Abstract
Poverty is a persistent and insufficiently understood societal challenge that requires the inclusion of lived experiences of poverty (Hagenaars, 1986; Reeves et al., 2020). Traditional approaches to poverty are dominated by the non-poor’s understanding of poverty, which hinders effective policy and intervention strategies. To address this gap, we demonstrate that Urban Living Labs (ULLs) provide the potential for the development of hybrid research methods, i.e., the Cultural Probe methodology. We argue that this method is able to explore the lived experiences of poverty, and shed light on how people perceive poverty, themselves and others in their local context. We apply the method via the social-cultural perspective, going beyond the traditional economic perspective on poverty (Lok-Dessallien, 1999). We aim to explore the usefulness and feasibility of the methodology in local context, particularly in terms of participants’ ability and willingness to share their poverty experiences and complete the probe booklet.