Whose probe is it anyway? Connor Graham
Keith Cheverst
Mark Rouncefield
Department of Information Systems University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia +61 3 8344 1498
Computing Department Lancaster University InfoLab21, Lancaster, England +44 1524 1524 510312
Computing Department Lancaster University InfoLab21, Lancaster, England +44 1524 594186
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the “probe” as a method for enabling the design of technology through consideration of a particular case. In doing so we explore how systematic the use of the data from probes should be and who should own the process in which a probe pack may form a part. The probe pack we discuss here was designed around inspecting the use of visual information and message exchange at a care setting where health care workers cared for ex-psychiatric hospital patients in a hostel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The intention was both to enable care workers to describe their current practice and help them envisage new technology design. The probe design was informed by a period of fieldwork and the probes were launched immediately after a participatory design workshop that had presented and discussed some technology designs. An interview with one informant was conducted after the receipt of the probe pack. We found the probes to be particularly useful for describing the use of artifacts and places at the setting and for supporting a semi-structured interview about a participant’s work, but ineffective for evoking new technology design directly from the participants themselves. We reflect on the probe pack, other types of probes that have been exploited and challenges for probes as an approach.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organisation Interfaces – evaluation/methodology, computersupported cooperative work.
General Terms
Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Cultural probes, informational probes, technology probes, design probes
1. INTRODUCTION
Cultural probes, since first proposed and described by [6], have been appropriated and adapted for a range of purposes within a variety of design processes. These include probes oriented towards understanding the nature of everyday life at a sensitive setting in order to generate possible requirements for new technology design [3] and probes aimed at collecting data on technology use while new, minimalist artifacts are field tested by engineers and innofused [4] by users [11]. While we are sympathetic to the notions that cultural probes act as ‘uncertain’ and ‘ambiguous’ inspiration for design and facilitate the
generation of stories within design teams and also that one can dwell too much on process, we also believe that probes have a particular value within particular design processes and that there are lessons to be learned from these deployments. For instance, cultural probes have been used within a scheme of participatory design [15] to design technology mediating intimacy and within a user-centred design process involving both users and designers aimed at designing for pleasure [6]. Here we wish to return to and question the original notion of a probe and, in doing so, consider who this method belongs to in a process supporting technology design for pleasure, utility, therapy, or everyday activity, whether this process of design be participatory [14] or co-realisation [9] or something else. In this exploration we make the simple claim that probes are useful for gaining insight into particular settings and that their “interpretation and analysis” [5] can have varying levels of formality. Thus the question posed in the title of this paper is not a mere play on words but an invitation to consider how unstructured and impromptu this technique should be and who actually owns the process that probes form a part of (e.g. users, designers, engineers, social scientists). In addressing this question we ponder whether probes only provide inspiration over information [6], if the data collection approach supported by probe packs should be treated as ‘fragmentary’ or ‘scientific’ [6], exploratory or focused, who really owns the designs emerging from a process involving probes and when key players (such as designers and users) should be involved. We endorse the view that probes are generative of stories about settings, but consider that these ‘stories’ tend to be imported into a particular design process or methodological scheme. We also consider what users’ particular involvement in any process involving probes is and if probes should be used to innovate or, instead, to tune current practice and configurations of technology. Central to this discussion is the notion of ownership of the design process, the designs produced, and the creative process. We will explore the questions we pose here through the examination of a particular case, involving a particular probe pack deployment. We will show that probe deployment is indeed part of a “multi-layered” process, but also question if the position of the designer in this process should be as a ‘lens’ at both the beginning of the design exercise and at the end [5].
