During my internship with the Human Interaction Project at NTT’s Cyber Solutions Laboratories I worked with Sidney Fels to lead a design exercise based on Gaver et al’s Cultural Probes user study technique. The goal of the exercise was to assist a group of researchers in finding new insights and research directions concerning meetings in the workplace.

For a more thorough background on the probes check out this article but to summarize briefly, each participant of a culture probe study is given a package of probes to complete and return to the designers over some period of time (a few weeks to a few months). The probes are devices or activities that are designed to stimulate thought and/or record aspects of the participants’ lives and attitudes. Returned probes are interpreted by designers to challenge existing notions and promote new ideas and ways of thinking.

Focusing our study on meetings and how they can be improved to improve workplace productivity, we designed a package of meeting-related probes for use both before, during, and after meetings.

An example is the “uninvitation card” that participants could use before a meeting they would rather not attend:

Another example is postcards printed with thought-provoking questions that could be filled out during a meeting. This one asks, “if the current meeting were a television show what show would it be?”

This postcard asks the participant, “if you had to choose one person in this meeting to be stranded on a deserted island with, who would it be?”

Probe packages were given to six volunteers and they were asked to complete and return what they could over a week period. At the end of this week the researchers met several times to view and share interpretations on the returned probes. Discussion during these sessions resulted in new ways of thinking about meetings as well as several ideas for new technologies that could help increase their productivity.

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