Shopping Carol,” which featured Scrooge
as the older client reluctant to reimburse
the volunteer and raised various issues,
including trust and honesty on the part of
both the volunteer and the client. The sec-
ond was a set of scenarios based on
Laurie Taylor’s satirical newspaper col-
umn on the antics of academic staff at the
fictional university of Poppleton. The sce-
nario at the beginning of this article
shows, through comic exaggeration,
some of the difficulties university
employees might encounter were they to
take on too many clients and also some of
the problems they would encounter if the
accounts were not administered electron-
ically. It also flags some of the issues
around ageism that Age Concern is keen
to address.
Although the scenario document was
rather long the Age Concern representa-
tives read them in their lunch break
because they found them amusing. The
rather dry subject of secure financial sys-
tems was enlivened by pastiche and a
range of issues and design problems were
raised around privacy, trust, honesty,
complexity, reliability, and dependability
which helped shape the final procedure.
There is an obvious objection to these
kinds of scenarios: They do not address
the typical user. This is an entirely valid
criticism. The pastiche scenarios outlined
above all addressed entirely atypical
users in order to identify potential prob-
lems and abuses of the technological con-
figurations described. Pastiche scenarios
are not in any sense a scientific tool;
rather they are resources to inspire or
caution design. Similarly, the selection of
the scenario has a profound influence (or
bias) on the issues that are likely to be
raised; selections must be based on the
work the scenario is to do (as with the
utopian or dystopian scenarios for the
surveillance technology). One of the prin-
ciple advantages of pastiche scenarios is
that they are fun to make. They engage
the designer and lead to fresh insight
because the traits and quirks of the char-
acters have nothing to do with the tech-
nology being imaginatively road tested.
Pastiche scenarios are certainly not pre-
sented as an alternative to more tradi-
tional scenarios, rather they are suggest-
ed as a complementary and fun addition
to the HCI toolkit.
REFERENCES
1. Carroll J. M. (2000). Making use: scenario based design of
human-computer interactions. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press.
2. Cooper, A. L. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum:
Why high-tech products drive us crazy and how to restore
the sanity. Indianapolis: Sams.
3. Djajadiningrat, J. P., Gaver, W.W., & Frens J.W (2000).
Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: Methods for
exploring aesthetic interactions. ACM.
4. Gaver, W; Beaver, J; Benford, S. (2003). Ambiguity as a
resource for design. CHI2003 Conference Proceedings. New
Horizons..
5. Nielsen, L. (2002). From user to character: An investiga-
tion into user-descriptions in scenarios. DIS2002
Conference Proceedings. London: The British Museum.
6. Taylor, L. (1994). The laurie taylor guide to higher educa-
tion. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd.
© ACM 1072-5220/04/0900 $5.00
Cultural Probes
and the Value
of Uncertainty
By William W. Gaver
william.gaver@rca.ac.uk
By Andrew Boucher
andrew.boucher@rca.ac.uk
By Sarah Pennington
sarah.pennington@rca.ac.uk
By Brendan Walker
brendan.walker@rca.ac.uk
Interaction Design,
Royal College of Art
When reason is away, smiles will play.
— Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret
Designing for pleasure demands a differ-
ent approach from designing for utility.
The latter can be done from outside a
given situation, standing back to assess
difficulties and seek solutions. The for-
mer, in contrast, is better done from with-
in. To give pleasure to someone—to tell a
funny joke, recount a moving story,
dance a beautiful dance—it is best (or at
least easiest) if you share with them some
sense of humor, passion, and empathy.
Five years ago, Gaver, Dunne, and
Pacenti published an article in interactions
magazine, concerning “cultural Probes,”
a design-led approach to understanding
users that stressed empathy and engage-
ment [1]. Probes are collections of evoca-
tive tasks meant to elicit inspirational
responses from people—not comprehen-
sive information about them, but frag-
mentary clues about their lives and
thoughts. We suggested the approach
was valuable in inspiring design ideas for
technologies that could enrich people’s
lives in new and pleasurable ways.
Since then, the approach has been
adopted by several industrial and aca-
demic research and design groups
around the world. This is heartening, of
course, but also somewhat troubling. The
problem is there has been a strong ten-
dency to rationalize the Probes. People
seem unsatisfied with the playful, subjec-
tive approach embodied by the original
Probes, and so design theirs to ask specif-
ic questions and produce comprehensible
results. They summarize the results, ana-
lyze them, even use them to produce
requirements analyses.
