I think the probes were a great way for these artists to bring out the kind of answers they wanted from their audience of elderly people. Not only did they include textual cues, but visual cues that invited the audience to interact to generate their answer. I especially liked the different maps they included, and how they didn't just ask them to tell them where they had been or lived but these "zones" of more irreverent nature, like where they would go to be alone or where they liked to daydream. I think these questions make the audience feel like the designer cares about them as a person, not just as a demographic or statistic. Using these probes is a non-traditional way of researching your audience, and getting to know them will ultimately serve them better. Why would you spend so much time designing something if your intended audience doesn't understand it?
It almost seems like a project in itself to develop these cultural probes. Do Not Disturb, a senior thesis project website I found, is an interactive campaign much like Gaver's. From the Do Not Disturb website:
"Do Not Disturb is an interactive campaign to promote awareness of nuisance noise. Instead of following traditional hard-hitting campaign approaches Do Not Disturb is about giving the issue a buzz feeling within the community. Using three different approaches Do not Disturb encourages people to interact and participate with the issue through the Noise Poster, Noise Bomb Pack and the Do Not Disturb Website. By adding elements of interaction in to the campaign, it allows the issue to be communicated between people without it having to be verbal."
The designer's project is very well researched and she used cultural probes to find out about what kind of antisocial behaviors bother people and why. She made her audience think about what these things are, how much time they take away from you, what the person that engages in this behavior looks like, and where they happen. This allowed her to see how her audience responds to her idea and what they get out of it. It even helped guide the course of her project:
"This has led me to steer my project towards anti social noise. Instead of concentrating on anti social behaviour as a whole I can focus my attention on the noise side of it. I feel that although I did not get the results that I had hoped for my probes have still been successful in influencing my project."
Therefore, I feel that cultural probes are important to my project as well, especially as it deals with relationships. If I made a cultural probes package, it could include some of these things:
- stickers of men and women that the user can place in home environments to show where, when, how, and why the couple argues
- pre-made flowcharts that ask the user to fill in the most common directions of arguments with their partner from beginning to end
Here are some cultural probe packages that I love for the design:
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