ProbeTools: Digital Devices for User Research

This project will develop a family of computational devices called ProbeTools that are designed to collect user data for HCI studies and social research more generally. Taking advantage of new developments in rapid prototyping for computation and product design, ProbeTools will explore possibilities for opensource digital tools to support social research.

ProbeTools build on Cultural Probes, a design-led approach to social research in which collections of tasks are designed to elicit responses from people that illuminate participants' lives, values and desires. Designed to be engaging, playful, aesthetically appealing and open-ended, Probes can be an effective way for designers to work with participants to gain an understanding of the context for their designs. Since their introduction about fifteen years ago, Cultural Probes have become an established method in the repertoire of designers, researchers, technologists and social scientists. However, the traditional media of Probes such as film and audio tapes are dying out, and it is more difficult for practitioners to achieve the sensibilities of probe-like activities using feature-led technology such as smart phones or tablets.

The project team will work with Research Partners from Microsoft Research and the University of Dundee to explore how ProbeTools may be designed to benefit commercial research as well as academic research and teaching. We will pursue a research through design methodology, in which reflections on designing, making and using ProbeTools will be used to produce guidance for future ProbeTool design alongside the devices themselves. This will start with a review of the hundreds of Cultural Probe studies and materials from the last fifteen years, and include workshops with our Research Partners as well as other experienced UK practitioners, to inform the development of a design space for ProbeTools, embodied in a Design Workbook containing simple annotated concept proposals organised thematically.

We will select 3- 6 designs from the most promising but also to explore how complex ProbeTools should be, what media will work well, and how constrained they should be in their functionality. For instance, we envision developing a camera that can be easily reconfigured to provide e.g. time-lapse photography or images processed to protect privacy, or an audio recorder that turns on for a period when unusually loud sounds are heard, or processes speech to preserve emotional intonation but not intelligibility. We anticipate that each ProbeTool will offer a range of options to allow researchers to configure them for a wide variety of research requirements.

15 - 30 copies of each design will be batch produced for use in-house and by our Research Partners to collect data for ongoing projects. Based on the results, we will be able to work together to identify the characteristics of successful ProbeTools, both to refine the final designs and to produce guidelines for the development of future devices.

The project is designed to make the largest possible impact by taking advantage of another recent trend, towards open-source product design. We will publish the complete specification of the ProbeTools we make on appropriate repositories, in the form of design packages that also include manuals for building, programming and modifying the tools, and generalisable guidance on batch producing products using 3D printers, and using microprocessor toolkits and custom PCBs. This will be publicised via exhibitions, the popular press, and online media as well as academic publications in HCI, Design and the Social Sciences. The end result will be a series of designs that can be used in Cultural Probes studies, appropriated for other sorts of user research, and which illustrate possibilities of rapid prototyping and open source making more generally.

Our research has potential impact across a wide range of commercial beneficiaries, in two basic directions: user research and rapid prototyped and batch-produced products.

As a tool for user research, we expect initial impact in technology companies such as Microsoft (one of our project partners), Intel, Google, etc, and SMEs such as consultancies specialised in user research and design. As a tool for researching people and their beliefs, moreover, ProbeTools have relevance for any industry engaged in user-centred design. Thus they may impact on research for policy makers, for marketing firms, for biomedical companies, and so on. Our overall ambition is to develop ProbeTools as a significant new resource in the palette of user-centred design methods.

How they will benefit:
- Researchers, designers and developers across the sectors will benefit from affordable, robust and open-source designs for ProbeTools that they can use in their research.
- Technology designers will benefit from tools that enable them to contextualise their products with respect to richly-textured details of potential clients' lives and orientations.
- SMEs and design consultancies who build competence in using and developing ProbeTools will benefit from a new technique to offer clients.
- Policy makers will benefit from more open-ended techniques for investigating the social and personal effects of their policies.
- Research participants will benefit from research instruments that are more engaging and flexible for personal expression than many existing methods.
- The general public will benefit from improved products and policies.

As a model of using rapid prototyping in the development, production and dissemination of new products, we expect initial impact in the research and development teams of large technology corporations. We also expect impact in SMEs and consultancies, as we pass on expertise and guidelines for batch producing products using 3D printing and microprocessor platforms. Our guidance will extend to issues such as tolerance variation between different build technologies, build orientations and support structures, and drawbacks inherent to individual processes such as delamination on FDM. We will disseminate this working knowledge along with the STL files for our open-sourced parts so that researchers can accurately replicate our work. Lack of such knowledge is an issue that holds back the more widespread distribution of rapid-prototype artefacts more generally as users can struggle to replicate the results of the original object.

How they will benefit:
- Designers and developers in large R&D departments and smaller SMEs and consultancies will benefit from guidance for dealing with, e.g., tolerance variation, build orientations, etc. in using 3D printers to produce product prototypes or batch produced products.
- Hardware and software developers will benefit from our experiences in using rapid prototyping systems to develop new systems that are then transferred to custom-built hard- and software.
- Opensource communities will benefit from the examples we provide of distributing detailed design knowledge along with specs for building new devices, and from the specific devices we outsource.
- The general public will benefit from an increasing range of projects, designed for specific populations and batch produced or produced on demand.

We expect initial benefits to be established over a 1-5 year time-scale. Our partners and collaborators will start to benefit during the first 1 - 2 years, as we begin to design and disseminate the initial ProbeTools, design workbook, and associated design guidance, tutorials, and accounts of successful trials. Once the ProbeTools designs are made available on open source product repositories, we expect them to spread to industry and policy beneficiaries over the following 2 - 5 years as new groups encounter them and appropriate them to their practice.