Sarah Pink

This chapter explains how designing for future intelligent mobility systems is advanced by a huma... more This chapter explains how designing for future intelligent mobility systems is advanced by a human-centered approach, based in design anthropology. It provides an accessible introduction the theory and methodology of this approach, the production of ethnographic insights, and their translation into design probes for use workshops tailored to enable stakeholders to actively co-design future mobility and autonomous vehicle services and outlines the potentials and challenges of engaging diverse stakeholders—from industry and policy to the people who will use future technologies and services—in the development of future mobility.

What is Uncertainty

Uncertainty and Possibility : New Approaches to Future Making in Design Anthropology

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Traces through the Present

Imagining Personal Data, 2020

LEEDR: what are the results? Participant feedback for H99

The LEEDR project was a four-year study that explored energy consumption in family homes. 20 hous... more The LEEDR project was a four-year study that explored energy consumption in family homes. 20 households took part, being involved for about three years. Insights were fed back to the participants at the end of the project in the form of a unique, tailored book for each family. This book represents the style, formatting and information content of those books. This version has been called ‘H99’ and it is an amalgam of chapters from multiple homes, and therefore should not be used as a source of data or analysis: please refer to publications. The information contained here has been released generally in the hope that it might inspire and inform the development of feedback from other similar projects.

Media practices of young Australians: Tangible and measurable reflections on a digital divide

KOME, 2020

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Empathetic technologies: digital materiality and video ethnography

Visual Studies, 2017

In this article, we advance recent theoretical and methodological discussions regarding the use o... more In this article, we advance recent theoretical and methodological discussions regarding the use of video techniques for generating empathetic encounters. We do so through a focus on how these techniques might be rendered in research conducted through sites of action and experience that are explicitly constituted through forms of digital materiality, whereby the digital and material are understood as relational and emergent. We argue for a processual view of digital materiality and in correspondence with this, of the research process, whereby empathetic imagining is itself understood as emergent from the research encounter. By way of example we draw on recent video ethnography research that has used GoPro and researcher-held video recording in collaboration with participants, in order to record and develop understandings of their experiences of self-tracking and cycle commuting.

Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology By SarahPink, ElisendaArdèvol, and DèboraLanzeni, eds.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016

Visual Anthropology Review, 2018

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The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

Social & Cultural Geography, 2017

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Entangled belonging: Barcelona-to-Melbourne professional transient migrants

Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 2017

The economic crisis in Europe has generated a context of increasing uncertainty along with new fo... more The economic crisis in Europe has generated a context of increasing uncertainty along with new forms of globalization through a wave of migration from Europe to more thriving OECD economies, including Australia. This article examines how particular transnational senses of belonging are generated in this context through the example of how Catalan migrants generate what we refer to as an &#39;entangled sense of belonging&#39; between Melbourne and Barcelona. In doing so, we draw on semi-structured interviews and photographic research methods undertaken with such migrants living in Melbourne. We argue that the transient nature of migration becomes contingent in this context. As such, it is not a measurable state or status, but something more qualitative and experiential, and therefore needs to be attended to through an approach that accounts for this.

Self-tracking and mobile media: New digital materialities

Mobile Media & Communication, 2017

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Screen Ecologies

Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. Thi... more Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues through digital and visual media are riddled with irony, because the resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste associated with digital devices contribute to environmental damage and climate change. Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region -- a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media. Screen Ecologies shows how new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. It investigates such topics as artists' exploration of alternative ways to represent the environment; regional stories of media innovation and climate change; the tensions between amateur and professional art; the emergence of biennials, triennials, and new arts organizations; the theme of water in regional art; new models for networked collaboration; and social media's move from private to public realms. A generous selection of illustrations shows a range of artist's projects.

Being in a mediated world: self-tracking and the mind–body–environment

cultural geographies, 2017

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The affective intensities of datafied space

Emotion, Space and Society, 2016

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Video: What is Sensory Ethnography?

