Probing for co-exploring

Designers are facing new kinds of design tasks beyond their traditional expertise that call for tools and practices to facilitate design collaboration. This article focuses on the relations between probing and issues of collaboration and participation. It first introduces the probes approach and then describes how it has been applied to support collaboration and participation in case studies which have been conducted in the context of design research and company collaboration in Finland. The article also discusses the role of probing in enhancing collaboration. It proposes that the probes approach can have roles in supporting an iterative co-exploring of the design space, as well as in facilitating collaboration with various stakeholders in co-design.