Cultural Probe
In the article ”Cultural Probe”, Gaver talks about the definition of a cultural probe: a medium that is used to “provoke inspirational responses” from a given subject. Many examples of cultural probes involve items such as notebooks, disposable cameras, stickers, etc. For this assignment, my goal is to use this opportunity to engage with such user experience, but in a digital form instead of the traditional physical objects.
The goal of this assignment was to design a probe that provides an insight into the life, identity, or culture of your peer. My partner for this assignment is Tania Zaidi. I want to use this assignment as an opportunity to do research and learn about my partner’s lifestyle after quarantine began.
Considering the fact that we have to deliver the research in a digital type of manner, I was thinking about electronic notebooks. A prominent example of such is an app called “Paper”. The app contains a collection of creative templates. From color books, doodling books, to journals, these templates allow users to select the template they desire and express their creativity on it. Inspired by this app, I wanted to create something that serves as a digital scrapbook.
First, I wrote down what kind of features that I would be including in the cultural probe kit. I also highlighted what kind of questions that I should be considered while creating the research questions. The directions that I should be aiming at are the sources of influence, my partner’s feelings about the situations/products/people, and her long term aspirations and how are they different comparing with her real-life situations.
After writing down the first draft, I began to dig deeper into more specific questions that I was considering. I have decided on the topic: what are my partner’s daily habits like under COVID quarantine? I created four categories for the questions: eating, sleeping, working, and spending.
Finally, after marking down the questions, I began to design my scrapbook. In some of the questions (such as the “5 things I bought for myself” and the go-to menus), I would be asking my partner to provide photos and giving her the opportunity to play around with them. In other questions, the partner would sketch out her thoughts. An example of such would be the question where I ask her to sketch out her daily routine in the form of a pie graph. By making these questions interactive and minimizing writing, I aim to create a digital cultural probe that allows my partner to express her creativity while contributing to my research questions.
By looking at the information my partner provided, I learned that Tania’s lifestyle is quite organic and indoor-style. Her go-to menus are homemade style and a number of her spendings were related to her routines (an example is her easel and painting ni her daily routine chart).