Self-Tracking in the World

Imagining Personal Data

The gender of smart charging

Buildings and Cities

“Isn't this Marvelous”

Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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Simulating and Trusting in Automated Futures: Anthropology and the Wizard of Oz

In Search of Lost Futures

An Interventional Design Anthropology of Emerging Technologies: Working Through an Interdisciplinary Field

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

Contributions of ethnographic practice to community-engaged research in construction management

Ethnographic research in the construction industry, 2013

ABSTRACT

Mobility as a Service Through Design: A Human Approach

Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 2021

What is Uncertainty

Uncertainty and Possibility : New Approaches to Future Making in Design Anthropology

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Traces through the Present

Imagining Personal Data, 2020

LEEDR: what are the results? Participant feedback for H99

Media practices of young Australians: Tangible and measurable reflections on a digital divide

KOME, 2020

Download

Empathetic technologies: digital materiality and video ethnography

Visual Studies, 2017

Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology By SarahPink, ElisendaArdèvol, and DèboraLanzeni, eds.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016

Visual Anthropology Review, 2018

Download

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

Social & Cultural Geography, 2017

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Entangled belonging: Barcelona-to-Melbourne professional transient migrants

Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 2017

Self-tracking and mobile media: New digital materialities

Mobile Media & Communication, 2017

Download

Screen Ecologies

Being in a mediated world: self-tracking and the mind–body–environment

cultural geographies, 2017

Download

The affective intensities of datafied space

Emotion, Space and Society, 2016

Download

Video: What is Sensory Ethnography?

Sarah Pink: Digital Ethnography (CAST IT Interview)

Sarah Pink is a Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia, and the ... more Sarah Pink is a Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia, and the author or co-editor of several books about digital ethnography.
To approach this area, we get Sarah’s help with some conceptual groundwork about the methods, values, and history of ethnography, and its relation to neighbouring fields such as anthropology or cultural geography. But the conversation focusses on digital ethnography: Information technology changes not only the methods of ethnography by providing tools or modes of expression, but also raises new questions by changing notions of embodiment, geographic place, and social relation, all of which are central themes for ethnographers. We also talk about how an field that largely eschews prediction and hypothesis can reason about future technology such as self-driving cars.
Sarah’s book is Pink et al., Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, SAGE Publications, 2016.

Essaying the fabpod

by Francesca Rendle-Short, David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Brigid Magner, Adrian Miles, Sarah Pink, and Annie Fergusson

An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of th... more An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of the fabpod, as of August 21, 2014.

How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to an urban architectural model structure? This is the question that motivated this experiment, which took place in 2014 in Melbourne, in and around an innovative architectural design artefact, the Fabpod (RMIT 2012).

Authors: David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Adrian Miles, Kyla Brettle, Annie Fergusson, Brigid Magner, Alvin Pang, Francesca Rendle-Short and Shanti Sumartojo

Energy & Digital Living web site

Between 2010 – 2014, a team of anthropologists, engineers and designers worked towards a deeper u... more Between 2010 – 2014, a team of anthropologists, engineers and designers worked towards a deeper understanding of how energy and media consumption fit in to everyday practices and habits in home life. This site presents some of the key outcomes of the ethnographic and design strands of that research

Digital Living and Sensory Perception: Implications for Ethnography and Design

An invited blog post on the EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) web site

Australia's rising air con use makes us hot and bothered

by Larissa Nicholls, Yolande Strengers, and Sarah Pink

Refiguring Techniques In Digital Visual Research

by Edgar Gómez Cruz and Sarah Pink

This book interrogates how new digital-visual techniques and technologies are being used in emerg... more This book interrogates how new digital-visual techniques and technologies are being used in emergent configurations of research and intervention. It discusses technological change and technological possibility; theoretical shifts toward processual paradigms; and a respectful ethics of responsibility. The contributors explore how new and evolving digital-visual technologies and techniques have been utilized in the development of research, and reflect on how such theory and practice might advance what is “knowable” in a world of smartphones, drones, and 360-degree cameras.

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Digital Materialities Design and Anthropology

by Elisenda Ardevol and Sarah Pink

Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the inter... more Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between design and digital research in the UK, Spain, Australia and the USA. By incorporating in-depth understandings of the digital-material world from both the social sciences and design, the book considers how this combined knowledge might advance our capacity to design for the future. Divided into three parts, the focus of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical: how different digital materialities are imagined and emerge, through software emulation, urban sensors and smart homes; how new digital designs are sparked through collaborations between social scientists and designers; and finally, how digital design emerges from the insider work of everyday designers. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/digital-materialities-9781472592590/#sthash.eRqwyjAG.dpuf

Un/Certainty

by Yoko Akama and Sarah Pink

Sarah Pink , Yoko Akama and participants This book is about the generative potential of uncertai... more Sarah Pink , Yoko Akama and participants
This book is about the generative potential of uncertainty as it emerges through practice and scholarship at a nexus of design+ethnography. Un/certainty argues for a a deeper engagement with and interrogation of uncertainty and acknowledgment of how sites of uncertainty operate within specific processes of research/design.

