Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink
health professionals at a teaching hospital’ (2007: 113).
More recently, the place of the senses in sociological research has become increasingly established. Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) have called for ‘live methods’ in sociology. This approach puts the senses at the centre of their project in that they write:
We are arguing for the cultivation of a sociological sensibility not confined to the predominant lines of sight, the focal points of public concern. Rather, we are arguing for paying attention to the social world within a wider range of senses and placing critical evaluation and ethical judgement at the centre of research craft. (Back and Puwar, 2012: 15)
As part of this, Back proposes that ‘The first principle of live sociology is an attention to how a wider range of the senses changes the quality of data and makes other kinds of critical imagination possible’ (Back, 2012: 29, original italics). Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk (2012) have sought to write the sociology of the senses through what they describe as a focus on the social, with a commitment to the study of interaction and what they call ‘somatic work’. There, taking a distinctly sociological approach, they bring together sociological attention to the body, the senses and human interaction. Again, the authors’ interest in social interaction tends to define the sociological approach to the senses, making this a distinctive element of what we might think of as a sociology of the senses, which runs through the different works discussed in this section.
Collectively, these works draw our attention to the corporeality and multisensoriality of any social encounter or interaction – including not only the relationships between research participants but those between ethnographer and research participants. Building on this in Chapter 3 I suggest that understanding our interactions with others as multisensorial encounters necessitates a reflexive awareness of the sensory intersubjectivity that characterises such meetings. Thus we might see the sociology of the senses as an important reminder that social interaction is a fundamental unit of analysis for not only understanding what is happening in the world, but also for part of the research process itself.
Sensory ethnography and applied research
The use of ethnographic methods in applied research – whether or not this is led by academic practitioners – is widespread across a range of fields of applied research, including consumer research, marketing, product development, health, education, overseas development and more. In some of these fields sensory analysis is also particularly important. In this section, by means of example, I reflect on consumer research and health studies.
In consumer research a range of methods have long since been used to analyse people’s sensory perceptions of products and brands to the point where now, in a context of consumer capitalism, ‘tapping the subjective sensory preferences of the consumer and creating enticing “interfaces” has come to take precedence over conventional design principles’ (Howes, 2005c: 286–7). In 1999 and 2000 I developed two ethnographic studies with Unilever Research in which the multisensoriality of how people experience their homes, material cultures and domestic products and practices was essential to both the research questions and processes engaged in. Both projects were situated in the domestic sphere and involved using video and interviews to research and represent how cleaning and home decorating (Pink, 2004) and laundry (Pink, 2005b, 2007c) are part of everyday practice, identity and morality. My current and recent applied research with industry partners and with designers also always incorporates attention to the sensory elements of experience and environments. For example, my research about occupational safety and health with Jennie Morgan and Andrew Dainty involved a focus on sensory ways of knowing through the hand in health care (Pink et al., 2015) and on the way other people’s homes are experienced as sites of familiarity or danger by workers in logistics and health care who have to perform home visits as part of their everyday working lives. An ethnographic approach to exploring people’s multisensory relationships to the materialities and environments of their everyday lives, and to their feelings about them, offers a remarkably rich and informative source of knowledge for academic and applied researchers alike. However, in these contexts ethnography has not historically necessarily been the dominant methodology. Indeed, in consumer and marketing research a range of sensory research methods have been developed. Some of these have been qualitative, for example Howes noted the example of ‘“body-storming” focus groups (see Bonapace, 2002: 191)’, which aimed to ‘divine the most potent sensory channel, and within each channel the most potent sensory signal, through which to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and capture the attention of potential customers’ (2005c: 288). Therefore, consumer researchers are interested in and attend to the senses in ways that show there is great potential for sensory ethnography in this applied field.
In health research the applied potential of sensory approaches to research is also becoming evident. Recent studies have focused on contexts of nursing (Edvardsson and Street, 2007), interventional radiology (Lammer, 2007) and anaesthesia (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). Located academically in sociology some of this research focuses on the embodied and sensory nature of social interactions and environments in clinical contexts, often using visual methods. The importance of acknowledging the sensorial dimensions of biomedical practices is evident from Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s (2007) study. David Edvardsson and Annette Street’s work developed this in a slightly different way by providing a reflexive and ‘insider’ account of health contexts. They discussed the idea of ‘The nurse as embodied ethnographer’ (the subtitle of their article), suggesting that researchers should account ‘for the embodied illness experience’ and ‘the sensate experience of the nurse as ethnographer’, and thus ‘open up nursing practice to phenomenological descriptions’ (2007: 30). Although their work is clearly rooted in academic debates (drawing from the work of Stoller and Emily Martin) it has practical implications and Street has ‘taken this idea further into teaching neophyte nurses to attend to their senses and their embodied responses, in order to better understand the lived experiences of patients and their families’ (2007: 30). Lammer (2007) was also concerned to find ways to present her findings concerning the interactions between clinicians and patients (see above) to clinical staff and as part of this produced the documentary video Making Contact (2004). This and her later project CORPOrealities (n.d.) (which also involves collaborations with artists) create innovative links between arts and biomedical practice (Lammer, 2012). As noted above, my research with Jennie Morgan and Andrew Dainty also engaged a sensory approach to attend to how community nurses and occupational therapists who perform home visits, sense their environments, and to explore their sensory ways of knowing about health and safety (Pink et al., 2014).
Together these studies and forms of social intervention show that a sensory ethnography approach has a key role to play in applied research. It draws out the everyday realities of people’s experience and practice and provides insights about how to make these experiences and practices more pleasurable and effective – whether this means developing products that people will desire to use and foods they will enjoy eating or making medical procedures and care contexts more comfortable.
Sensory ethnography for design research and practice
Ethnography has long since been part of the practice of design researchers, although the ways and context in which it is used for design have tended to differ in significant ways from its development in anthropology. In part this can be explained through the applied nature of design research, and in that it has often been associated with the desire to make change through psychologically informed rational actor type behaviour change models (see Tromp and Hekkert, 2012). However, design research has been a constant strand in the ‘sensory’ turn since the beginning of the twenty-first century. For example, Malnar and Vodvarka (2004) led the way with their book Sensory Design which used examples from a range of practice-based and literary contexts to establish the importance of sensoriality in design (and see Lucas and Romice, 2008; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010; Leder Mackley and Pink, 2013; Pink et al., 2013). This shared emphasis creates potential for theoretical and ethnographic elements of anthropological practice to connect with the concerns of designers who, like Malnar and Vodvarka (2004), are concerned with questions including