Showing papers by "Sarah Pink published in 2019"

Smart energy futures and social practice imaginaries: Forecasting scenarios for pet care in Australian homes

Abstract: In this article we demonstrate how existing scenario-planning and forecasting methods employed in the energy sector envision, prioritise and limit possible futures. We propose that ‘social practice imaginaries’ can be mobilised to develop alternative future scenarios grounded in changing everyday life. To undertake this we critically interrogate the sociotechnical imaginary given rise through an Australian smart technology scenario-planning exercise, which asked: ‘what might Australia’s electricity sector look like in 2050?’ Proposing that this question needs to be reframed to account for the question of ‘what might everyday practices look like in 2050?’ we experiment with a ‘stay-at-home pets’ scenario. We draw on secondary data on pet care trends and a decade of ethnographic research with Australian households. Through this example, we demonstrate how viewing futures through pet care and entertainment practices shifts the conceptualisation of the energy problems that the sector seeks to address through smart technology deployments. We conclude by emphasising how this social practice imaginary expands opportunities and pathways for understanding and intervening in possible futures, and call for further analysis through this conceptual lens.

Automated futures and the mobile present : In-car video ethnographies

Abstract: New technological possibilities associated with autonomous driving (AD) cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. In this article we advance a theoretical-methodolo...

Atmospheres in Urban Light

Abstract: Inescapably spatial and located in experience, understanding atmospheres and their impact means close empirical attention to how they arise and are constituted, how they impress upon us, how they circulate and are shared, and what configures to make them feel differently for diverse people. In this article, we advance a dialogic autoethnographic methodology for attuning to, exploring and understanding atmospheres that accounts for them as they arise in the ongoing flow of experience of light. In this ethnographic approach, we research in atmospheres – that is, in the ongoing flow and change of shifting impressions and feelings constituted spatially by a multiplicity of elements. Taking a ‘light walk’ through inner city Melbourne as our example, we interrogate our experience of atmospheres in light, and also address how they might be purposefully constituted or designed.

Homeliness in Health Care: The Role of Everyday Designing

Abstract: This article examines how a sense of home can be created in complex clinical healthcare contexts for vulnerable patients. While existing research in this field focuses mainly on patient experience,...

Understanding Trust in Automated Vehicles

Abstract: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are developed to increase safety, and bring environmental benefits. Nevertheless, there is growing skepticism in society regarding these technologies, a tendency that centres issues of trust in research and design of future AVs. In this paper, we raise the question of how trust has been understood and researched in relation to automation within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) thus far and what has been identified as key issues to deepen our understanding of personal trust in contemporary AVs. To answer this question, we systematically reviewed 232 HCI research articles on trust in automation and AVs to identify a) key aspects of contemporary trust research theories and methodologies, and b) what dimensions of trust are in need of further investigation in relation to UX perspectives on trust. Based on the review, we discuss methodological implications of focusing on the experience of trust in future research.

Experiencing the Future Car: Anticipatory UX as a Social and Digital Phenomenon

Abstract: In order to be innovative and competitive, the automotive industry seeks to understand how to attract new customers, even before they have experienced the product. User Experience (UX) research oft ...

Imagining Personal Data: Experiences of Self-Tracking

Abstract: As technology has become more advanced, self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring ...

Everyday mundane repair: banknotes and the material entanglements of improvisation and innovation

Abstract: This article seeks to contribute to the conceptualization of everyday repair with a focus on banknotes, a ubiquitous and mundane technology in constant need of maintenance and repair. Through a des...

Noise transformation: A critical listening-based methodology for the design of motorway soundscapes

Abstract: Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an industry-funded qualitative interdisciplinary research project that has produced a new approach to motorway noise management called “noise transformation”. Design/methodology/approach Four iterative design tests guided by listening as methodology. These included field recordings, laboratory tests and two field tests. Field tests were conducted in combination with ethnographers, who verified community responses to field-based transformations. Findings Transformation requires an audible perception of both background and introduced sounds in all instances. Transformation creates a 1–2 dB increase in background sound levels, making it counterintuitive to traditional noise attenuation approaches. Noise transformation is an electroacoustic soundscape design method that treats noise as a “design material”. When listening to motorway noise transformations, participants were actually experiencing another rendering of a sound that they had already acquired a degree of attunement to. Thus, they experienced transformations as somehow familiar or normal and easy to feel comfortable with. Originality/value Noise transformation is a new approach to noise management. Typically, noise management focusses on reduction in dB levels. Noise transformation focusses on changing the perceptual impact of noise to make it less annoying. It brings together urban design, composition and ethnography as a means to think about the future design of outdoor environments affected by motorway traffic noise, and should be of interests to planners, designers and artists. The authors have structured the paper around listening as methodology, through which both design and ethnography outcomes were achieved.

Imagining mundane futures

Abstract: When people move country, they experience new social, infrastructural, and ambient contingencies, which enables them to imagine otherwise unknowable possible futures ‘at home’. In this article, we mobilise a design anthropological approach to show how collaboration with temporary migrants can generate understandings that generate insights regarding future sustainable products in emerging economies. We draw on research with temporary Indonesian student migrants in Australia, which explored how they envisioned their possible domestic futures through their changing laundry practices.

