studio project #1: a cultural probe…

For our first official project, Denise assigned the following:

Project 1 : Anatomy of a Culture Probe

As you venture into "thick analysis", in studio we enlist your imagination to interpret and extrapolate from the explicit evidence you observe.

Based on observations culled at your coffee house:

Design a Culture Probe that aims to discover what/how/why ritual exists within the experience.

1. Speculate on the complete system that includes:
   1. Format
   2. Form
   3. Verbiage/Tone
   4. Locale
   5. Moment
   6. Delivery Mechanism
   7. Respondent
   8. Probe retrieval
   9. Archiving
   10. Assessment

Oy ve!

Nailing down a working definition of ritual seemed like a logical place to start, from dictionary.com:

• Set of actions performed mainly for their symbolic value. (Not arbitrarily performed/chosen by performer, or dictated purely by logic, chance, necessity, etc.)
• Any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner.

I also feel that ritual inherently has a sense of specialness or reverence…this is something set apart from every day operational action (although I believe that ritual can occur within the everyday).

Next I moved to some more online research and found some interesting articles about ritual. I discovered a conversation about the ritual-ness of the ways we use space—how we signal our defined space around us, signal power structures, and display identity through our use of space (i.e. in a workplace). This ritualistic use of space is certainly found in the context of the coffee shop. But how could I get at this notion with an artifact? How could I open up the user and encourage them to express some of their notions of space, and get them to define or label that?

The Idea
To provide customers with an array of small, tactile objects and encourage them to arrange these objects in some way (with very little instruction or prompting). The customer would then be asked to frame their arrangement in a photograph (using a Polaroid camera) and label that photograph. Then the polaroids would be hung together on a wall in the seating area of the store.

The Specifics
what's space got to do with it?

• I was interested in the notion of space and the way it affects ritual (for example, issues of privacy, proximity, comfort, trust, freedom, etc.)
• A way of getting at these ideas and perceptions is to engage the customers in a spatial way
• I really wanted to think about a probe that was centered on creating conditions in which users could express themselves, or tell stories, or do something unexpected
• SO my probe is a set of small somewhat abstract objects that the user would arrange in some way, frame in a polaroid photograph, label with a sharpy, and then hang in the coffee shop space.

so how does this thing work?

• Three sets of objects would be placed in the customer seating area, 2 sets in labeled boxes, 1 set in a small glass container
• A polaroid camera and some sharpies would also be accessible in the seating area
• The labeled images would be hung on the back of the large merchandise wall, so all the photos could be viewed from the entrance of the store and the seating area
• I really wanted the probe to be very open ended, I debated as to whether there would be explicit instructions included or not, and finally settled on having very brief directions that could still be somewhat ambiguous
• I spent a lot of time debating what the arrangable objects should be: wanted them to be abstract but be able to have some symbolic meaning, wanted them to be tactile and have some presence (weight), wanted people to be able to stack and build if they wanted to
• I tried to design this to not be from Starbucks, but still be of Starbucks
• I wanted it to feel more like a store specific phenomenon
• As to why people would participate, I hope by having these items on the tables (where normally just papers or computers are) people would be intrigued. They would also see all the photos on the wall and hopefully want to participate. Hopefully the unusual-ness of both the task and the use of the polaroid camera would be enticing.

and this is useful because...?
The images could be collected after some duration (1–even 6 months) and then analyzed. The assessment would consist of looking for patterns, anomalies, ranges within the set of photographs.

Some questions that could be considered:

• How did individuals respond to the materials and task?
  
• How did individuals respond to the arrangements made by others?
  
• How did individuals interpret space?
  
• Where did they set up their arrangement?
  
• How did they frame the photograph?
  
• How did they consider scale? Color? Juxtaposition?
  
• How does their written label correspond to their visual arrangement?
  
• Did they define the arrangement with seriousness? Humor? Confusion? Irony?
  
• How could designed artifacts fit into these spatial arrangements?
  
• What do these arrangements say about the use of space? About drinking coffee?

The Execution
Here is a presentation of my culture probe.

Starbucks Culture Probe 1A from Liese Zahabi on Vimeo.

Reflections on this project will follow in a later post...