Process

Our project started first with a telephone interview with a 6-year old Chinese girl’s mother. We wanted to get general information about what kind of toys, cartoons, and colors the girl and her same-age friends like and what kind of activities they usually do. The interview showed us that those girls like bright colors and cute things. Most of them like drawing, reading storybooks, and telling stories. Based on those findings we want to design the probe contains objects and activities they like to make sure they can really enjoy participating so that we can get real useful insights from it.

The cultural probe would be given to girls in the form of a gift. We used a gift bag to contain everything inside. We have a strawberry shape notebook, and at the first two pages we wrote instructions of how to use this “gift” for girls in Chinese and illustrating pictures. The disposable camera is for them to take pictures of anything they like, such as puppies, flowers, or cartoon characters. The stickers we gave to them are meant to let them decorate the notebook. These items are for us to get an idea of what kind of objects, patterns, shapes and colors they like. The color pencils are for them to do drawings in the notebook. Also, we provided scissors and a glue stick for them to cut the photos they took and paste them into the notebook; if they want, they can make stories with those photos, pictures, and stickers. We tried to get information about how they create things, their preferences of beauty, and interesting insights from those items.

My Role

• Conducted telephone interview with the mother.
• Co-designed items for the cultural probe.
• Wrote Chinese instructions on the notebook.