Digital-visual-sensory-design anthropology: Ethnography, imagination and intervention

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Article

Digital–visual–sensory-design anthropology:Ethnography, imaginationand intervention

Sarah PinkDesign Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; Loughborough University,

Leicestershire, UK

Abstract

In this article I outline how a digital–visual–sensory approach to anthropological eth-

nography might participate in the making of relationship between design and anthro-

pology. While design anthropology is itself coming of age, the potential of its

relationship with applied visual anthropology methodology and theory has not been

considered in the existing debates in this field. Here I bring this question to the centre

of the discussion through a reflection on the themes, issues and limitations of applied

visual anthropology and how, with the ability of design thinking to engage with the

future, this might develop. I argue then for a future-oriented applied visual anthropology

that engages with the everyday, ethnography and design as processual and situated at

the innovative edge of what is possible.

Keywords

Anthropology, design, digital, ethnography, sensory, visual

Introduction

When I video recorded Rhodes showing me her home, we discussed the way thatseveral of her rooms were lit. Lighting the home is a tricky business, and does notalways work out exactly as people wish. In Rhodes’ case, for instance, sheexplained to me how in the living room, ‘we specifically didn’t want ceilinglights, we wanted really nice floor lamps, but we put ceiling lights in because wewere initially going to sell the house, and we just haven’t bought the floor lamps

Corresponding author:

Sarah Pink, Design Research Institute, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.

Email: [email protected]

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yet, because we’ve run out of money, so we are just using the ceiling lamps. . . wewould like softer lighting’. At the moment of our encounter in the home, Rhodesthus spoke in temporalities that spanned present, past and future. The way thelighting was used and experienced could only be understood at that interface, andnot as part of any ‘fixed’ characteristic of her home. Once I reviewed the videorecording of our meeting the present of that moment dissolved into the past; notonly did I not know if Rhodes had changed her lighting, I did not know if she haddone so as planned, or if she later aspired towards other imagined futures in thelong and short terms. However I can be sure that she will continue to innovativelyimagine and act with the material and sensory elements of her home that are relatedto lighting. In relation to the multiple contingencies that also shape the environ-ment of home, she will appropriate the resources around her in doing so. The clipdiscussed is available online as clip 1 in a published article (Pink and LederMackley, 2012). Readers are invited to view this and other clips in our onlinearticle, which likewise represent this temporal positioning of participant, researcherand the material and sensory realities we experience.

Within my research about everyday life in the home these situations are notunusual. I usually ask participants to take me on a tour of their homes. Videorecording them as we go, they show me, room by room, the material, sensory andaffective affordances of their everyday environments. Across various projects,undertaken since 1999, our interests in touring homes have ranged across howthey are cleaned, decorated, how laundry moves around and is experienced,digital media and how people consume energy at home (Pink, 2004, 2012; Pinkand Leder Mackley, 2012, 2013; Pink et al., 2013). These have all been appliedvisual ethnography projects, which offer insights that might inform, or contributeto informing the development or design of products or interventions. During thetours participants have usually made me aware of what they have already chan-ged and what they are intending to change about their homes, and in my earlierwork as a result of this I conceptualized the home as a ‘project’ (Pink, 2004) thatis ongoing, never finished and involves imagining into the future. Similarly myresearch about a town and community garden project in the UK involved toursthat happened at this interface, between past, present and imagined futures (Pink,2008, 2007b). As an anthropologist I am also acutely aware that the ethnographicpresent is a problematic temporality – as ethnography inevitably refers to the(even if relatively immediate) past. Therefore when we do ethnography withpeople who are already overlaying their discussions of their everyday environ-ments with projections of how they will be (should be) in the future, to under-stand the present (soon to be past) we as researchers also need to engage with thefuture. For designers, this will not be a novel point; design is inevitably anengagement with the future. Thus interdisciplinary working with design discip-lines offers anthropology a route through which to consider the future, boththeoretically and with an applied purpose.

In this article I engage with the idea of a future-focused, design oriented anthro-pology through a discussion of the implications of recent attention to the digital

2 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 0(0)




and sensory, across theoretical scholarship and ethnographic practice. Digital,visual and sensory theory, methods and media are increasingly becoming part ofethnographic research practice across the social sciences and humanities, offeringinnovative ways of developing informed understandings and interventions forchange.

