Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink

Doing Sensory Ethnography

In addition, forms of user-centred design, experience design and emotional design (all of which bear some relation to the sensory) play a role in contemporary design thinking. In my work with designers at Loughborough University, UK, we explored the relationship between a sensory ethnography approach and phenomenological approaches to design (Pink et al., 2013). There we identified that there are

clear parallels between the phenomenological sensory ethnography approach and the notion of embodied interaction that is core to 3rd Paradigm HCI [Dourish 2001a]. At the heart of both is a commitment to the idea that we encounter the world as a meaningful place within which we act [Harrison and Dourish 1996]: ‘It is through our actions in the world – through the ways in which we move through the world, react to it, turn it to our needs, and engage with it to solve problems – that the meaning that the world has for us is revealed’. (Pink et al., 2013: 10–11)

There we suggest that such an approach

provides us with both a theoretical and experiential framework for design because it allows us to on the one hand appreciate the meaning and nature of the experiential environments into which we seek to introduce design interventions. On the other it offers us a set of theoretical tools that guide us away from attempts to change ‘behavior’ and to instead ask how interventions might sit in relation to the existing routines, contingencies and innovations that ongoingly make and re-make the practices and places of everyday life. (Pink et al., 2013: 15)

Indeed, sensoriality is at the core of the agenda in the emergent field of design anthropology. As Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan put it, design anthropology

resonates with four areas of interest that are generating some of the most exciting new work in the discipline: exchange and personhood in the use of technology, the understanding of skilled practice, anthropology of the senses and the aesthetics of everyday life. (2012: 10)

In a contemporary context the relationship between design and the social sciences is growing, specifically in fields of applied research where the research orientation of the social sciences towards the present-past can grow through the orientation of design research towards the future. In the Afterword to this book I elaborate on this to suggest that sensory ethnography offers a new focus for change-making and future-oriented research.

Sensory ethnography and arts practice

Attention to the senses in arts practice has developed in parallel to and sometimes overlapping or in collaboration with ethnographic work on the senses (see, for example, Zardini, 2005; Jones, 2006a, b, c). It is not within the scope of this book to undertake an art historical review of the senses. Instead, I draw out some of the most salient contemporary parallels and connections between these fields. There is already a growing literature concerning the relationship between anthropology and arts practice (Silva and Pink, 2004; Schneider and Wright, 2006, 2013; Ravetz, 2007; Schneider, 2008), some of which places some emphasis on sensoriality (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2005) and highlights a turn to collaborative arts practice, noting how an anthropological approach can bring to the fore issues around the politics and power relations of such collaborations (Schneider and Wright, 2013).

There are some obvious crossovers between sensory ethnography and creative practice, such as the work of the ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (see MacDougall, 1998, 2005), the audiovisual practice of the sociologist Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007, 2012) and soundscape studies (e.g. Drever, 2002; Feld, 1991, 2003). These works are discussed in the following chapters. Specific connections tend to be less frequently made between ethnography, the senses and arts practices as developed in installation and performance art. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between recent developments in sensory ethnographic methods and arts practice. Perhaps the clearest example is in forms of practice in each discipline that uses walking as a method of research (e.g. the arts practice of Sissel Tolaas (see Hand, 2007) and the ethnographic practice of e.g. Katrín Lund, 2006, 2008; Jo Lee Vergunst, 2008; and Andrew Irving, 2010, 2013), representing or engaging audiences in other people’s sensory experiences or in specific smell- or soundscapes (e.g. the work of Jenny Marketou, discussed by Drobnick and Fisher, 2008). These discussions of arts practice and the sensory ways of knowing that are implied through them invite a consideration of how sensory ethnography practice might develop in relation to explorations in art. Contributors to Schneider and Wright’s Anthropology and Art Practice (2013) also bring questions around the senses to the fore. Some of these examples are discussed in Chapter 8.

An interdisciplinary context for sensory ethnography

Since the early twenty-first century an increasingly interdisciplinary focus on the senses has emerged. This has been promoted through a series of edited volumes including Howes’ Empire of the Senses (2005a). These collections unite the work of academics from a range of disciplines to explore sensory aspects of culture and society (Howes, 2005a) using modern western categories of audition (Bull and Back, 2003), smell (Drobnick, 2006), taste (Korsmeyer, 2005), touch (Classen, 2005) and visual culture (Edwards and Bhaumik, 2008). According to Howes this increased focus on the senses represents a ‘sensual revolution’ – an ideological move that has turned ‘the tables and recover(ed) a full-bodied understanding of culture and experience’ as opposed to one that is modelled on linguistics (2005a: 1; see also Howes, 2003). Although some would disagree that the revolution contra linguistics (e.g. Bendix, 2006: 6) should be the central concern of a sensory approach to ethnography, Howes is correct that the senses have come to the fore in the work of many contemporary academics. Moreover, as we have seen in this chapter, the senses are becoming increasingly important to scholarship and research across social science, arts and humanities disciplines – including design, geography, anthropology, sociology and arts practice. In what is an increasingly interdisciplinary context for scholarship and practice within these fields – for instance, with the emergence of design anthropology and the connections between anthropology and arts practice – as well as between the social, technological, engineering sciences and medical sciences more generally, we can see how the theoretical, methodological and practical emphasis on the senses in the social sciences and humanities is also having impact through them in wider fields. Therefore, for example, in my own experience of working with designers, engineers and construction industry experts, a sensory ethnography approach can inform the development of strong research collaborations that bring to interdisciplinary and hard-to-address research problems, new ways of knowing that are not usually applied in those fields.

Summing up

In this chapter I have shown how an interest in the senses has extended across academic and applied ethnographic disciplines concerned with understanding and representing human experience. Each existing body of literature offers important insights that I draw on to propose a sensory ethnographic methodology in the following chapters. I have suggested that a sensory ethnography could be of use not only in discipline-specific projects and in applied research. Rather, it can additionally make an important contribution in projects that bridge the divide between applied and academic work, in projects that develop and combine perspectives and aims of different disciplines in interdisciplinary analysis.

Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink