How Do User Stories Inspire Design? A Study of Cultural Probes

Celikoglu, Ozge Merzali; Ogut, Sebnem Timur; Krippendorff, Klaus

doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00441

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April 01 2017

How Do User Stories Inspire Design? A Study of Cultural Probes

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu,

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu is a researcher in the Department of Industrial Product Design, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where she received her MSc and PhD degrees. During her doctoral research, she conducted her studies as a visiting scholar at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research is primarily concerned with how ethnography informs design—exploring the intersections of user-centered design, material culture, and symbolic interactionism in particular.

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Sebnem Timur Ogut,

Sebnem Timur Ogut

Sebnem Timur Ogut graduated from the Department of Industrial Design at METU in 1994 and received her MFA and PhD degrees from Bilkent University, Department of Graphic Design. She conducted a post-doctoral study as an honorary research fellow at University College London in the Department of Anthropology, Material Culture. She currently teaches at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Design. Her research interests mainly concentrate on design and particularly objects as cultural phenomena at the intersection point of semiotics, material culture, and visual culture studies.

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Klaus Krippendorff

Klaus Krippendorff is a graduate from the Ulm School of Design and is the Gregory Bateson Professor Emeritus for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Over a hundred of his publications contributed to communication theory, cybernetics, social science methodology, and design. He is the author of several books, among them Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology; On Communicating, Otherness, Meaning, and Information; and The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. He critically explores how realities are socially constructed in discourse, by design and through actions with an emphasis on emancipation from burdensome conceptions of reality.

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Author and Article Information

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu

Ozge Merzali Celikoglu is a researcher in the Department of Industrial Product Design, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where she received her MSc and PhD degrees. During her doctoral research, she conducted her studies as a visiting scholar at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research is primarily concerned with how ethnography informs design—exploring the intersections of user-centered design, material culture, and symbolic interactionism in particular.

Sebnem Timur Ogut

Sebnem Timur Ogut graduated from the Department of Industrial Design at METU in 1994 and received her MFA and PhD degrees from Bilkent University, Department of Graphic Design. She conducted a post-doctoral study as an honorary research fellow at University College London in the Department of Anthropology, Material Culture. She currently teaches at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Design. Her research interests mainly concentrate on design and particularly objects as cultural phenomena at the intersection point of semiotics, material culture, and visual culture studies.

Klaus Krippendorff

Klaus Krippendorff is a graduate from the Ulm School of Design and is the Gregory Bateson Professor Emeritus for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Over a hundred of his publications contributed to communication theory, cybernetics, social science methodology, and design. He is the author of several books, among them Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology; On Communicating, Otherness, Meaning, and Information; and The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. He critically explores how realities are socially constructed in discourse, by design and through actions with an emphasis on emancipation from burdensome conceptions of reality.

Online ISSN: 1531-4790

Print ISSN: 0747-9360

2017

Design Issues (2017) 33 (2): 84–98.

https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00441

Abstract

This paper reports an initial study using cultural probes to support design. Its aim was to provide designers and design students with ethnographic information not easily accessible via surveys, interviews, and user statistics. Our research applied the cultural probes method to domestic ironing practices. We communicated the narrative and pictorial data generated by this method to designers and asked them to interpret these data in terms of a new ironing board design. Finally, we conducted a content analysis to reveal how designers interpreted and used data from cultural probes to inform design ideas.

cultural probes, ethnography, narratives, sense making, user-centered design

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