Understanding Climate Change Impact Across Socioeconomic Strata: A Cultural Probe Analysis
Overview
Given the project brief, we were supposed to create a cultural probe or toolkit by deciding on a social issue and a user group that would help us answer our research questions or leave a digital or physical trail for further conclusions via data collection and analysis. I finally decided on the effects of climate change on various income groups. I then built my cultural probe kit, which included tools to help me collect data about people’s socioeconomic status and how they are affected differently by the impacts of climate change.
Chosen Social Issue
I chose climate change because, no matter what time of year it is, the first thing my relatives in India ask me is, How’s the weather? and it’s surprising to hear them talk about what the weather conditions were like when they were my age. They frequently say things like,
Oh, our winters are getting colder
We haven’t had any rain this year
The summer had the highest humidity record this time.
I can “afford” not to be affected by climate change.
I often wondered what that meant and chose it as my topic for the cultural probes to investigate how the impact of climate change differs for people at different levels on the social ladder.
Target User Group
Older adults (50+) in West Lafayette who have observed how climate or weather conditions have changed over the last 20–30 years and their income levels have affected how they perceive climate change's impacts
Research Questions
1. What do these people understand by the term “impacts of climate change”?
2. What are their income ranges, and how has that been a factor in dealing with the impacts of climate change?
3. What did the surroundings look like 15–20 years ago, and how has climate change impacted them?
Prototype Construction and Iterations
I wanted to keep in mind that these older adults may have some time on their hands to do smaller activities over the course of a week or even a day or two, so I kept the toolkit limited to things that will engage them and won’t require too much effort to complete.
Rough Sketches
These were the first iterations of tools I could think of that could be used to answer my research questions:
Prototyping Ideas
Some of the final ideas that I decided to make a physical prototype for were:
- A disposable camera for the people to click a picture of what they perceive as an impact of climate change in their surroundings (outdoors or indoors).
- A Climate change bingo for people to mark on with the memos provided to help me understand what words associated with climate change are they aware about or familiar with
3. A deck of income range flashcards, which will help me understand where they stand on the economic ladder, and a map to pinpoint their location to know what kinds of neighborhoods those people can afford to live in
4. A sketch pad (15–20 pages) for the people to draw or write on; What is one effect of climate change that has increased their expenses, and what is that expense? Also, describe what that aspect looked like 20 years ago.
5. A cloth bag to keep the theme of climate change intact and act as a container for the cultural probe kit. I intend to give this bag away as a gift to the participants to keep and use instead of plastic or paper bags and return the responses in a small cardboard box that I will provide separately.
Final Toolkit
Deployment and Analytical Strategy
Materials are mailed in a cloth bag to targeted participants, complete with an introduction card and manual, facilitating easy navigation. Each tool is labeled with a correlating number for streamlined use, with a pre-labeled return package included for response submission. Responses were categorized and analyzed to identify patterns in climate change impact awareness and financial discrepancies among income groups.
What did I learn?
I believe that using cultural probes as a research method can yield a large amount of data to analyze and answer our research questions in such a way that we can find the best way forward, if not completely answer them. I first thought about this topic in my CGT Seminar class when our professor was showing us the various locations around West Lafayette where we could go for excursions, hikes, boat rides, and so on. He also mentioned how these places used to have something but now don’t because of the extreme temperatures in the summer and winter (different flora and fauna).
While conducting secondary research, I came across many articles that listed climate change impacts as an environmental issue, but I eventually discovered a social angle to it when I was talking to my parents back home, and they mentioned that their electricity bills had increased due to the need for air conditioning in every room due to the extreme humidity in summers.
Following those discussions, I decided to investigate how people are affected by climate change based on how much they earn as a household.
Thank you for reading!