Attention to these turns in scholarship and practice, and their theoretical andmethodological implications, opens up a new dynamic relationship between new/emergent approaches to ethnographic practice and designerly thinking. Suchapproaches have the potential to offer new ways to consider design and interven-tion, as well as to contribute to theoretical scholarship. My proposal is alsoinformed by a firm commitment to the idea that applied or design anthropologyresearch can and should speak back to, rather than being simply informed by orseparate from, the development of theoretical and disciplinary/interdisciplinaryscholarship. Therefore I also argue for a future-focused applied visual anthropol-ogy that is attentive to the sensory and digital environments of the everyday.

The example discussed above is from a visual and sensory ethnography abouteveryday digital media and energy consumption in the home, which is intended toinform work of designers (Leder Mackley and Pink, 2013) and thus seeks to inter-vene in, rather than simply comment on, the world. The project – lower effortenergy demand reduction (LEEDR) is based at Loughborough University in theUK, and seeks, through interdisciplinary collaboration between social scientists,engineers and designers, to create digital interventions that will enable energydemand reduction (see http://www.leedr-project.co.uk/). In the context of thatproject, therefore, the future I am concerned with is framed by an environmentalsustainability agenda as well as a focus on the digital and sensory elements of theeveryday environment. Bringing together these themes asks how attention to thedigital and sensory elements of everyday life as lived can help us to shape anenvironmentally sustainable future where digital technologies and sensory, aswell as spoken, forms of knowledge are activated to achieve this. These issuesare discussed in more depth in co-authored articles (e.g. Leder Mackley andPink, 2013; Pink et al., 2013).

In this article, my aim is to reflect more broadly on the implications of develop-ing a future-facing visual, sensory digital anthropological ethnography. To developthis I draw on existing examples from my earlier work about everyday life in thehome and about slow cities, as well as articles co-written with colleagues involvedin the LEEDR project. My aim is to use these as a starting point through which toconsider how the temporalities of visual ethnography research might be engaged tothink about the future. The substantive focus of the examples I discuss will be onthe idea of ordinary people as everyday innovators.

This discussion however also forms part of another wider context. To end Isituate the emergence of a visual design anthropology within an interdisciplinaryenvironment where multiple encounters are emerging between design and socialscience disciplines: a context that is replete with new opportunities and fuelled bycompeting academic debates and claims.

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From applied visual anthropology to design anthropology:Engaging with the future

To varying degrees and in different ways, across national and regional contexts, forwell over half a century the proponents of applied and public anthropology firststruggled against, and now more often work alongside, academic scholarship in thediscipline, to carve a role for anthropology as an active discipline that could berelevant beyond its university departments (see Pink, 2005, 2007a). Much has beenwritten and said about the development of and challenges faced by applied anthro-pologists as this field of practice has developed since the last century (Field andFox, 2007; Pink, 2005). In more recent years, however, attention to digital visualand sensory media and experiences has become increasingly part of applied eth-nography agendas, for example across health (Lammer, 2007, 2009), energy (Pinkand Leder Mackley, 2012) and learning contexts (Fors et al., 2013), in ways thatconnect with contemporary descriptions of design anthropology. Indeed, designanthropology, according to Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan, ‘resonates with fourareas of interest that are generating some of the most exciting new work in thediscipline: exchange and personhood in the use of technology, the understanding ofskilled practice, anthropology of the senses and the aesthetics of everyday life’(2012: 10). These areas of interest (including the focus on the sensory) are also,as I have outlined elsewhere, core to the contemporary development of a digitalvisual anthropology (Pink, 2013) as it is emerging as an applied practice (see Pink,2011). This therefore creates a set of key synergies between existing bodies ofapplied visual anthropology practice and the aspirations of design anthropology.

