Of Culture and Probing
So, one of the Design Research Methods was introduced to this year is the Cultural Probe. According to Boehner et al. (2007), Cultural Probes ‘are designed objects, physical packets containing open-ended, provocative and oblique tasks to support early participant engagement with the design process’ while Gaver et al. (2004) say that they are ‘collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time’. Basically, it’s a way of getting the muse to directly give more to the design process of the game. One of the ideas I liked for probes is giving the muse a list of things they have to take photos of whatever is written in the list.
Although, apparently, most times Cultural Probes are physical objects given to the muse, I decided to take a more digital route. So what I did was instructing my girlfriend, my muse for the game, to find GIF images, animations, of certain moods so that I can get an idea of what kind of animations I could try to create for the player character in the game; I asked her to think of the moods she is in first thing in the morning, at about noon, lunch time and in the evening. Having a software development background, I created a small application for her where she simply copies image URLs and pasting them inside the app, which would show the animations and save them. This process was done for six days, giving her the Sunday off.
Some of the resultant images of this experiment are shown below. The most common elements found in these images are Exaggerated Expressions and images of animals performing human actions. Also, I noticed that the amount of motivation to work she has was frequently displayed in the images chosen.
The second part of the Cultural Probe was in fact of a more physical form. Since my girlfriend enjoys drawing, I also asked her to draw Beyonce’ (being the subject of the game and the character the player would control) in different moods/positions; Power, Success, Failure, Happiness, Anger/Frustration, Idle/Bored. These images will be used as a base for the character and animations designs to be used in the game. So to end this blog post, here are the pictures she drew for the Cultural Probe.