Relying on Krippendorff's description of “authentic conversation” we describe the ethnography of unimagined possibilities in the intersection of ethnography and human-centered design research. Possibilities are what inspire human-centered designers to create products, practices, and services that could satisfy currently unimagined yet real needs and desires. Although possibilities are not observable as such, they can be constructed in conversations of designers and other stakeholders. Hence, they can become extensions of real situations that are co-constructed as new realities.

Metaphor has long been a topic of investigation in scholarly design research. Studies across various design contexts have demonstrated the value of deliberately exploring and using metaphors to facilitate different phases of the design process. However, the analytical potential of metaphors has often been overshadowed by their generative use, leaving their significance in the research phase of the design process relatively unexplored. This article aims to broaden our understanding of the role metaphors can play in design, delving into the analytical role of metaphors in human-centered design research, particularly focusing on the insights that users' and other stakeholders' metaphors can offer. We present the rationale for adopting metaphor analysis as a method for design research, drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and evidence from analogous research studies. Acknowledging the natural creativity in language use of ordinary people, we argue for the potential this inherent creativity holds for user research and co-creativity settings. We discuss the value of attending to the metaphors in design research, introduce relevant concepts from linguistic metaphor analysis, and demonstrate their practical application on designers' use of user metaphors. We address the advantages and challenges of adopting metaphor analysis as a method for design research and provide recommendations for designers seeking to instrumentalize metaphors in their design processes.

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.