Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

72 2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED
tion-oriented approach has sprung forth from the Royal College of Art in London,
most prominently from creative minds at the Computer Related Design studio.
Their focus is to become inspired by and of people and to treat concept design
as a tool for creating value fiction – creations that challenge people to think
about their relationships with technology and products (Dunne & Gaver 1997
– they approach value fiction mainly through concept prototypes). One of their
most influential works was the original Cultural Probes process, a process or
technique for collecting input from the elderly in various locations in Europe
for the EU-funded project Presence (Gaver et al 1999).
The cultural probes approach from the Presence project has become influential
at least in Europe (Gaver et al. 1999). They used designed tasks in a kit
to help people describe their experiences and attitudes towards their life and
their neighbourhood. The results, as postcards, photographs, maps and stories,
trickled back to London one by one through the mail from Norway, the Netherlands
and Italy. The principle of the cultural probes was that the designers
could become inspired by what the people created directly, and that the sometimes
even ambiguous material would evoke stories and help the designers to
approach the issue of the elderly and neighbourhoods creatively.
Their approach to becoming inspired is to interpret the ambiguous, focus
on the idiosyncratic, blow it out of proportion, design for it and then inspect
the results. This approach is best at home where design concepts are used to
inform, speculate, learn and warn: they have been used in art installations and
student work (Dunne & Raby 2001). The creative and highly inventive quality
of the Cultural Probes, and later the Domestic Probes, has not been surpassed.
Both projects aimed at collecting highly personal, subjective and fragmentary
pieces of input from people on a broad, experience-related topic and using the
results to fuel creativity and ideation.
The probes approach has been applied to pre-concept research in different
areas as well, and has been combined with other types of user studies. Wensveen
applied the probes approach to help people document their waking experiences,
something a visiting researcher could not very well come to do. His probes
helped people express their emotions during waking up and their attitudes towards
the alarm clock. (Wensveen 1999) Probes, then, do not have to travel far to
be useful. Probes were also applied in a case of exercise and wellbeing, and following
that, several pre-concept research projects (e.g. Mattelmäki & Battarbee
2002). The approach was more towards using the probes approach as one part
of establishing a dialogue between participants and reserachers. The process
involved several stages of studying materials, forming profiles or conclusions
and then meeting again with the participant to learn more (see Fig. 17). In cases