstract way?

i. Gaver, B. Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. 1999. Design: Cultural probes. Interactions 6(1). ACM, 21-29.