2. SETTING & PROCESS
The probes described here were utilized at the end of a process in which participants were actively engaged over a prolonged period ([3],[7]). Within this process we tried to enable users to realize
their needs through facilitation and create a context for design and development where “effort shifts fairly smoothly between implementing or adjusting previously decided possibilities, picking up on the host of small problems that arise during work, coping with the unanticipated consequences of previous actions, talking to individuals…” [1]. The setting where the probes were deployed was quite unusual: a community care facility in a small town in the north of England supporting ex-psychiatric hospital patients. The participants were health care workers aged between 25 and 58, operating across the two sites forming the community care facility. One site is staffed all the time, even at night, whereas the other is staffed at regular working hours. Due to the nature of the setting there were considerable constraints governing data collection. These included concerns over confidentiality and disturbing and alarming the residents through the data collection process. This sensitivity was indeed a motivation for studying the health care workers over the residents in this phase of the work. Thus, in the earlier phases of the work, data was collected through cultural probes that were more informational in character than Gaver et al.’s [6] original conception [3], technology probes (when new technology use is actually logged) [2], field visits and interviews with staff and researchers involved in the earlier phases of the work [7]. In this part of the research process we were keen to explore the possibility of handing over the “provocateur” role [6] to the participants themselves so that they could reflect outside the norm of their current practice and hopefully surprise us. The probes themselves were ‘launched’ after a participatory design workshop which capped a period of field work. At this workshop ‘stories’ or snippets of typical, everyday action and interaction at the setting were presented to participants for confirmation or disconfirmation. These scenario-like entities acted as a means for staff to reflect on their current practice and on opportunities for new technology deployment. A technology demonstration was also presented which played out how particular technology (in this case a mobile phone interacting with a public display) might work. The session produced several crude designs for technology configuration, described mainly in text (see Figure 1). Two multi-disciplinary groups placed the participants in the centre of the creative process, while supporting them with a computer scientist and social scientist in each team. One of these designs that emerged was then ‘fleshed out’ by the research team [7].
Figure 1. Workshop Design Description
These details are not insignificant: they show that participants were involved in a prolonged process of data collection and reflection and co-realised [9] the resultant designs, crude though they might have been. There was also a deliberate attempt to introduce and describe technology that both constrained their conceptions of what might be deployed at the site and helped them envisage the possibilities offered by new technologies.
3. PROBE PACK DESIGN
The purpose of the probe pack was to enable participants to reflect on particular phenomena and artifacts at the settings and, above all, to enable them to sketch some configurations of technology that would be suitable for the particular nature of the setting. A very important feature of this probe pack was that it was sequenced. The reflections in the first two sections (see 3.1 and 3.2) were supposed to support self-directed envisagement in the last (see 3.3). Thus this pack was not only initially intended as a tool supporting reflection, but also as a kind of prop supporting the ‘acting out’ of design ideas [10]. This structure meant this probe pack was more proscribed and less constrained than many others (e.g. 15) due the particular kind of responses we wanted to elicit. The probe pack comprised a booklet, a Polaroid camera with extra film, glue, a disposable camera, PostIt notes and pens. The booklet was divided into three parts and was designed to be kept like a journal or impressionistic diary capturing the particular as it happened over a week. When the probe packs were returned, one participant was interviewed, focusing on the substance of their return. Only two probe packs out of three were returned.
3.1 Photo Diary
The Photo Diary was a means for capturing the properties of the environment in which the participants acted and interacted. It was oriented towards understanding what might indeed populate a digital public display if deployed at the setting. As already noted this technology had been described at the participatory design workshop via a demonstration. The instructions (Figure 2 below) had a reflective component (under the ‘Think about…’ section) and an action component (under the ‘What to do…’ section) and were oriented to visuals and information in the environment. This ‘reflect-do’ format was consistent across all three sections of the booklet. The Photo Diary was successful at eliciting the particular artifacts and information that care-givers used at the setting: notices on the walls (6 photos); visible artifacts such as papers, files, and books (6 photos); people, including residents and staff (5 photos); communication technology such as CCTV, a messaging system, an intercom (5 photos); ‘hidden’ artifacts used to store important information such as files (4 photos); pictures on the walls (2 photos) and a global view of one office (1 photo). Alone, this data had limited significance, but situated as they were in a research process involving both traditional and remote fieldwork, they presented rich and specific instances of how particular work was done using particular artifacts in the course of a working day. For instance, a photograph of a staff member “busy updating daily reports during the shift” was not surprising, given what we found during a phase of the research involving site visits and interviews. On the other hand, 2 photographs of a messaging system (SPAM) that had been installed at the site previously [3] did not reflect the actual use of the system as mainly being to support social
interaction that we discovered through analysis of 164 logged messages [8]. The two comments added underneath the photos revealed a level of cynicism and detachment regarding the technology and were: “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam everybody loves spam” (see Figure 3) and “Picture of SPAM machine, Broken down.”
what might be suitable for public display content. The instructions (see Figure 4 below) were directed towards participants thinking about message transfer at the setting.