However, design anthropology offers the possibility to go beyond the limits ofapplied visual anthropology. Applied visual anthropology might be characterizedas having impact in the world in two ways. First, researchers in this area commonlypoint to the ways in which participants in their projects gain new forms of self-awareness and understandings of their situations. In doing so they emphasise that itis not necessarily simply the (audiovisual) product of the applied project that isimportant for making interventions, but the process through which it is made. Thusapplied visual anthropologists have consistently been concerned with producingchange in the world, with individuals and collectives and more broadly in widersociety (Pink, 2007a). Second, applied visual anthropology projects tend to pro-duce a documentary, or other form of lens-based creative practice output (althoughthis is not always the case). These outputs are often created through and/orinformed by collaborative and participatory processes of researching and photo-graphing and/or video recording activities and experiences of various kinds (Pink,2007b). They are often made for a target audience, and use the potential of film tofacilitate the making of new intercultural understandings – what Chalfen and Rich(2007) refer to as ‘cultural brokerage’. Such representations are made and used inways that might influence, for instance, public opinion, clinicians, policy makers,government, or business leaders. Thus while applied visual anthropology can besaid to have a vision to the future, and to seek to create change, here the design is





the making of the film-as-intervention rather than in the design of an object orservice that is intended to become part of the changed everyday environments andpractices of a target user group. The intervention in applied visual anthropologythus plays the role of potentially informing design – in the form of the design ofpolicies, services, processes, objects and more. As such it is a cautious interventionin terms of the claims it makes for the future. The intervention is also made with theknowledge that viewers appropriate and innovate with ethnographic films for theirown meanings and uses.

Applied visual anthropology has been developed across a range of fields, andperhaps most relevant here has been its specific use in research and design projectsin industry contexts (e.g. Lovejoy and Steele, 2007; Pink, 2004, 2007a, 2011;Sperschneider, 2007). In some cases – such as health research and intervention –other applied visual anthropology projects can be shown to have led to forms ofchange and innovation (e.g. the work of Chalfen and Rich, 2007). Yet, as notedabove, when visual anthropology methods and media are engaged in research thatis intended to have some kind of impact in the world it is often to bring criticalcommentaries to the fore, create new forms of self-awareness amongst participants,create awareness amongst policy makers and offer key implications for what shouldhappen next. The limitation is that such projects do not necessarily in themselvesalways lead to or become part of intervention for change, especially when theproject ends at the point that its outputs – a report, a film, multimedia or onlinedissemination – is delivered or published. Instead it is left to the client or targetaudience to respond to the findings, through policy or other interventions.

However, as the anthropologist Samuel Collins (2008) has suggested, anthro-pology holds more potential to engage with the future than is immediately obvious.Indeed there is a case that as anthropologists we should take an ethical stancetowards the future. Collins argues that ‘we need – more than ever – to revisit theidea that anthropology might provide material and critique for cultural futures, forthe imagination of different lifeways less premised on exploitation and environ-mental degradation’ (2008: 8). He proposes that ‘raising the possibility for radicalalterity is one of the chief roles of cultural anthropology in the twenty first century’(2008: 8). Applied visual anthropology has taken a step towards this. Designanthropology presents a way forward that evades some of the limitations of exist-ing incarnations of applied (visual) and public anthropology, and which moreoverhas a convincing and strong intellectual backing in the discipline as well as well-considered methodological foundations. Indeed, designers address issues that, asanthropologists, we have conventionally been taught are beyond our (and perhapsanyone else’s) reach. Consider Tim Ingold’s characterization of design:

Let us allow then that designing is about imagining the future. But far from seeking

finality and closure, it is an imagining that is open-ended. It is about hopes and

dreams rather than plans and predictions. Designers, in short, are dream-catchers.

Travelling light, unencumbered by materials, their lines give chase to the visions of a

fugitive imagination and rein them in before they can get away, setting them down as

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signposts in the field of practice that makers and builders can track at their own, more

laboured and ponderous pace. (Ingold, 2012: 29)

This orientation towards the future offers anthropology a new way of thinking.Much of the methodological debate about the temporality of research in anthro-pology (e.g. Fabian, 1983) and in visual anthropology (see Pink, 2013) has focusedon problematizing the constitution of the ‘ethnographic present’. These argumentslead us to understand visual and written anthropology as inevitably referring to thepast. In contrast, design anthropology, as Gunn and Donovan describe, creates arelationship between past, present and future.

In bringing together D and A, anthropology brings an understanding of the past in the

present. This, however is a wider time frame than is usually given by design history in

order to make sense of the present and moves towards the future. DA is concerned

with making partial connections between past, present and future – what you do with

the present is to have a vision of the past in order to make a move towards the future.

