In human-centred design processes, co-design encompasses an eclectic mixture of people,
objectives, methods and outcomes. Straddling the boundaries between design-led research,
sociocultural data collection and the organisational properties of artefacts, this paper explores
the cultural probe as the product of collaboration amongst members of a postgraduate design
team. Drawing from my experiences of a recent case study, I discuss the cultural probes’ purpose
as tools to engage with community members in a participatory workshop and as evidence to
reinforce the identification of design opportunities on the Scottish island of Islay. However, the
probes’ role in supporting intra-team co-design during the initial exploratory stages of the design
process is the paper’s primary concern. The accessibility of hand-drawn sketches, organisational
maps and paper prototypes supports an iterative development of the designers’ ideas. I propose
that the materiality of these artefacts simultaneously embodies each designer’s individual lines
of enquiry and the collective aspirations of the team. As a result, the paper goes some way
to redefining the agency of the designer’s own images and artefacts in human-centred design
processes. Moreover, it contributes to the transferability of the cultural probe as an epistemic object
within design teams and across social research contexts to offer a methodological framework
for applying the practitioner-researcher’s visual representations as mediators of knowledge.