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

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.