Probes and Participation
Connor Graham
Dept of Computing,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
c.graham[at]lancs.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This exploratory paper considers the relationship between
methodological techniques and forms of user participation.
Specifically our concern is to document the different kinds
of participation that different sorts of ‘Probes’ - ‘Cultural
Probes’, ‘Technology Probes’ etc - elicit, encourage and
provoke. Analysis of the different kinds of participation
invoked by Probes – imaginative, investigative, emotional,
discursive, reactive, disruptive, reflective, and playful –
may prove useful as heuristic devices guiding the selection
and deployment of these methodological and design tools.
Whilst there are further opportunities for new forms of
participation through ‘Probing’, new concerns, challenges
and risks have also emerged.
Keywords
Probes, participation, design
INTRODUCTION
Participative Design (PD) can be described in terms of a set
of analytic and constructive commitments, commitments
that can be understood as either moral/political or as
methodological. As Blomberg and Kensing [1] point out,
successful PD work requires: a perspective on the politics
of design; on participation; and on methods, tools and
techniques. PD is driven by a commitment to user
participation and encompasses a conception of the user as a
participant both in organizational life and any design
process. Much of the debate about PD concerns exactly
what kinds of participation might be entailed in design. The
focus on participation also entails new methodological
commitments involving working with users in coconstruction/co-realisation: rather than merely studying
them. Whether PD has successful cracked the difficult nut
of participation is open to question; Blomberg and Kensing
(1998:173) argue: “In many P.D. projects it is not possible
for all those affected by the design effort to fully
participate. In these cases the choice of user participants
and the form of participation must be carefully considered
and negotiated with relevant organizational members,
including management and the workers themselves.”
In this paper we wish to explore the meaning of
‘participation’ in the design process through examples of
participation in Probe deployments. There seems an
assumption in the HCI and design communities that Probes
are inherently participatory, but that the level of that
participation varies in terms of control over the disclosure
Mark Rouncefield
Dept of Computing,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
m.rouncefield[at]lancs.ac.uk
of information, analysis and input into design in particular
[1]. We believe this assumption is worth exploring in detail
thus we consider how different kinds of probes provoke
different participation with often quite different results.
What is a probe?
“…the name seemed right because it made multiple,
simultaneous references:- to space probes returning data
over time from far away- to medical probes poking into
intimate nooks and crannies- to probes as devices to
provoke reactions.” [Gaver personal communication]
Probes have variously been described as: “Collections of
evocative tasks meant to elicit inspirational responses from
people” [6]; “materials…treated as resources facilitating
cooperative analysis” [1]; “an instrument that is deployed
to find out about the unknown – to hopefully return with
some useful or interesting data” [10]; “an automatic
recording device that is sent to unknown territories where
human researchers cannot go, from where it collects
samples, and sends these back to the researchers” [11].
While all these definitions may not involve embracing “a
pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for
design” [6], many do indeed involve “subjective
engagement” and “empathetic interpretation” [ibid] of
people in a technology design enterprise. These definitions
also suggest that Probes involve: collecting (hopefully
interesting, perhaps inspirational) responses from people;
going into unknown, uncharted and difficult to reach
research territory; and asking questions that both the
researcher and researched generate answers to. Probes also
have particular forms and affordances [10]. Finally Probes
generate (auto)biographical accounts of individuals’ lives,
making ‘the ordinary’ visible, assuming participants are the
experts in their own lives, and thus supporting an ongoing
dialogue between participants and designers [Error!
Reference source not found.].
What is participation?
