Experiential Probes : probing for emerging behavior patterns in everyday life

With the rise of highly interactive and intelligent product-systems it becomes increasingly more difficult for design researchers to understand and predict the impact, meaning and value of their designs for society. As the meaning of these products is often created in interaction, design researchers learn about their designs, and the user acceptance or rejection, only after product launch. Valuable insights and inspiration for design researchers are not incorporated in the design process, but come as an afterthought. Probing is a useful technique to inform and inspire design researchers, allowing them to gain early insights in their designs. The nature of most probing techniques is to record, analyze and understand current ‘static’ situations (i.e. ethnography), and to obtain information or inspiration for design researchers. Recent technological developments offer opportunities to probe in ‘dynamic’ i.e. changing or emerging, situations, and to merge analysis with design synthesis. This conceptual paper discusses different probing techniques through their fundamental characteristics: informing, inspiring, observational, experiential, static, dynamic etc. We further argue that 1) it is logic that probes with different characteristics fit different phases of the design process 2) dynamic, inspiring, Experiential Probes are more desired when initiating innovation for societal transformation.