Remembering the motivations of cultural probes

Some extracts from the original text by Gaver et al.

• Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
• None of these tasks (or any of the others we used) produced returns that were easy to interpret, much less analyze. How could you compare two photographs, even if you knew both were meant to show “the spiritual centre of the home?”
• Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint.
• When we finally receive the results it is clear that they are incomplete, unclear, and biased. We do not ask volunteers to explain their responses. Instead, we value the mysterious and elusive qualities of the uncommented returns themselves. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
• We are forced into a situation that calls for our own subjective interpretations. We have to see our volunteers in terms of our own experiences, understanding their responses empathetically, not intellectually.
• Rather than producing lists of facts about our volunteers, the Probes encourage us to tell stories about them, much as we tell stories about the people we know in daily life. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
• the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences.

• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising. 
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring. 
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns. 
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.

We like this analogy. If Probes are collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time, then “probology” is an approach that uses Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design. We accept that Probes, the technique, may be appropriated for a variety of different ends. We hope, however, that other researchers and designers will embrace “probology” as well as Probes in pursuing design for everyday pleasure.