01.24 // Presentations, Cultural Probes
Syllabus | Class Box Folder | Cultural Probes Assignment
Final team presentations
On Thursday, we had our final two teams present their observations in Construction Junction (CJ). The first team discussed product placement and visibility, and created a hypothesis around what an object classification system might look like for CJ, if value was split into four tiers.
The second team discussed greetings and farewells at CJ, noting their own impressions from a customer perspective, sights and sounds, as well as setting up cameras to record interactions from the cashier perspective.
Introduction
Researching with cultural probes
Cultural probes are interactive artifacts that may include surveys, installations, maps, drawings, journals and even cameras that users come across in their natural environments. The probe prompts reflection of sorts or feedback like “how would you rate this experience?” or “how well did we do?” They can be simple questions, or more involved assignments (like take-home diary studies), and even serve to provoke reactions. They require some effort from the user to be interested in participating, and to be self-aware and analytical.
Reasons to design a cultural probe
- Learn about users in the present time and space
- Can allow users to participate in the design process
- Gives a voice to the user
Examples of cultural probes
The Presence Project distributed kits with a map, camera, and diary to elderly people to learn more about their everyday lives and break stereotypes of “inactive” or “frail”.
A team studying millennials and biohacking made an installation asking “Do you even biohack, bro?”
Feedback
Students had questions about the use case of cultural probes. Is it a data-collection method recognized by the design community? What about participant bias? There are considerations based on your particular project’s goals—
1 — Are anecdotal insights (subjective) more important to your goals than scientific data (objective)? Voluntary nature of cultural probes can lead to self-selection bias, especially at smaller scales. However, anecdotal insights can be compelling from a journalistic / narrative-seeking perspective. The tradeoff is diving deeper into fewer insights, versus collecting lots of data but at a more surface-level.
Alternatively, your cultural probe can also be designed to collect data at scale in a more scientific manner, addressing the limitations and biases of your own study and watching for things like leading questions, wording, herd mentality, and forms of response bias.
2 — Are there any questions you want to explore that are better asked / observed in the user’s natural environment? Maybe you want to gauge the emotional response of users in a particular setting, like in their home or in a public area of interest instead of having them ‘remember a time when…’ Although more common in physical form, cultural probes can also be digital.
3 — Do you think you can draw better quantity or quality of feedback by engaging with users in person and with physical artifacts? You may also observe physical cues or elicit conversation and questions from participants who see you there. Some of it depends on the quality and effort in your designed cultural probe, and balancing that with the amount of time you have available to work on it. As mentioned above, cultural probes can also be digital.
4 — Are you trying to use cultural probes to generate answers or to generate questions? When used as part of a larger research project, cultural probes can help answer pre-existing questions, or lead you to new ones, that can then be asked in interviews, surveys, or posed as next steps.
Oversampling
One student asked if it wouldn’t overwhelm CJ customers to have our entire class (eight teams total) setting up cultural probes in their space. Perhaps it is a limitation and an opportunity. If you have ever been to a festival with booths, conference, or trade show, you will be familiar with being bombarded for attention. Some people are running errands and will not have time or interest, others may be inquisitive and offer additional feedback you did not even ask for.
Cognitive bias as researchers and research participants
As is the case with any method of user research, researchers and participants bring both their conscious and unconscious biases to the study. This knowledge helps us as researchers to question our findings, to remain open to different hypotheses, and to be aware of ourselves and each other.