(Gunn and Donovan, 2012: 12)

Design anthropology therefore does something that anthropology alone would notclaim: it enables us to work in a temporal world of which the future is part andseeks to intervene in that future to produce change. Thus while more recent work inapplied digital visual anthropology has to some degree, by also creating forms ofcritical and provocative intervention, sought to engage (with) and produce change(see Pink, 2011), the addition of designerly thinking takes another turn, which ismore attentive to the future.

In the following sections I consider further the implications of bringing togetherrecent developments in applied visual anthropology theory and practice with designanthropology. Therefore, I next outline how sensory and visual approaches toapplied ethnography offer a particular approach to developing the imaginativeand critical perspectives of a future-focused and design-oriented anthropology.

The sensory in visual and design anthropology

There has been a growing interest in the senses and in sensory experience acrossacademic disciplines, including anthropology (e.g. Howes, 1991, 2005; Pink, 2009;Seremetakis, 1994; Stoller, 1997). Attention to the sensory has been notable invisual anthropology as theorists and documentary makers in this field alike havebegun to resituate visual images and experience in relation to an understanding ofperception as multisensory (Stoller, 1997; Pink, 2009). This has included exploringthe relationship between vision and touch (MacDougall, 1998, 2005), sound andvision (Ingold, 2000) and the development of online journals such as Sensate. Inparallel, sensory experience has become central to a range of fields of designresearch and practice (Leder Mackley and Pink, 2013; Lucas and Romice, 2008;Malnar and Vodvarka, 2004; Pink et al., 2013; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010). This





shared emphasis creates potential for theoretical and ethnographic elements ofanthropological practice to connect with the concerns of designers who, likeMalnar and Vodvarka (2004), are concerned with questions including those relat-ing to sensory perception and experience.

However, anthropological approaches to the senses do not follow one singlestrand. The field has been contested mainly through the work of two scholars:Tim Ingold and David Howes. Briefly, in this debate Howes, who has played apivotal role in the development of what might be called the anthropology of thesenses (e.g. Howes, 1991, 2003, 2005), takes a broadly representational and cultur-alist approach to studying the different cultural systems through which sensoryexperience is classified. Ingold by contrast takes a non-representational approachto the senses as part of his interest in ‘how people perceive the world around them,and how and why these perceptions differ’ (2011: 323). For the interests of designanthropology, Ingold’s approach already offers an important foundation forunderstanding and interpreting design, and indeed he is a leader in the theoreticaldevelopment of much contemporary design anthropology (e.g. Ingold, 2012, 2013).My own interest in taking a sensory approach to ethnography, intervention anddesign shares Ingold’s concern with how designers might ‘design for improvisation’(2012: 32). To understand how people already innovate involves focusing on thedetail of how they engage with and experience their environments, and on how theydo this ongoingly in the inbetween of past/future. To achieve this requires goingbeyond the focus on sensory categories which is the object of the study of theanthropology of the senses (as pointed out by Ingold, 2000). Instead it involvesasking about the forms of embodied sensory knowing and learning that happenongoingly as people engage with their everyday environments and the innovationthat forms part of this. This requires a focus on the dynamic processuality throughwhich everyday environments, things and socialities are experienced, rememberedand imagined. As Gunn and Donovan point out, we need to develop approachesthat enable us to really explore ethnographically how the ‘partial connectionsbetween past, present and future’ (2012: 12) emerge. In the next section I examinethis through a discussion of digital–visual–sensory methods.

Central to my research is the development of ethnographic understandings ofthe sensory experience and ways of knowing and being that are unspoken, tacit andpart of the ongoingness, flow and innovative edge of everyday life. In practicalterms this has included researching how people do the washing up and laundry(Pink, 2012), and how they use digital media (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013; Pinket al., 2013). I am concerned with how, by focusing on the unsaid and the habit-ually known and lived elements of the everyday as well as those that are talkedabout, explicit and celebrated, we can offer new ways of conceptualizing whatpeople do and how they innovate in their homes or at work or elsewhere. Insome cases this simply means drawing on the research materials to show howusually hidden forms of knowledge are used. In others these reconceptualizationsseek to disrupt the conventional ways of thinking about, theorizing and categoriz-ing everyday life that both designers and social scientists tend to use, including, as I

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outline below, concepts of behaviour and practice (see Leder Mackley and Pink,2013). A focus on the tacit, sensory, hidden and often unspoken invites us to thinkanew about how we might divide up the ongoingness of human activity in theworld in alternative ways and has implications for how we might imagine thefuture, and how we might appropriately intervene to invite ordinary people toinnovate towards environmentally sustainable outcomes.

