Here are my documentation and findings with the cultural probe I made in order to explore some professions that I was interested in.
The Cultural Probe
My cultural probe is a simple task sheet for the participant to fill in during their free time, and I did not make it too lengthy for the sake of brevity and due to time constraints as a limitation over the past two weeks.
With the task sheet, I was able to mass e-mail a couple people hailing from different professions. Unfortunately, reaching out to folks on LinkedIn and asking them to reply quickly tends to be generally more difficult.
Designing the Probe
With regards to the design of the probe, I decided on the first task to allow me to glean some insight with regards to how people viewed their profession with adjectives. They could use one of the words and write a six-word story to describe their job.
For the second task, I wanted to be a little more cunning to add in an ideation maker for the second task to see how they would design something in relation to our module’s theme.
Goal
As a whole, the goal that my probe was set to achieve was a simple feedback on terms that the professionals describe their job and their creative thoughts on the tools they would like to see in the future to make their tasks easier.
Feedback
Vanessa, being as kind as always, was able to send back her probe to me for me to document this at least in time for our submission deadline.
Things that I Learnt
Vanessa really enjoys her job, she even took to circling more terms on the cues I gave which all point towards a positive outlook. The terms she also used can be described as fun, interactive and enjoyable. Needless to say, her design for the future, is also very whimsical and I really enjoyed that as I wanted to make something that would be fun to use as well, almost like a game for them.
When I asked her to explain her drawing, she reminded me about the weeds that she hates, and how her suit has a vacuum that sucks up the weeds with gusto so that it no longer has to bother her and her team.
I was inspired by this, and perhaps in future iterations, I could also use this design to potentially make something out of it!
However, that being said, I am still discussing with my group with regards to all of the feedback and useful research that we have collected on which would be the best profession for us to work on. I cannot wait to explore further our ideas and start making awesome creations with our group!