Much of the discussion above alludes to ‘participation’ in
some way: people respond to questions, generate accounts,
make visible the ordinary, and engage in dialogue and
conversation. However such discussion is also focused on
data collection and analysis. Participatory Design actually
involves ‘the user’ in the design process. There are
additional, methodological concerns, of validity,
generalization and ethics, with using Probes to encourage
participation. For example, as Probes returns are highly
individual, which individual’s returns should we take most
seriously in the design process? How do we deal with needs
and desires that will appear when new technologies are in
place? Who do we involve in participation and how many
of each group/person should be involved? Many of these
questions are not new, but Probes bring these concerns into
renewed focus. For example, if a participant feels
empowered through Probe involvement but is not involved
in any design decisions, is this empowerment? If a
participant feels emancipated through describing their
everyday life and is then involved in the design of a new
technology that consumes much (unpaid) time, disrupts
their life and possibly transforms it for the worse, how can
this be regarded as emancipatory?
What is design?
Considering design is important to contextualise both
participation and PD. Vetting Wolf et al. [14], describe a
useful distinction between “engineering design” and
“creative design” in terms of different practices and views
on rigour which may well impact on participation in the
design process. Engineering design is formalised,
‘objective’ and often defined in lexical terms, whereas
creative design explores a ‘design space’ through
subjective involvement by the designer and “a tight
interplay between problem setting and problem solving”
often through the use of real artifacts such as sketches and
models. They also describe how both schools of ‘design’
involve rigour; “a repeatable process, of a consensual
standard of quality, in use by a professional community of
practice” that also invoke methodological issues for PD.
where and in whose company. Finally there is a sense in
which Gaver et al’s Probes are fun: they engage
participants in playful participation.
Informational Probes
The Informational Probes [3], deployed at a residential care
setting for former psychiatric hospital patients as part of the
Digital Care Experience, were concerned with ‘getting at’ a
setting where any disruption (through the implementation
of new technology and even ethnographic work for
example) had to be carefully considered – the care work at
the setting could be endangered through poorly designed,
unstable (although, perhaps, highly innovative) technology
and processes and the informants themselves, quite
understandably, were often reticent to have a analytical
vivisection conducted on their everyday lives. Through the
use of cameras, a scrapbook and a visitors’ book, people
involved participated through investigating their own lives
– describing their own rhythms and routines and in doing
so providing an account of the ordinary detail of their lives.
Technology Probes
Since Bill Gaver and his colleagues developed ‘Cultural
Probes’, they have been adopted and adapted. Here we
consider Cultural Probes [3,5,6]; Informational Probes [1];
Technology Probes [10]; Mobile Probes [7]; Empathy
Probes [11]; Domestic [13]; and even Urban Probes [12].
Technology probes were first used as part of the
interLiving project. Technology probes, being intuitive and
learnable artefacts minimally designed and embedded
within the research setting, allow the capture of
ethnographic style data (through logging) from within,
while the same technology is appropriated and
domesticated. For example, the messageProbe deployed in
the interLiving Project enabled participants to communicate
using digital Post-It notes in a zoomable space and also
collected data concerning the kinds of messages that are
exchanged across a distance between different family
members at different times and with varying frequency. As
well as being a placed artefact capturing the temporal and
substantive nature of message exchange, the messageProbe
was provocative or “different enough from commonly
available technologies that they provoke families to
consider how they do or don’t fit into their lives” [10]. In
this deployment of Probes participants reacted to new
technologies being placed in, and at times disrupting their
lives. Yet these Probes supported playful interactions and
also, due to their logging functionality, ensured
participation was highly visible and recountable.
Cultural Probes
Domestic Probes
KINDS OF PROBES
Our initial discussion, we hope, has provoked some
questions concerning what ‘participation’ actually means
for individuals in the kinds of projects we involve them in
and in the sorts of roles they have in those projects. Here
we wish to consider different kinds of Probes and the
various forms of ‘participation’ these varieties encourage.