Appropriating the Probes into a scien-
tific process is often justified as “taking
full advantage of the Probes’ potential,”
as if, by not analyzing the results of our
original Probes, we had let valuable
information slip away. But this misses the
point of the Probes. Sure, they suggested
that research questions could be pack-
aged as multiple, rich, and engaging
tasks that people could engage with by
choice and over time. Beyond this, how-
ever, the Probes embodied an approach
to design that recognizes and embraces
the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s
an approach that values uncertainty, play,
exploration, and subjective interpretation
:/53interactions / september + october 2004
>

as ways of dealing with those limits.
...it was through games, play, tech-
niques of surprise and methodologies
of the fantastic that [the Surrealists]
subverted academic modes of enquiry,
and undermined the complacent cer-
tainties of the reasonable and
respectable.
— Mel Gooding
Arecent example of our use of Probes
provides an example of how we use this
purposely uncontrolled and uncontrol-
lable approach to help us understand
design domains in new ways.
Over the last few years, we have been
pursuing a project on new technologies
for the home. At the outset, we realized
that a great deal of research on domestic
technologies reflects dubious stereotypes
about how people live at home-that
“home” equals “family,” for instance, or
that the activities of home revolve around
consumption and recreation, domestic
chores and paid employment. We decid-
ed to apply a Probes study to shake the
preconceptions about home that seem to
come with the domain.
For this study, we distributed domes-
tic Probe packages to 20 volunteer house-
holds recruited through advertisements
in popular London periodicals and signs
posted on newsagents’ windows. We
made no attempt to control demograph-
ics, but our volunteers came from a wide
range of circumstances: from ages 18 to
80, rich and poor, families, single people,
and housemates; they represented a wide
range of the home lives of people in
today’s society. Preliminary visits
allowed us to introduce ourselves to the
volunteers and give them Probe packages
to complete over a month’s time.
Confident from our success with the
first Probes study, we designed more
diverse and adventurous materials for
this one. Space precludes a complete
description here, but a few examples will
give a feel for the approach we took.
As with many Probe or probe-
inspired studies, we included a disposable
camera with our packages, repackaged
and labelled with requests for particular
pictures (Figure 1). Many of ours were
extremely open-ended or even absurd:
“something you’d like to get rid of,” “the
spiritual centre of your home,” and
“something red.” On the one hand, we
found it interesting to see how people
dealt with these problematic requests. On
the other, accidental glimpses of the
home’s atmosphere were as informative
to us as more purposeful presentations
made by the volunteers. If nothing else,
the requests provided a structuring tech-
nique that encouraged people to take pic-
tures of their homes that they might not
normally do.
We also included a friends and family
map, adapted from a technique suggested
by ethnographers in the project (Figure
2). Typically this requires that people
come up with their own ways of dia-
gramming their relationships, but we
subverted the method by providing
images (a cricket pitch; trees on a moun-
tain slope; Dante’s heaven and hell). This
had the effect of encouraging volunteers
to see their relations in new ways.
Moreover, the visual frameworks we
chose can be seen as somewhat sardonic
comments on researchers’ tendency to
apply their own conceptual frameworks
to the phenomena they observe.
One of our favourite items was the
Dream Recorder, a cheap digital memo-
taker that we repackaged with instruc-
tions to use upon awakening from a vivid
dream (Figure 3). Pulling the tab that acti-
vated the device lit a LED indicating that
there was 10 seconds to describe a dream
to us. After that, the device simply shut
down; volunteers had no chance to edit
or even review what they had said, but
could only choose to return the device.
We weren’t sure what to expect from this,
but thought it might give us unexpected
new insights into their lives. In fact, it
gave us much more: The dreams we
received were remarkably powerful and
sometimes poignant, seeming to summa-
rize people’s lives and personalities in a
few evocative words.
“In my dream, the moon’s reflection
in a stream turned into my girl-
:/54 interactions / september + october 2004
<
Figure 1: A disposable camera repackaged with requests for specific pictures. Figure 2: A friends and family map based on Dante’s heaven and hell.