Dear Alison,
I'm not sure I can shed much light on your first question, but I do have a
take on it.
On 9/24/08 1:13 PM, "Alison Barnes" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> as a fairly new practice led phd student i have many tentative half formed =
> questions about this thread (not to mention many other things!). two are...
>
> where do listers feel cultural probes might fit into the axioms below, or, =
> as they are allegedly about inspiration rather than information, do they no=
> t belong here at all as they are something different?
I think 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. 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 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.
All the best,
Ben
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.
--
Ben Matthews
Associate Professor
Mads Clausen Institute
University of Southern Denmark
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