Figure 4. Instructions in Message Book The Message book produced 6 entries by one participant. These entries were: PostIt notes containing phone numbers and coding schemes (4 – see Figure 5 below); and scraps of paper that were used to transfer information among staff members (2). The content of these messages concerned the recording of medication to be collected, telephone calls to be made and money handed out to residents. Figure 2. Instructions in Photo Diary
Figure 3. Example of Photo Diary data
3.2 Message Book
The Message Book was a way of enabling participants to reflect on how information was transferred and moved around the setting. Again, there was a deliberate intention to concentrate on
Figure 5. Example of Message Book data
3.3 Ideas Book
The Ideas Book was intended to facilitate design. Thus this probe pack was not only about reflection but also was supposed to support envisagement of new practices and technology. The instructions (see Figure 6 below) were directed towards reflecting
on entries in the Photo Diary and Message book and on thinking about how particular technology configurations might work in the context of the setting. There were no entries in the Ideas Book. Despite the paucity of entries in the Ideas Book, many of the photographs presented in the Photo Diary represented design opportunities, such as the possibility of displaying staff rota information (see Figure 7 below) on a digital public display that we explored in a design emerging from the other field data [7].
Figure 6. Instructions in Ideas Book
Figure 7. ‘Inspiration’ for Design in Photo Diary
4. REFLECTIONS ON PROBE PACK
Often the relationship between designers and users is conceived of in terms of power – of the powerful and the less powerful. We will not deny that there is a system that enables the production of differences, but we will insist on the need to study its existence
and its implications empirically. The difference between designers and users should not be taken as an a priori fact. It has to be explored. [13:4] We have described a very small deployment of probes that was intended to support participant design. The data that was returned was incredibly valuable, but not in the manner we expected. It gave us insights into the objects used, information transferred and aspects of the environment from the participants’ point of view. Through our use of the probe pack, we deliberately handed over the responsibility for design to the participants within carefully constructed constraints. So, on one hand, the probe pack very much belonged to us. However, our concern was to be democratic in the way we involved participants in design. Thus, on the other hand, the probe was very much the property of the participants. The pack was spectacularly unsuccessful in producing designs but was successful at gathering participant impressions (regarding the importance of record keeping for example), attitudes (regarding SPAM for example) and important aspects of their physical environment (such as notices on staff’s shift patterns). However, the participant who was interviewed (with his returned probe pack acting as a prompt) noted that he did not complete the Ideas Book because he felt the current technology and practices (e.g. the use of PostIt notes) dealt with the issues he raised through the Photo Diary and Message Book adequately. The same participant commented that the probe pack had made him realize how information was passed among people “all the time”. The former comment seems particularly damning when the intention of the probe pack is considered: the aim of the pack was to enable the participants to think beyond current use and practice. However, this case has shown that we can trace the content of probe packs forward into design ideas (see Figure 7). These inspirational shards may lack detail and may not result in particularly novel technology design, but they are situated within the practices operating at the setting and they represent important actions, interactions and reflections as-they-occur. This involves acknowledging the probe content as reflecting the day-to-day practices of participants that can, indeed, inspire design. The results also show that this pack was successful in combating our inability to access particular details of the setting (such as the important ‘hidden artefacts’ photographed by participants). We also seemed to bridge the gap between a participant view and an observer view by accessing their own opinion of their work and of the importance of particular artifacts and places they experienced. For example, one participant wrote “THE NERVE CENTRE” under a photograph of one office at the setting, reflecting how important s/he regarded it as a nexus for message exchange. This probe pack, we admit, was highly functional in character. The booklet was designed as a journal and all the materials included were added as support for the construction of a detailed picture describing the role of messages, photographs and pictures in participants’ everyday working lives by the participants themselves for the participants themselves. However, there was little support in the pack for activities supporting design (for example, only one instruction suggested the use of sketching) and the instructions seemed too verbose (see Figure 6). Thus the Ideas Book seemed both to have too many constraints and not enough support. This lack of support may have been compounded by
participants not being ideally suited to envisaging new technology design in the first place.
