The travels and adventures of cultural probes: how probes can be used to enrich qualitative research

Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS series 

'The travels and adventures of cultural probes: how probes can be used to enrich qualitative research'  

This is the fourth session in the ten-part series: Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS. The aim of this series is to showcase and celebrate the diverse and innovative ways UTS researchers are working with qualitative data.

Dr Tuck Leong will present this session in two parts*. The (shorter) Prologue tells the story of Cultural Probes, a novel and playful method used to generate design inspirations from participants, introduced to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community in 1999. It was adopted enthusiastically, with many using it as another ‘qualitative’ method to existing approaches in HCI to support “knowing the users” - an important phase aimed at generating insights and understandings to ground and inform the design of technological artefacts. Its early adventures in HCI were often brazen but not without some public ‘methodological admonishments’.

The main story (part two) describes how probes are commonly used today in HCI to “know the users”. Tuck will present a case study where a set of probes were designed to supplement an ethnography that sought to understand people’s experiences of technology-mediated serendipity and in particular, how people made sense of the random processes that led to their serendipitous encounters. Tuck hopes to show how the probes could facilitate
and ground dialogue between researcher and participants. He will explain how fragmentary ‘probe data’ is analysed together with the participant, through dialogue and co-construction of meaning and understanding. When added to the richer ethnographic data, the resulting analysis can yield deeper and richer insights into a phenomenon of interest.

* please note, this session will be recorded.