Cultural probes were deployed as part of the Presence
Project [5] across three communities of older people
(Bijlmer, a housing development in the Netherlands;
Majorstua, a district in Oslo; and Peccioli a small village in
near Pisa) to get at “people’s emotional, aesthetic, and
experiential reactions to their environments, but in openended, provocative and oblique ways” [3]. These Cultural
Probes involved imaginative participation through
materials like a dream recorder: a repackaged digital
memo-taker enabling participants to describe a vivid dream
upon waking. They also involved investigative
participation through media diaries for example that
required them to record the various media they use, when,
Although the probes deployed at the University of
Melbourne [13] are labelled Domestic Probes in this paper,
we acknowledge that this heading is somewhat artificial:
they have aspects of Cultural, Informational and Empathy
Probes. They have, indeed, been used in domestic settings.
This particular kind of Probe was distinctive in that the
probe data was analysed systematically to produce a
descriptive model of intimacy and constituent themes, in
contrast with other uses of Probe data. The analysis was
also to inspire designs via design workshops involving
research participants. The focus of these Probes was on
investigation and reflection: diaries were used to record
daily communication and interaction activities and
catchphrase labels and postcards encouraged both reflection
and the sending of images or short messages. In this
deployment there was also an element of disruption: the
process of investigating participants’ lives actually upset
their normal routines [13].
Mobile Probes
Mobile probes extend the notion of a Technology Probe.
They combine the diary method, self-photography, the
Experience Sampling Method and collaborative data
analysis in order to document participants’ thoughts,
feelings and actions while they are moving. They were
deployed in collaboration with companies by the University
of Art and Design at Helsinki in order to envisage new
concept designs and to create “an empathic understanding
between the study participants and the company designers”
[7]. As well as the ‘traditional’ theme diary and disposable
camera participants they used a camera phone running a
Java application. This application set tasks, such as
instructions for taking pictures (e.g. Take a picture of
something credible), and asked questions to facilitate selfdocumentation through repeated daily questions: What was
inspiring today? Why? Thus, these Probes were highly
reflective and involved participants, through the phone
application investigating and making visible their own lives
as well as reacting to a new technology.
Empathy Probes
Empathy probes aimed to stretch notion that Probes
sustained an ongoing dialogue between designers and
participants. Mattelmäki & Battarbee [11] stress how these
probes did not directly support ongoing product
development (their client was a heart rate monitor
manufacturer), but instead how they wanted “to experiment
if the probes and the interview material as such could be
used to find new points of view”. Participants were those
who regularly exercised and who had medical conditions
varying from headaches to serious heart conditions. This
version of Probes, as well as including a diary and camera
for ‘documentary’ and reflective purposes, engaged
participants’ emotions through including stickers of cartoon
faces and other illustrations to represent different emotions.
The pack also asked open questions on illustrated cards
regarding attitudes, experiences and emotions pertinent to
heart rate monitor development. Participants also discussed
Probe returns and participants used their imagination to
assemble a collage describing their ideal wellbeing and
exercising assistant.
Urban Probes
The most recent appropriation of Cultural Probes is
probably the hardest to consider in terms of participation.
This form of Probe aims to support radically innovative
design in urban spaces through supporting urban
inhabitants becoming “proactive in the evolving of and
future design of our urban landscapes” [12]. The stated goal
of this methodology is “to understand how our future fabric
of digital wireless computing will influence, disrupt,
expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent
within our public urban landscapes” (ibid). Urban Probes
use observations to examine public spaces in detail –
people, movement and actions. Then interventions, such as
the lost postcard technique (involving the dropping of
postcards in public places) and interviews are designed to
disrupt this current context. Thus participants are only
involved obliquely and in a discursive manner – in this
version Probe participants have little autonomy. These
interventions and subsequent interviews are designed to
influence the design of a functional urban artifact.
