Researching sensitive topics: Adjusting cultural probes to research and identify design spaces for sensitive HCI.

Abstract: Research tools to identify sensitive topics and thus new opportunities to design for have grown in popularity in the last twenty years within HCI, with many projects and areas to note. However, the research tools used are still underdeveloped (Crabtree, 2003), and many universal designs of the 20th century have failed to develop for more sensitive areas, bar the conventional young, non-disabled, white, cis-male (Clarkson, 2003). The topics discussed in the thesis are reviews and arguments for the use of an adapted cultural probe’s place to research sensitive topics, identify perhaps previously hidden “sensitive-HCI” (Waycott et al. 2015) design spaces. The focus is on the tools to gather data, and discover design opportunities, rather than the particular and actual findings from the study.