The participatory technique of “Technology Probes”: a case study in Burkina Faso
Giovanni Innella, F. Papeschi, Valentina Nisi · 2011
This paper describes a project introducing a group of young adults from Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso, to the potential uses of Internet services, discovering how these services would impact and possibly change different aspects of their daily lives. Resisting a top-down or technology driven approach, the team adopted a participatory design approach in order to create a more meaningful training course. Technology Probes were introduced in order to understand to what extent freely available Internet service would fit into the local context and what new services and technologies could be generated in accordance to that.