PROBES AND PARTICIPATION
“Perhaps most important is that I deeply value the
undermining of certainty we achieve with our probes. I also
value the subversion of understood researcher-researchee
relations. I like the possibility that people's responses
include their aspirations and fears as well as their lived
realities, and that they might lie to us or leave out stuff, and
that's all explicitly understood and accepted and fair. I like
that the probes reveal us as much as the people we give
them to. I like that they are playful and rewarding, so we
aren't just taking from volunteers but giving to them as
well.” (Gaver, personal communication)
Throughout all the versions of Probes described above
there is a sense that these Probes are ‘uncertain’ – they
require working out. There is also a sense that different
kinds of Probes bring users to account to members
differently: for example, probes that log everyday actions
do this quite differently from those that require describing
dreams. Each makes different forms of action and
interaction visible and in different ways. We have argued
elsewhere that Probes ‘work’ because they attempt to get at
participants everyday lives and through a joint ‘working
out’ and ‘assemblage’ involving both participants and
researchers [Error! Reference source not found.] and
there is clear evidence of a genuine attempt to engage
participants in discursive participation in all versions with
the exception of Urban Probes. Most forms of Probes
involve investigative participation – when participants
explore and examine aspects of their own lives. In doing so,
participants engage in reflective participation – both in the
standard sociological sense of becoming aware of actions
and interactions and describing them in some way, and in
the ethnomethodological sense of making actions
accountable (as already noted).
However, there is also evidence of different forms of
participation. Cultural Probes emphasise imaginative and
playful participation, engaging participants in activities that
promote the use of aspects of their lives that are more
‘ludic’ and less goal-driven. Empathy Probes emphasise
emotional participation, seeking out participants’ affective
responses both to things in their everyday lives and new
technologies. Both Technology Probes and Mobile Probes
emphasise reactive participation and, to some extent, a
change in participation or disruptive participation.
Participants have to react to these new technologies placed
in their lives and to the disruption to their existing routines
that they enforce. There is also some evidence of this
disruption in Domestic Probes as the deployments actually
impinged on participants’ everyday routines.
that ‘participation’ should perhaps now address more
thoroughly.
TOWARDS DESIGN
1. Blomberg, J. and Kensing, F. Participatory Design:
Issues and Concerns. CSCW: The Journal of
Collaborative Computing 7, 3-4 (1998), 167-185.
Why use Probes? For many of us, Probe deployment is
motivated by a desire to involve users and to move towards
a design of some kind, and we are confronted with practical
questions concerning what kinds of Probes to deploy. In
this section we wish to suggest some critical questions for
Probe selection and deployment. These questions are
exploratory, require testing and have the primary purpose
of informing Probe selection but also support some critical
reflection on the level and type of participation of
participants in the design process.
Who is your user? This requires researchers to know
something about individual users before both designing and
deploying particular Probes. What kind of materials might
s/he respond to? How much time has s/he got? What are
their technical skills? This suggests that Probes work best
after some initial understanding of individual users has
been generated.
How long will people be involved? This is closely related
to the previous one and is essentially a question about time
– is the Probe deployment a ‘one off’ or the start of an
ongoing process of co-realisation [Error! Reference
source not found.]? It also concerns the different kinds of
involvement they may have over time – the next question.
How will people participate? This question extends
beyond the important practical details of how data is
collected, shared and analysed. It also concerns the kind of
participation expected – imaginative, investigative,
emotional, discursive, reactive, disruptive, reflective,
and/or playful? A key concern is how people’s lives will
alter through the Probe deployment.
What happens next? This question concerns what happens
to the output of the Probe process and the tradition in which
this output will be used – engineering, design or more
‘craft’-oriented.
Consideration of these questions will facilitate, we contend,
critical review of the objective of Probes in the broader
research/design enterprise. Are they to support description
of people? Are they to infer new research questions? Are
they to directly support design? An ongoing opportunity
and concern for Probe approaches is how much of people’s
lives are now readily available (e.g. through Web search
histories) for ‘probing’ and willingly put on display (e.g.
through blogging) to support any Probe process. Thus, it
seems, the threshold for initial involvement, if not full
participation, has lowered. However, what is physically
possible to gather and share (e.g. by research teams that are
increasingly mobile and distributed) and ethically
permissible (e.g. without engaging in unethical
surveillance) to use from this morass of personal
information and how to efficiently make sense of it (e.g.
through data mining, visualizations etc.) are two questions
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