‘Sore Legs and Naked Bottoms’: Using Cultural Probes in Dependability Research

As digital technologies have matured, they have moved beyond the workplace to our everyday lives, presenting interesting methodological and research challenges. Attempting a useful input into dependability processes requires an understanding of how technologies are integrated into a range of social contexts. However, to usefully consider issues of dependability we may require significant shifts in investigative techniques to consider how technology relates to and offers support for everyday living. Our 'user groups' are former psychiatric patients and elderly and disabled people living at home. Methods for eliciting needs in 'care' settings are relatively under-developed and represent a complex set of design and methodological challenges. Research in such contexts is often difficult and inappropriate and their deeply personal nature presents conventional ethnographic methods with obdurate problems. This paper outlines one methodological approach 'Cultural Probes' (Gaver 1999) for supplementing ethnographic investigations, prompting responses to emotional and social values and opening a dialogue with users.