Designing for movement in public life with itinerant probes

Abstract

This pictorial illustrates how objects can illuminate people's experience of public space, an approach we call itinerant probes. Itinerant probes are not individualized, mediated artifacts, but instead dynamic events that enliven people's personal and collective memories. Building on the probes literature and recent ecological perspectives, we describe three probes related to lighting that we investigated at three public sites. Our explorations with these probes highlight the intimate histories associated with public spaces.