Digital–visual–sensory methods

To develop alternative ways of understanding the world and how it is experienced,and to communicate those understandings to other people requires research meth-ods beyond standard interviews, focus groups and participant observation tech-niques. Using methods that usually involve lens-based media in my work morebroadly, I look for routes to understanding and learning about the often ‘hidden’,unspoken, routine and everyday things that matter to people. This includes, forexample ways of experiencing the town one lives in that are difficult to verbalise,but can be shown through walking tours or expressed through metaphors or roars(Pink, 2008; Pink and Servon, 2013), or experiences of textures, heat and moralitiesthat can only be understood when the washing up is performed (Pink, 2012).Working with participants to photograph and video elements of these sensory,affective and embodied experiences of locality and activity, enables researchers todevelop empathetic subjectivities through which to remember and imagine otherpeople’s worlds.

Visual anthropology has a strong tradition of offering alternative ways of doinganthropology and anthropological ethnography. In the 1990s the anthropologicalfilmmaker David MacDougall was already calling for the visual to be used toradically re-think anthropology as a discipline (1997), and suggesting that thereis a sensoriality to the ways that we work with film that brings new ways ofknowing to the fore (1998, 2005). Indeed since around 2000 visual anthropologypractice has increasingly been re-thought as a form of sensory ethnography/anthro-pology practice, both institutionally in the naming of programmes and in the con-text of defining the work developed in specific projects. Thus the introduction ofvisual anthropology methods and methodologies in design anthropology brings notonly the use of digital video for documentation. It also creates possibilities for itsrole as an evocative method that can be used to create interventional researchencounters, forms of embodied empathy, and that engages not only with whatpeople say but with what they do, show and feel and with the material, digitaland sensory environments in which this takes place.

Visual ethnography methods now commonly involve using digital media, whichcould be a video camera, but equally a camera-phone or other portable and loca-tive computing technology. If we think of a digital visual ethnography (Pink, 2013)then we go beyond the notion of visual ethnography as involving the making ofvideo or still images to consider multiple possibilities for image uploading, sharing,co-creation and more. Underlying these possibilities is also an understanding that





with research participants we share digital-material environments and realities. Thealgorithmic architectures and digital interfaces of these environments shape botheveryday life and research practices. They form part of the context and the subjectmatter of what I would define as ‘digital ethnography’: meaning a way of doingethnography that is part of and participates in a digital-material-sensory environ-ment rather than simply ethnography about the digital. When applying this point todesign anthropology, this likewise refers to the environments we research in, seek tounderstand and whose future evolutions we seek to both intervene in and shapethrough design interventions. In a contemporary social and cultural context thenarratives, technologies, environments and practices related to sustainability, cli-mate change and ubiquitous digital media have key implications for both thedesign and the everyday appropriation of any household appliances, products orservices.

The approach to ethnography that (with colleagues and co-researchers) I havedeveloped is a form of short-term ethnography (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012;Pink and Morgan, 2013) that is compatible with the research contexts we tend towork in, our sample sizes and the length of time we have for fieldwork. The searchfor quicker ways to do ethnography has long been part of design and interventionresearch practice. For instance, David Millen (2000) developed what he called‘Rapid Ethnography’, in a human computer interaction (HCI) research contextto allow HCI teams to achieve their aims of understanding users, their environ-ments and the relationship between these in less time (Millen, 2000: 285). As notedelsewhere (Pink and Morgan, 2013), for Millen this meant ‘more focused observa-tion, better selection of informants, multi-person research teams with greaterinformant interaction and better data analysis tools’ (Millen, 2000: 285). The inter-pretation suggested by myself and Jennie Morgan advances the way in which short-term ethnographic techniques are theorized and the ways their possibilities forproducing knowing are understood. As we write:

It draws from contemporary renderings of anthropological ethnography, originating

in the late twentieth century reflexive turn of the ‘writing culture’ debate (Clifford and

