NatureCulture Probes

What are the NatureCulture Probes?

The NatureCulture Probes are bespoke tools composed of a set of postcards – the Postcard Probes – and a sensory map – the Sensory Mapping Toolkit – to inform the design of location-based games and digital interventions for visitors at heritage sites.

When designing tools for visitor engagement, especially at open-air sites, cultural, ethical, social, technological, and environmental challenges need to be considered. These probes enable researchers and designers to gather insights to help navigate these aspects and offer a way to counter the idea of heritage being one singular authored story.

We created three versions of the NatureCulture Probes to be used in three of the LoGa Culture project sites: the Madeira Levadas (Portugal), the Avebury Stone Circle (UK), and the Boyne Valley (Ireland).

Follow the buttons below to download each of the site’s Probes files:

Figure 1: The Postcard Probes – (top) the Madeira Levadas postcards; (bottom) The Avebury Stone Circle postcards.

The NatureCulture Probes in Case Studies 1, 2, 3 and 4

The NatureCulture Probes were created through an interactive design process by the University of Lisbon and Bournemouth University, and later adapted to be used by Trinity College. The Probes were instrumental in the exploratory phase of the LoGa Culture project, being a crucial tool to facilitate the visitors’ engagement with the different sites and allowing the researchers to get a better understanding of visitors’ needs, wants, and, more importantly, their relation to the particular characteristics of each heritage site. The results from the studies performed with the NatureCulture Probes have informed the subsequent design and development of the applied interventions.

The NatureCulture Probes and studies have been presented through the following research publications:

• Bertmark, A., Gouin, M., Nunes, N.J., Millard, D., Galvão-Ferreira, P., Fearns, V., Ferreira, M. and Nisi, V. (2025) Natureculture Probes: Opening up dialogues in natural heritage(s) landscapes. In Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI’25), March 04–07, 2025, Bordeaux / Talence, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704430
• Galvão-Ferreira, P., Ferreira, M., Silva, T. M., Nunes, N. and Nisi, V. (2025) The Entangled Tales that Landscapes Tell: An Embodied HCI
  Pedagogy for Re-enchanted Nature Walks. In Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI’25), March 04–07, 2025, Bordeaux / Talence, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3705012
• Galvão-Ferreira, P., Ferreira, M., Nunes, N. and Nisi, V. (2024) The brain inside the heritage machine: Exploring inclusive natural history neuromuseology. Narrative and Hypertext Workshop (NHT) Sept. 2024.
• Galvão-Ferreira, P., Fearns, V., Nunes, N. and Nisi, V. (2024) Posthumanist Care and Ecologies of Empathy: Investigating Design Potentials for Nature:Culture HCI. Mindtrek’24: Proceedings of the 27th International Academic Mindtrek Conference, Oct. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681731.

(Further publications are under review. The publication list will be updated in the future)

How to use the NatureCulture Probes

The Postcard Probes

The Postcard Probes consist of 10 unique cards and probing questions for the participant to answer on the back (Figure 1). These questions seek to collect visitors’ reflections about how the site might be experienced from different perspectives. Only one of the questions is specific to the site (”If the X could talk, what would they tell you?”) and can be adapted to different places. The postcard picture shows objects and parts of the site but is arranged as a collage with surreal colours. This is intentional in linking the card to the site and also communicating that it’s no ordinary visitor’s postcard. The back of the card has space to write an answer to the question and features some general information about the research project, which can be customised. The ‘fake address’ makes the exercise feel more personal to invite participants to be more honest and thoughtful in their answers.

The Sensory Mapping Toolkit

The Sensory Mapping Toolkit collects sensory information and facilitates new embodied discoveries. It builds upon sensory ethnography, smellscape mapping, soundscape exploration, and sense walking, aiming to provide an immersive method that captures the here-and-now of the visiting experience and allows for new ways of noticing and remembering the visit.

The Sensory Mapping toolkit is divided into three parts:

• Before the walk, including information about the project and study, a consent form, and a sensory warm-up exercise to help participants attune with the environment through multiple senses (Figure 2 – 1).
• During the walk, featuring a map for participants to record their location, alongside five prompt pages containing sensory-themed questions and space for writing or drawing their responses (Figure 2 – 2).
• After the walk, with space for further reflections on the sensory mapping process or additional sensory information (Figure 2 – 3).

Figure 2: The three phases of the Sensory Mapping Toolkit.

Please see the accompanying academic publication ’Natureculture Probes: Opening up dialogues in natural heritage(s) landscapes’ for more information on how to design and deploy the probes.

Adapt and Use the NatureCulture Probes

The Open Template of the NatureCulture Probes allows other institutions to adapt these tools to their sites. In these templates, the image areas that need to be adapted to the specific site are marked with an orange rectangle.

To download the Open Template files (Adobe Illustrator files and PDF), please click on the button below.

The NatureCulture Probes Team is:

Prof Valentina Nisi – Principal Investigator
Prof Nuno Nunes – Academic Investigator
Prof David Millard – Academic Investigator and Architect
Dr Pedro Galvão Ferreira – Senior Post-doc
Dr Marta Ferreira – Post-doc Researcher and Designer
Anna Bertmark – Researcher and Designer
Mathilde Gouin – Researcher and Designer