Cultural Probes

Dr Claire McAndrew / Academic Practice / 12th January

It was useful to learn about culture probes once I’ve never heard about it before. In my opinion it’s a curious way of researching because, from what I understood, not only it can get results in order benefit design approaches to some problem but also the research is designed in a way it can give the desired type of answers. Therefore cultural probes can have different characters. They can be open-ended, they can create situations and provide choice. From cultural probes we can get resourceful stories, unexpected and deep responses, that wouldn’t be accessible with other method of research. The case studies were crucial to understand better the importance of the pack, how do cultural probes work and what we can get from them. However, I’m not sure how to engage and get people to participate. Moreover, it seemed difficult to do the data analysis. It’s not a quantitative analysis, but more a qualitative one, once we are dealing with real responses from real people. These are raw materials that should be kept raw, and interpret them every time we look at them. Also the issue of not knowing exactly if cultural probes can be really informative or more inspirational.

Finally, I must say that this lecture was hard to follow for me. Maybe it was the first lecture of the term so my ears were not adapted yet to English again, but also because the presentation had lots of blocks of text and made it difficult to understand the concept of cultural probes. I confess that just got it in the middle or the lecture.