Marcus, 1986) and its legacy (James et al., 1997) the idea anthropological ethnography

involves doing research with rather than about participants (Ingold, 2008). Thus,

short-term ethnography as we define it differs from its uses in other disciplines in

that it is shaped by, and contributes to, distinctly anthropological ways of understand-

ing and being in (and with) the world. (Pink and Morgan, 2013: 359)

Such approaches develop research encounters with participants that are intense interms of our experiences of being with them as well as the forms and extent of theways of ethnographic and scholarly knowing that emerge from them. Video is a keyelement of short-term ethnography, it enables researchers to invite participants toperform, remember, reflect on and create recorded representations of the ways inwhich they experience and engage with their everyday environments. It moreoveroffers a route through which researchers may return to their research experiences

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and encounters and invite both co-researchers and target audiences to engage withthem (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012; Pink and Morgan, 2013). Digital, visual andsensory ethnography therefore creates an understanding of everyday environmentsthat accounts for how they are constituted, mediated and experienced. I argue thatthis type of research knowledge is moreover key to underpinning the kinds ofunderstandings that we need to account for how people and things evolve togetherin specific environments, and can thus enable us to engage with their ongoingnessinto the future.

In much of my research into everyday life I use two key methods, the video tourand video reenactments. Both methods involve engaging with participants in move-ment, as they go through the world. They have included touring homes, a gardenproject or towns (Pink, 2007, 2008; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012; Pink andServon, 2013), and reenacting domestic cleaning and routines (Pink, 2012) andworkplace practices including the application of hand gel in healthcare contexts(Pink and Morgan, 2013). These methods allow us to catch something of the flowof everyday life – charting the meeting points where our human subjects cometogether with material, sensory and other elements of their environments. Indoing so they take us to the core of what anthropological ethnography is about– what Ingold terms researching with (2008) rather than about. In terms of designresearch however they also situate this being withness of ethnography in such a waythat it can be (literally) viewed as part of a past/present/future configuration:engaging with human movement, the ongoingness of everyday life as it actuallymoves between these tenses, offers us insights into how innovation actually hap-pens, what it leaves ‘behind’ and how it reaches out into the future as it occupies anew present. One element of the relevance of video is indeed its capacity to invite usto reflect on the processuality of the everyday.

Above I have pointed to the problematic nature of the ‘ethnographic present’and highlighted the need for alternative ways of thinking between the past, presentand future in ethnography. Elsewhere I have suggested re-thinking the temporalityof the ethnographic process by attending to how participants and researchersimagine past and present in ways that might be both personal and collective(Pink, 2009). One way to conceptualise this is by thinking about how ethnographicresearch materials and representations move beyond the ethnographic past andpresent, to become part of an imagined present/future where they are used andre-used to create meaning in relation to the new narratives with which they inter-sect. I have referred to this context as the ‘ethnographic place’. This means anenvironment that is made by the ethnographer, but like Doreen Massey’s (2005)concept of place is ‘open’, and thus grows and shifts once it is engaged with by newreaders, viewers and other users. Here I extend this idea to suggest that by con-necting our work with design thinking we can extend the ethnographic place tohave a more explicit acknowledgment of the temporality of the future that we seekto anticipate with and through participants’ renderings of their present and imagin-ings of their futures. Yet the use of video in such work goes beyond the conven-tional observational uses of video that have tended to be used in much





ethnographic and design research. Therefore, whereas in existing uses of video indesign anthropology there is the tendency to analyse what people are doing in therecording of an observational video (e.g. Kjærsgaard and Otto, 2012), a sensoryvideo ethnography approach is both more reflexive in its mode of understandingthe nature of the knowledge it can produce (see MacDougall, 1998, 2005) and moreinterventional. It focuses more on the context of the recording as moving throughthe world and on how this can be used as a means of probing people to somehowarticulate, show or discuss what and how they know and feel about their environ-ments, activities and objects and what these mean to them. By connecting this tothe future oriented approach of design we can think of an ethnographic place thatwill continue to move forward, and envision our role in this; thus we can see thefuture as part of rather as after ethnography.

