Design Probes for Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing

. In developing electronic gadgets, meters and oscilloscopes are used to probe into their workings, so that engineers can understand how they are behaving and how they can be improved. Analogously, this paper suggests a variety of conceptual probes that can be used to explore the process of design. The probes focus designers' attention onto successfully managing complexity and in coping with socio-economic influences on design practice in the real world. 1 Introduction We may take it as self-evident that design should be good, yet it is also clear that it is di#cult to make it so because technology is complex and because of pervasive and persuasive socio-economic forces that obscure a straight forward notion of "good." Regardless of the abstract arguments, there is additionally a wealth of circumstantial evidence that design fails: many systems are awkward to use. There is a large literature discussing design failure [1--4], as well as business literature on the way inadequate ..