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How probes work

Published: 28 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

'Cultural probes', since first being proposed and described by Bill Gaver and his colleagues, have been adapted and appropriated for a range of purposes within a variety of technology projects. In this paper we critically review different uses of Probes and discuss common aspects of different Probe variants. We also present and critique some of the debate around Probes through describing the detail of their use in two studies: The Digital Care Project (Lancaster University) and The Mediating Intimacy Project (University of Melbourne). We then reorient the discussion around Probes towards how probes work: both as interpretative fodder for social scientists and as a resource for 'designers'. Finally we discuss new possible directions for Probes as an approach and some of the challenges confronting Probes as an approach.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
OZCHI '07: Proceedings of the 19th Australasian conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Entertaining User Interfaces
November 2007
323 pages
ISBN:9781595938725
DOI:10.1145/1324892
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 November 2007

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  1. cultural probes
  2. design process

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OZCHI '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 42 submissions, 62%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

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  • (2024)Exploring Smart Office Design with Multimodal and Multi-users Interaction for Workers’ Well-Being and Productivity2024 29th International Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC)10.1109/ICAC61394.2024.10718852(1-6)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
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