Exploring everyday innovations through video: Imagining thefuture of the sensory/material/digital home

The research design in which I set specific research questions is set within a widerconcern with how people, things and processes engage with and are indeed con-stituents of the digital and sensory environments in which they live or which theyinhabit. As outlined elsewhere (Pink, 2012; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012), mywork is framed through related concepts of place, movement and perception. Insimple terms this entails a focus on the environment and the multiple processes,things and persons which constitute it, the ongoingness of human activity that ispart of this and how this is experienced and informed by sensory ways of knowing.It is also underpinned by acknowledging that everyday environments are often insome way digitally mediated. Thus along with other forms of materiality and soci-ality, I account both theoretically and ethnographically for how digital presencesand the senses are part of everyday life. By approaching research this way – toaccount for people, processes, things and environments – I seek to develop newways of thinking about the worlds, the material, technological, social and sensoryenvironments and the people who are being designed for.

Therefore when researching what people do in their homes, I am not concernedwith pre-figuring what I will find out by seeking to impose constructed categoriessuch as ‘behaviours’ or ‘practices’ onto what I anticipate research participants willdo. I sometimes use these categories as entry points into the everyday, but alwaysremain open to the prospect (or inevitability) that the ethnographic findings willdeconstruct them. Thus, I am concerned with the ongoingness of activity as itoccurs in the home, how people, things and processes become entangled or inter-woven with each other, and finally with how we might divide these up into units ofsocial and material life that can be identified, and ultimately designed for/with. Iuse video as a means to explore this, by inviting participants to talk about, show,perform and engage with their environments and the activities they normally enactin their homes with the camera. One example of this is the excerpt from theresearch encounter with Rhodes with which I began this article. There, Rhodes

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was just beginning the process of taking me on a tour of her home. At that point wewere exploring her back living room, as part of a research exercise in which I askparticipants to show and tell me what they usually do in seeking to create thesensory aesthetic of home that they wish to create. As I noted above, this oftenleads not to a factual description of what they always do, but to a series of reflec-tions on the present which are carefully situated in relation to the past and present;why the room is as it is, what they do to make it satisfactory and how it ‘should’/’would’ be in the future. Often these performances and descriptions are accompa-nied by narratives about the contingencies of everyday life that make it difficult forthe ‘ideal’ sensory aesthetic of home to be achieved, and the innovations that theparticipant has developed to resolve some of the issues that cannot be/have not yetbeen resolved. Rhodes’s use of lighting is one good example of this (see Pink andLeder Mackley, 2012). In another example, discussed in detail in a co-authoredarticle, we outline how during the video tours of their home, we learned how for theBarnes family ‘the idea of making the home feel right was also bound up in aprocess of creating comfort or adjusting one’s activities and movements accordingto the affordances of different localities around the home’ (Pink et al., 2013). Thisfamily used particular areas and technologies in the home seasonally in order tofeel warm, given that they could not heat all the areas of the home (especially theconservatory) sufficiently to be able to use them to the same extent in the winter asin the summer.

Likewise participant enactments of everyday routines were developed with theassumption that these would be interesting moments when activities that involvedenergy consumption would begin/end, but I did not pre-figure what they mightinclude and where they would necessarily end. Like the tours, the enactments showhow sensory embodied ways of learning and knowing about the home enablepeople to navigate routes to bed and when getting up in the morning that involvemultiple activities and tasks, all of which form part of habitual routines. Yet withinthese routines we also see how innovative acts emerge, in relation to participants’understandings of the contingencies of the material, social and sensory home. Forinstance, Lee, one of our participants, has developed a routine of light switchingand back-tracking to accommodate the taking out of the cat at night, and Alan,another participant has sourced a wooden stick that he provided for his family touse to switch off the television at the socket at bedtime in his absence (discussed indetail in Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013). These activities are not the kinds of thingsthey usually speak about, or that would necessarily seem important to mention inan interview about energy consumption. Yet such contingencies and innovationsform key elements of the ways in which people navigate their homes and use energyin order to accomplish their aims of creating a particular sensory aesthetic for thenight time home.

