Читать книгу Doing Sensory Ethnography - Sarah Pink - Страница 23

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 those relating to sensory perception and experience. 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.