5. INSPIRATION OR INFORMATION?
“In fact, one should be careful about the a priori distinction made between use and design, between user and designer. This distinction implicitly inscribes assumptions that the one is passive (user), and the other is active (designer)…” [13:8] The probe pack presented here poses a question: Where is the envisagement and who does it? We have presented one example of a photograph (see Figure 7) that was indeed something that could be implemented using the technology we presented at the participatory design workshop, in an attempt to empower participants to actively produce design ideas instead of passively consuming them. This photo reinforced the finding that making staff rota information visible was important at this setting. But does probe pack content have to map directly onto new technology design, as with a sketch of a technology configuration which we tried to encourage? Does not the “inspiration” emerge from the story that unfolds from the “interpretation” of the pack, as Gaver et al. (2004) suggest? We would say “yes” but only because some of the participants themselves, in partnership with the researchers, helped shape these stories. “Some” and “helped” are important here: one probe pack that was returned was by a participant who had been interviewed. The other was filled out by a participant who had had an active role in the design workshop and, as the post-probe interview showed, enjoyed reflecting on his/her own practice. Both these participants were involved in an ongoing dialogue that formed an important part of the design process. That the inspiration-information dichotomy has been described at all, and in some cases ridiculed, represents a particular stance concerning probe deployment: probes are seen as a means of looking from the outside in for those enthused by the possibility of technology intervention and production. In framing the debate in this manner, participants become the watched, the designed for, the architect’s puzzle, the passive consumer. A more important and subtle distinction seems to be concerning innovation and envisaging new technologies as a design experiment against understanding and incorporating new technologies to support existing practice in a sustained way. Thus more worthy continuums may be represented by the design intervention continuum and the conception of the user: the design intention varying from the extraordinary to the ordinary; and the conception of the user varying from the passive consumer to the active bicoleur [14].
6. CONCLUSION: TYPES OF PROBE
“When studying technologies we are looking for types of use, symbolic expressions and personal attachment remaking the technologies into something close and familiar. This is a way of making them part of everyday life, and it is not accomplished simply by letting them into the home or other daily surroundings. There is a paradox concerning technology as well as everyday life in that both make us look for the trivial and functional. Here we have sought to shed light on the emotional” [13:17]
The above quotation could well be a call for new methods as well as a plea to consider new perspectives on technology beyond function and utility. Here we have explored one such method, first used for such design beyond function. But, given this method has been used to probe the everyday, the functional and useful and the affective and ‘ludic’, how can we describe it, and in doing so think about how it might be used? Is it a social science research tool for reaching the unreachable? A means of making the invisible, visible, the inaudible audible, the intangible, tangible, the impalpable, palpable? “Collections of evocative tasks meant to elicit inspirational responses from people” [5] that return “fragmentary data” over time? We think probes are all of these (the latter quotation is a comment on what they were originally intended to be, as opposed to how they have been appropriated). “Probes” describe a cluster of approaches and tools, some with considerable history in social science research (e.g. diarykeeping). Probes can be designed to capture a sense of participant culture in a very unsystematic way to understand ludic pursuits or be directed towards understanding everyday phenomena involving particular people. They can be owned by the research team where the designer of new technology acts as a slightly distanced architect or be shared with participants in a process of co-realising new technology design and practices. They can be directed towards understanding less goal-oriented activity in settings that are hard to access because of generational ‘distance’ or towards settings where understanding the character of everyday work is important and difficult. They can be used in a “fragmentary” or more “scientific” manner and they can be used to design technology for pleasure or more for utility, such as for technology supporting therapy. They can be highly visible and demand work on the part of the participants or be embedded in the fabric of the setting as with technology probes [11,3]. It seems common across all deployments that the returns from probes are analysed and in being analysed they are evocative of narratives, vignettes or scenarios that can act as information or inspiration (or both) for design. Other common characteristics are that they are deployed with a purpose (although this may be very broad) and they facilitate autonomous data collection for the design of new technology or practices. In considering how a ‘design’ emerges from probe data we reflect on the role of ‘the user’. We have suggested here that ‘the user’ is not a powerless and passive consumer in this process. In doing so, we question the very conception of a probe as a scientific ‘instrument’ for data collection controlled by a research team. When thinking about adjusting this power balance we really are asking the question Whose probe is it anyway? In considering the answer to this question we consider the detail of how technology might actually work at a setting, the implicit view of technology we hold and our conception of ‘the user’ in the design process.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by the EPSRC funded CASIDE project (grant ref: EP/C005589) and the Equator and DIRC IRC projects. The work also builds on work carried out under the EPSRC funded CASCO project and was part funded by a Melbourne University Abroad Travelling Scholarship (MATS). Thanks to Dan Fitton, Steve Howard and Frank Vetere for help and advice. Special thanks to Christine Satchell for listening and contributing to early ideas.
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