Pack toolkit — DISOBEDIENT BUILDINGS

Pack methodology: A visual toolkit for researchers

During the Covid-19 pandemic the Disobedient Buildings Team designed research packs that allowed research participants to study their own home at their own pace. The packs consist of familiar, paper-based and low-tech devices such as postcards, maps, and disposable cameras to motivate participants to respond to a series of open-ended questions and playful tasks. The tools are exploratory in nature and, similar to classic anthropological research, they build on the spirit on participation and care to invite participants to share their everyday experiences and reveal what really matters to them on the ground. As a result, unexpected findings and innovative thinking about housing and other current issues emerged.

The packs, that were circulated through the post and online, were indispensable during the pandemic, when people were locked up in their homes. However, the methodology is also suited to health and care settings and museum and exhibition contexts. Our Pack Methodology Toolkit will allow anyone interested in doing participatory and open-ended research to create, adapt and use the tools for their own project.

You can access a pdf version of the toolkit here

Our methodology is still evolving and we would love to hear your feedback on how you are using the toolkit. Contact us at disobedientbuildings@gmail.com.

What are the characteristics of the tools?

The Disobedient Buildings team embraced the 3 fundamental characteristics of the original cultural probes. As anthropologists, we were also keen to nurture an understanding of empirical research as a mutual exchange between researchers and participants and added a 4th characteristic – reciprocity:

1. Participant-led understanding: participants play an active role in the research process.

2. Open-ended exploration: encouraging inquiry into what matters to participants.

3. Playful engagement: creating materials that spark interest among participants, motivating them to engage with the project.

4. Reciprocity: in exchange for pack materials shared by participants, researchers offer insights into their own lives.

How can you adapt the tools?

Identify a number of key themes/topics related to your project. For example, the DB team identified themes such as safety; wellbeing; maintenance; storage; materials; spaces in between; around the block; community.

1.Create a spreadsheet consisting of a series of columns; one for questions/ requests followed by one for each tool you plan to use.

2. Brainstorm possible questions/ tasks for each theme. Try to think outside the box and keep in mind the 3 fundamental characteristics of cultural probes.

3. Once you have a list of 5-10 questions/tasks, decide which tool you will use to gather this kind of information (put an x in the column concerned).

The Tools

What was our inspiration for the Pack Methodology?

The Pack methodology, developed by the Disobedient Buildings (DB) project, is inspired by the concept of ‘cultural probes’ introduced by interactive designer Bill Gaver and his team at the Royal College of Art,London in the late 1990s. Inspired by surrealist art practices, they crafted playful and exploratory tools to gather original materials related to various domestic practices (Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti, 1999). The collected materials served as inspiration for designing innovative home products.

Over the past two decades, the probes have been primarily employed by designers to study a range of topics such as elderly people’s experiences in urban settings in Norway, Italy, and the Netherlands (Gaver et al. 1999); in sensitive care settings (Crabtree et al. 2003); and when exploring the relationship between wellbeing and exercise in Finland (Mattelmäki, 2005). Some social scientists have also experimented with cultural probes, but they have tended to adapt the tools for use in objective, scientific information gathering resembling more standard methods in the social scientist’s toolkit such as questionnaires and interviews (e.g. Bernahupt et al. 2007). You can read more about here.