Each of the examples I have mentioned is indeed that of a specific individual,innovating around specific material, sensory, social, animal and other elements ofhome. Indeed one of the qualities of video that makes it such a good medium forcommunicating across cultures is its ability to bring to the fore the detail of





individual experience, and through this, to evoke empathetic correspondences in itsaudience. My reason for noting this here however is not so much in the context ofvideo as communication, but to point out that although video enables us to focuson the individual, across projects in samples of between 20 and 40 households, ithas also over the last 14 or so years enabled me to bring together sets of common-alities in the ways that individuals deal with everyday contingencies and in theculturally specific ways that they might innovate in their wake. For example inearlier work I have shown how men and women who reject housewifely identities,but nevertheless have to clean their homes themselves, innovate by using non-conventional sensory cues as reminders that they need to do the cleaning (Pink,2004) and Kerstin Leder Mackley and I have shown how across our sample ofLEEDR households, ways of engaging with digital media presence rather thancontent are emerging (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013).

Therefore, the contingencies of everyday life make much mundane everydayactivity innovative and often non-normative – or at least not what as researcherswe were expecting to find. Everyday domestic practitioners are continually perceiv-ing, sensing and assessing the environments of home as they experience its materi-ality, sensoriality and socialities. To manage the home as an environment theyinnovate, plan ahead, imagine, and appropriate. Therefore, a light can become areminder, a wooden stick can solve a digital media problem, eating in a differentroom can solve an insulation problem and understanding that the lighting is part ofa project that will evolve into the future can make it feel acceptable that the lightsare currently too bright. Innovation is ongoing. Video tours and enactments revealthe detail of the innovative ways of knowing, being, and doing that form the basisof how we live. To be able to design for the future we need to attend to andunderstand the principles through which everyday innovation happens.

Conclusion

To sum up the argument I have made in this article, the methodology and subjectmatter of ethnographic research that focuses on the senses and the digital throughdigital visual methods and media, develop ways of understanding the world thatpotentially connect directly with the concerns of designers. Anthropologicalapproaches also create understandings of how change happens that offer insightsinto how at the level of the everyday, people innovate with and remake the designsthey are presented with, in ways that are ongoing and interwoven in their lives inintricate ways. By exceeding the conventional theoretical concerns of designresearch, and challenging the theory-led categories of psychology (behaviour)and sociology (practices), anthropologically informed ethnography brings to theconcern that designers have with the future, an appreciation of the ongoingness ofeveryday environments as they emerge, and of the principles through which toanticipate how and where people innovate.

By drawing together visual anthropology and design we have the potential todevelop further the critical and interventional forms of applied visual anthropology

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that have been emerging in the first decade of the twenty first century. We also havethe potential to advance a reflexive, processually oriented and ethnographicallyinformed way of thinking about design and engaging with the future whichdraws on the principles, practices and terms of engagement with participants inapplied visual anthropology projects. When we rethink the temporality of researchin this way, not only do we challenge conventional anthropological practices, but,Ingold tells us, there are also implications for design. Ingold calls for newanthropological thinking to move design away from, amongst other things, itstendency of ‘devising solutions that constrain practitioners to play by their ownrules, to a position in which these rules are open to negotiation, and in which theimprovisory interventions of practitioners present an opportunity rather than athreat’ (Ingold, 2012: 32). A visual–digital–sensory ethnography approach, as Ihave proposed it, takes a step in this direction, precisely through its attention toprocess, the ongoingness of innovation and the capacity of video to engage with theforward moving living-out of human activity, as it moves between past, present andfuture, and acknowledges the imaginative edge to the way we experience thepresent.

Acknowledgements

The ideas and arguments developed in this article are my own, however as always they haveemerged in relation to shared research and discussions, which have inspired my thinking inthe area where design and anthropology meet. I would especially like to acknowledge: my

colleagues in the Design Futures Lab at RMIT University in Australia from whom I havelearned a lot through participating in events and conversations; and my colleagues and co-authors in the articles cited, with whom I participate in the LEEDR project. The interdis-ciplinary LEEDR project, based at Loughborough University, is jointly funded by the UK

Research Councils’ Digital Economy and Energy programmes (grant number EP/I000267/1). For further information about the project, collaborating research groups and industrialpartners, please visit www.leedr-project.co.uk. I also thank all the individuals and house-

holds who have generously participated in my research.

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Author biography

Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University,Australia and Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, UK. Herrecent books include Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009), Situating Everyday Life:Practices and Places (2012), Advances in Visual Methodology (2012) and DoingVisual Ethnography, 3rd edition (2013).




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Digital-visual-sensory-design anthropology: Ethnography, imagination and intervention