Creating Our Cultural Probe Kit

The community of Irvine is one of our primary stakeholders, and therefore we wanted to find a way to conduct some research with the residents of Irvine in a way that is interesting and easily completed remotely. After Peter’s lecture in week 1, we knew we wanted to find a way of creating a cultural probe kit as the design students on the team have had experience making these already. We decided the best format for our probe kit would be to create a series of worksheets which participants would print and fill out.

When it came to creating the probe kit, we first considered what would be the most beneficial information which we could gain from the research, and therefore what we most wanted to know from those who live in Irvine. We decided that it would be helpful to gain an understanding of the participant’s role in their community, the overall benefits and difficulties of living in Irvine, how they spend their time in Irvine, and their views and opinions on how the climate crisis will affect the world.

We decided to create six tasks for the participants to complete. The first task we decided on was some photography prompts to allow us to see areas of Irvine from a resident’s perspective. We thought this would be particularly useful as we cannot go to Irvine ourselves due to lockdown. However, we are aware that some participant’s may be unable to take photos of their area because of the pandemic and therefore we will give the option to write the locations where the photos would have been taken. The second activity we chose was to give the participants a map of Irvine where they could document where the photos were taken, along with annotating their emotions in certain areas, and noting the locations which they visit the most. Next, we decided the participants should document what they think the world will look like in 5 and 10 years. We believe that this will be useful to understand the views and opinions of the climate crisis and how much participants think that it will impact their lives in the near future. We also thought it would be interesting for participants to document their role within the community by noting who they spend time with the most and who they interact with the least. For the fifth task, we decided to create a TripAdvisor style worksheet where participants could create their ideal Irvine. Finally, we decided on a task where participant could document their weekly shop and how they dispose of packaging etc. We think that this task will allow us to calculate a carbon footprint and also will be useful to understand the current recycling practices and availability in Irvine.

When it came to designing the tasks, we decided to create A4 landscape sheets which could be printed out. We were able to incorporate our new branding and colour scheme into the sheets to make them look more exciting and professional. The photography prompts were the only task that was not in a worksheet format and therefore did not need to be printed out. In order to make this sheet more exciting, we added some icons to represent each of the photos we were asking for. For the rest of the sheets, we tried to keep the designs simple yet colourful to allow the most space for the participants to write and doodle on the sheets. We also added an instructions page and a ratings page to give us a stronger understanding of the participants views on the climate and their community. We decided to name all of the tasks to make them more fun. We put the sheets in the following order:

1. Instructions

2. Ratings

3. In Your Community

4. TripAdvisor: Imagine Irvine

5. Picture This

6. Map-tivities

7. The Weekly Shop

8. Visualise Our World

We reached out to participants by creating a survey which asked them to fill in some contact details and information such as their age and rough location to allow us to get an understanding of the demographic. We posted the survey on community Facebook pages and also reached out to the North Ayrshire Council. We also decided to give the option to take part in a focus group instead of the probe kit as we were aware that the probe kit could be asking the survey respondents to give up a lot of time. We will be asking questions related to the topics of the probe kit in a virtual focus group this week.

You can see our probe kit here:

Cultural Probe Kit.pdf

Download PDF • 4.36MB

We will be posting the results and findings from the kit next week!