Designing Cultural Probes

Why I chose to use cultural probes.
Initial I did not think cultural probes would be useful for my project. However through further investigation in to Anti social behaviour (ASB) I began to realise that in fact it is a much larger subject than I had first thought. 

When mapping out ASB, the one common thread seemed to be that ASB is all about personal opinion. For example some people think graffiti is a type of anti social behaviour where others do not.  I believed that cultural probes would be a beneficial way of collecting personal opinions of anti social behaviour in a visual way.

Designing cultural probes
In particular I wanted my cultural probes to be creative in the way in which the information was gathered. I wanted to try and stay away from the stereotypical cultural probe pacts such as a camera, map, and sound recorder, as I wanted to be slightly more imaginative with them.  However I knew that some of these might feature in my cultural probes because they are established ways of gathering information.

A number of initial ideas came to mind when thinking about my cultural probes.  One of the first ideas I though of, was to design a postcard that allowed the user to create their own anti social scene.  On one side of the postcard there would be a series of stickers depicting different types of anti social behaviour. On the other side there would be a street scene in which the user could stick there top three anti social behaviours that most affected them. I thought this idea would work well as it is quick and easy for the users to do and send back. This idea was based on a postcard that I had seen that allowed the user to make there

Another idea that came to mind was to get users to evaluate existing campaigns. This would contain a number of campaign images.  Along with the images there would be a picture of an up or down thumb that could be stuck accordingly on to the picture. The information received back would allow me to tell what campaign was deemed most effective. 

When mapping anti social behaviour I became interested in how anti social behaviour is created.  This in turn sparked off an idea for a cultural probe pack in which the user would make a kit on how to be anti social. Each box will have a particular anti social behaviour attached to it e.g. vandalism kit.  The user would then be instructed to put items in the box which would aid them in vandalising, for example a marker pen, stones for throwing at windows.  What I particularly liked about this idea was that I would be approaching the other side of anti social behaviour.  

Problems
When discussing these initial ideas with my colleagues and supervisor, a number of issues arose.  One of these issues was whether the information I was trying to gather was actually going to be useful in anyway. This came down to the fact that I did not know exactly what information I was actually wanting from people.  Did I want to know what anti social behaviour is? Or do I want to know what awareness campaigns are best? This confusion over what information I wanted back from my users meant that when it came to designing my cultural probes I felt lost.
Another issue that arose was that I was only exploring one aspect of anti social behaviour.  My sticker postcard was only exploring what anti social behaviour is, however there are other areas such as where and when anti social behaviour happens.  I was not particularly sure that only gathering peoples opinions on one particular area would be worthwhile.

One comment in particular that was made about the sticker postcard was that it restricted your choice of anti social behaviours.  As I have chosen the behaviours on the postcard it means that the user only has a choice of what is there.  This means that there opinion is being restricted and I am not really finding out what anti social behaviours really affected them.  This kind of information would not benefit my project. 

I think the reason why I found it hard to think of ideas for my cultural probes is because I am not focusing on one particular area of anti social behaviour.  There is a large number of anti social behaviours that are not even associated with one another.  This makes it very difficult to create cultural probes to represent all of the behaviours.

Brainstorming
After discussing my initial ideas with my colleagues I realised that I had not yet found the right idea for my cultural probes.  I then began thinking about what information I wanted to get out of my cultural probes. I realised that I wanted to find out what people’s anti social behaviours people were effected by.  I then began brainstorming this idea to find ways in which I could retrieve this information.