Cross-Cultural Dialogical Probes

Abstract

This paper explores the use of probes in a very remote Australian Aboriginal community where the rich traditional and post-colonial culture is worlds away from the urban Australian home of the research team. Cultural probes and technology probes have seen an enormous uptake in HCI as methods to develop inspiration from and insights into culture. Typically they are left behind, as unmanned probes, to collect and send data (or inspiring contributions) back to the design team. We investigate how probes align with indigenous ways of knowing, in particular a preference for situated knowledge creation, orality and co-presence. Through a case study we articulate how a technology probe became used as a means to engage in dialogue and co-creation with the local community. We found that co-presence of researchers and participants is crucial to foster engagement, unanticipated insights into culture and openings beyond the original problem-solution design framework. To highlight this, departing from the original conceptualization of probes, we propose and discuss the concept of manned cross-cultural dialogical probes.