Designing Cultural Probes. How to get unique insights and… | by Catherine Legros | Medium
In the context of a university Design Research and Methods class we learned co-creation and several research methodologies. The class revolved around environmental health and measuring the impacts of an environment’s influence on people’s behaviours. With a multi-disciplinary team (Industrial designers Cora Hall, Benjamin Mills, Gian Fernandes and Communication designer Marcos Lopes), I designed cultural probe kits to learn more about food habits and philosophies of 20–30 year old Vancouverites. What are cultural probes? Cultural probes are a qualitative research tool, where open ended activities are given to a group of participants to learn more about their daily lives and environment. They start conversations amongst designers and bring novel insights. More specifically we wanted to answer the following questions: What sources of influence are present in participants’ day-to-day lives? What are participants’ food aspirations and how do they compare to their food realities? What emoti