Pack methodology: A visual toolkit for researchers
WHO IS THE TOOLKIT FOR?
This toolkit is for anyone who is interested in doing participatory and open-ended research.
The pack allows research participants to conduct research from afar: people can study their own home at their own pace. This was useful during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were locked up in their homes, but the methodology is also suited to other crisis situations such as health and care settings and museum and exhibition contexts (see Daniels, forthcoming). The packs use visual and creative practices to discover what matters to participants on the ground. The tools are designed to be used as prompts rather than as end points in themselves. You can use them and adapt them in response to the interests of the group you are working with.
This is an evolving methodology: we would love to get feedback on how you are using the toolkit and how the tools we describe in this manual – or any other tools you might use – work in practice. Contact us on disobedientbuildings@gmail.com
BACKGROUND: FROM CULTURAL PROBES TO PACK METHODOLOGY
The Pack methodology, developed by the Disobedient Buildings (DB) project, is inspired by the concept of ‘cultural probes’ introduced by interactive designer Bill Gaver and his team at the Royal College of Art,London in the late 1990s. Inspired by surrealist art practices, they crafted playful and exploratory tools to gather original materials related to various domestic practices (Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti, 1999). The collected materials served as inspiration for designing innovative home products.
Over the past two decades, the probes have been primarily employed by designers to study a range of topics such as elderly people’s experiences in urban settings in Norway, Italy, and the Netherlands (Gaver et al. 1999); in sensitive care settings (Crabtree et al. 2003); and when exploring the relationship between wellbeing and exercise in Finland (Mattelmäki, 2005). Some social scientists have also experimented with cultural probes, but they have tended to adapt the tools for use in objective, scientific information gathering resembling more standard methods in the social scientist’s toolkit such as questionnaires and interviews (e.g. Bernahupt et al. 2007). ADD SENTENCE ABOUT READINGS HERE.
TOOL CHARACTERISTICS
The Disobedient Buildings team embraced the 3 fundamental characteristics of the original cultural probes. As anthropologists, we were also keen to nurture an understanding of empirical research as a mutual exchange between researchers and participants and added a 4th characteristic – reciprocity:
1. Participant-led understanding: participants play an active role in the research process.
2. Open-ended exploration: encouraging inquiry into what matters to participants.
3. Playful engagement: creating materials that spark interest among participants, motivating them to engage with the project.
4. Reciprocity: in exchange for pack materials shared by participants, researchers offer insights into their own lives.
THE TOOLS
HOW TO ADAPT THE TOOLS TO YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT
Identify a number of key themes/topics related to your project. For example, the DB team identified themes such as safety; wellbeing; maintenance; storage; materials; spaces in between; around the block; community.
Create a spreadsheet consisting of a series of columns; one for questions/ requests followed by one for each tool you plan to use.
(see below)Brainstorm possible questions/ tasks for each theme. Try to think outside the box and keep in mind the 3 fundamental characteristics of cultural probes (listed on page 3).
Once you have a list of 5-10 questions/tasks, decide which tool you will use to gather this kind of information (put an x in the column concerned).
KEY READINGS – CULTURAL PROBES
Bernhaupt, R. Weiss, A. Obrist, M. Tscheligi, M. 2007. Playful Probing: Making Probing More Fun. In Baranauskas, C. et al. (Eds.), INTERACT 2007, LNCS 4662, Part I, pp. 606–619.
Celikoglu, O. M. Ogut, S. T. Krippendordd, K. 2017. How Do User Stories Inspire Design? A Study of Cultural Probes. Design Issues, 33(2), 84-98.
Crabtree, A. Hemmings, T. and Rodden, R. Cheverst, K. Clarke, K. Desbury, G. Hughes, J. Rouncefield, M.2003. ‘Designing with Care: Adapting Cultural Probes to Inform Design in Sensitive Settings’. Proceedings of the 19th conference of the computer-human interaction special interest group of Australia on Computer-human interaction: design
Daniels, I. [forthcoming]. ‘Pack Methodology: Housing Research in Times of Crisis’. In G. Caramellino & F. De Pieri (eds). Housing Histories as a Methodological Observatory. Bloomsbury, London.
Gaver, B. Dunne, T. Pacenti, E. 1999. ‘Cultural Probes’. interactions, 6(1):21-19.
Gaver, W. Boucher, A. Pennington, S. Walker, B. 2004. ‘Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty’. interactions 11(5):53-56
Graham, C. Rouncefield, M. Gibbs, M. Vetere, F. Cheverst, K. 2007. ‘How Probes Work’. OZCHI '07: Proceedings of the 19th Australasian conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Entertaining User Interfaces, pp. 29–37
Graham, C. and Rouncefield, M. 2008. ‘Probes and Participation’. In ‘Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference’. Malmö, Sweden.
Hemmings, T. Crabtree, A. Rodden, T. Clarke, K. Rouncefield, M. 2002. ‘Probing the Probes’. In Binder, Gregory, and Wagner (eds), ‘Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference’. Malmö, Sweden
Mattelmäki, T. 2005. ‘Applying Probes – From Inspirational Notes to Collaborative Insights’. CoDesign, 1:2, 83-102.