Patient-Centered Care and the Design of a Psychiatric Care Facility

Abstract: This shift to a patient-centered care paradigm has implications not only for how hospitals provide care but also for how they are experienced and perceived by patients and communities more broadly. It confronts the traditional and outdated perceptions of hospitals as sites of authority and manifestations of power relations, a phenomenon prevalent in psychiatric facilities in particular (Foucault 1982, p. 790). In the past power has been realized through structures of authority, hierarchy and expertise, the allocation of treatment modalities, and inclusion or exclusion of patient families and carers from the care process through simple things such as visitation access or participating in treatment decisions. Contemporary models of health care have begun to challenge this perception and enactment of power that has been prevalent in the past. The evolution to new models of care within medical contexts, and particularly nursing (Curtis et al. 2013, and Wagner 2010), marks a shift from power realized through a treatment relationship, to one of patient care and the provision of health services. In this chapter we reflect on what this transition from treatment to care means for designers and their approaches to the design of contemporary psychiatric care facilities through a focus on the design approaches to one facility in particular.

Refiguring global construction challenges through ethnography

Abstract: There has been a burgeoning growth in the use of ethnographic methods in construction management research in recent years, which to a certain extent has been pulled together through our own efforts (see Pink et al, 2013). Yet, arguably the intellectual framework of inquiry has been set too narrowly until now, with the ethnographic endeavour in CMR concerned with “how these methods embrace the construction issues facing construction researchers... to enable the construction industry to effectively function in the future” (Phelps and Horman, 2010, italics added). While recent work, particularly that developed by the editors of this special issue and their colleagues, has started to make new advances in construction industry research through ethnographic practice and theory, we call for further work to consolidate this field of research. We believe there is much merit in this for two reasons. First to raise the profile of ethnographic approaches in the construction industry research context. Indeed this will enable construction researchers to better confront the research challenges they already face. However it will do more than this, in that ethnographic research also tends to open up the field of research further, to surface new questions and issues, and to demonstrate that the answer to the question originally posed might be neither what nor where originally assumed. Second, ethnographic research undertaken in the construction industry has the potential to bring significant theoretical, methodological and empirical insights to the fore that have bearings on debates and challenges that are being approached in other fields of substantive study or disciplinary discussion. For example as existing work has shown, the processes through which worker safety is often viewed and regulated in the construction industry have much in common with the ways that universities govern research ethics (Pink 2017, Akama et al 2018), or the ways that construction workers engage with digital video-based materials can inform us about wider questions relating to digital pedagogy (Pink et al 2016). The fact is that the construction industry is part of society, and if we do not view it as such, and understand the people who work in it, and the materials that flow through it as pertaining to these wider worlds of things and processes, then we stand little chance of comprehending its dynamics. Ethnographic research, when appropriately delivered, we argue offers the key to these understandings.

Interactive Arts and Disability: A Conceptual Model Toward Understanding Participation

Abstract: In this paper we explore how social aspects of group interaction and the physical affordances of interactive technology may be exploited to enhance the participation of people with a disability in creative, artistic activity. Participation per se is conceptualized using a current framework known as the family of Participation Related Constructs—fPRC, an ecological approach derived from a biopsychosocial health model. Taking an integrative approach, we blend current theory on participation, interaction design and community art to explore how group play and performance can foster inclusive participation in the arts and contribute to a positive change in personal (and collective) wellbeing. We describe two interactive arts projects called Resonance and Wheelchair DJ that provide examples of participation and performance in communities with a disability and reflect upon the workshop models that facilitate the creative expression of individuals and the group. We conclude with a discussion on the potentially transformative effects of participation in the arts by people with a disability and our gaps in our understanding of how to evaluate the notion of participation as a means—a medium through which person-related attributes and creative activity are developed in the longer-term.

Digital Social Futures Research

Abstract: Social research is almost inevitably digital: in its subject matter because the digital, social and material dimensions of our worlds and lives are now inseparably entangled; and in its methods as our research techniques and encounters are, even if indirectly, implicated with digital technologies, platforms and practices. Social scientific renderings of digital technologies and media and everyday life propose a range of discipline-specific ways of understanding this relationship between the online/offline and digital/material, and a large and growing literature about digital methods and practice for research and its dissemination. The new challenge is to advance from this strong base of critical research and scholarship within the social sciences and humanities, in two ways. First towards interdisciplinary interventions that will bring theory, methods and concepts into dialogue with technology and design disciplines, and policy and industry agendas; and second to engage with emerging digital technologies and communication, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Automated Decision Making (ADM), and the new socialities, everyday life practices and business models associated with these technological possibilities.

Interactive Arts and Disability: A Conceptual Model Toward Understanding Participation.

Abstract: In this paper we explore how social aspects of group interaction and the physical affordances of interactive technology may be exploited to enhance the participation of people with a disability in creative, artistic activity. Participation per se is conceptualized using a current framework known as the family of Participation Related Constructs—fPRC, an ecological approach derived from a biopsychosocial health model. Taking an integrative approach, we blend current theory on participation, interaction design and community art to explore how group play and performance can foster inclusive participation in the arts and contribute to a positive change in personal (and collective) wellbeing. We describe two interactive arts projects called Resonance and Wheelchair DJ that provide examples of participation and performance in communities with a disability and reflect upon the workshop models that facilitate the creative expression of individuals and the group. We conclude with a discussion on the potentially transformative effects of participation in the arts by people with a disability and our gaps in our understanding of how to evaluate the notion of participation as a means—a medium through which person-related attributes and creative activity are developed in the longer-term.