Smart Home technology looks set to become an
increasingly common feature of domestic life. However
commercial desire for technical innovation rather than
explicit user needs are often the driving force behind the
development of Smart Home products and services. This
study adapts the Cultural Probe approach developed by
Gaver et al. [2] to collect primarily visual data about
what people value within their home environment.
Whereas Cultural Probes are predominantly used to
build empathy with users when designing product concepts,
this approach attempted to provide similarly fun
and engaging prompts for data collection when the design
process and project context required more structured
consideration of user needs. This paper presents
the method developed, project findings and recommendations
on how the method should be applied
