Chris Elsden

Designing Money Mysteries: Child-Led Detective Activities as Cultural Probes

This pictorial provides an account of a Research through Design project, to engage children (aged 7-12) in child-led, family conversations about their contemporary experiences of many different forms of ‘money’ – especially digital monies and tokens – in an open-ended, experiential and participatory way. To do this, we designed an adaptation of a Cultural Probes approach, where we invited children to become ‘money detectives’, supported through the design of a range of world building props, a ‘detective kit’, and probe tasks framed as ‘money missions’. In presenting this methodological work, this Pictorial 1) Demonstrates various approaches to engaging children in relation to the important and challenging topic of money; and 2) Presents a novel method – ‘Detective Probe Packs’ – as a child-friendly, repeatable template for Cultural Probes which could be used for a range of other topics, technologies or domains to undertake more participatory, child-led research.