It advances this agenda by presenting the issues, challenges and joys of un/certainties as they were uncovered, expressed and reconciled by a group composed of some of the most innovative and interesting scholars and practitioners in the world over two days in December 2014.

Designing Cultures of Care Patient-Centered Care and the Design of a Psychiatric Care Facility 6 Patient-Centered Care and the Design of a Psychiatric Care Facility

by Laurene Vaughan and Sarah Pink

Designing Cultures of Care, 2018

Within contemporary discourses on design and care, considerable bodies of literature have been de... more Within contemporary discourses on design and care, considerable bodies of literature have been developing that propose care as a design paradigm for the health sector. From the global challenges of aging communities to the particularities of specific health and medical facilities, there has been a growing focus on human-centered design methods and approaches and their potential to provide particular and location-specific ways to design into this domain. The ambition of researchers and practitioners has been to identify ways to align the physical experiences of being in a state of institutional care, with new paradigms of patient-centered care as realized within the medical services that hospitals and other such care facilities provide. 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. The project context: Bendigo Hospital The site of the research (Design for Wellbeing Project) is the Bendigo Hospital located in regional Victoria, Australia (Figure 6.1), and the design and development of new psychiatric facilities in the hospital during a major redevelopment. The methodology for the research is design ethnography and the research is being undertaken over a three-year time span (2016-2018) by an interdisciplinary team of researchers. This discussion focuses on insights from interviews with the architects and landscape designers of the new facility that were undertaken in Year One of the study. The new hospital development has resulted in the psychiatric care unit physically moving from three discrete locations that focused on different needs, to one integrated psychiatric facility within the new hospital complex. This transition has resulted in the establishment of new contexts for care in the new facilities; the upgrade of facilities; the integration of current discoveries from research on the relationship between environments and health and well-being through spatial design; and the integration of digital technologies for care and safety. The aim of the chapter is to begin to draw insights about the

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DATA ETHNOGRAPHIES (III): HUMBLING DATA IN A PLAYFUL WORLD

by Edgar Gómez Cruz, Sarah Pink, and Shanti Sumartojo

This third Data Ethnographies position paper explores data through concepts of play and playfulne... more This third Data Ethnographies position paper explores data through concepts of play and playfulness. Our discussion is situated in the context of what scholars in this field have identified as an emergent 'ludic turn' in our media and cultural practices; a mode of playful interaction and engagement that imbues everyday digital materialities.

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DATA ETHNOGRAPHIES (II): Ethics and data futures

by Sarah Pink, Edgar Gómez Cruz, Annette Markham, and Shanti Sumartojo

In this Data Ethnographies position paper we outline our agenda for approaching the relationship ... more In this Data Ethnographies position paper we outline our agenda for approaching the relationship between ethics and data futures. The paper is based on our second data ethnographies workshop which brought together a group of colleagues whose work interfaces around ethnographic practice, design and ethnographic futures research, internet ethics and digital privacy, and personal data. Two key issues were at the centre of our discussions: first how ethnographic approaches to data can enable and might also call for new thinking about ethics and futures; and second how we confront the questions of the ethics and temporality of ethnographic research in data-worlds.

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DATA ETHNOGRAPHIES (I); Personal data in an uncertain world

by Edgar Gómez Cruz, Sarah Pink, Deborah Lupton, Heather Horst, John Postill, Paul Dourish, and Vaike Fors

Position paper. First Workshop of the Digital Ethnographies Lab, RMIT.

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Seeing, Sensing Sound: Eye Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters inc

by Andrea Rassell, Sean Redmond, Jenny Robinson, Darrin Verhagen, and Sarah Pink

Historically, a great deal of audience research within film studies either rests on an imagined v... more Historically, a great deal of audience research within film studies either rests on an imagined viewer, or involves qualitative memory work, interviews and focus groups. There is nascent work on the neurological and physiological transformations that viewers undergo while watching a film (Hasson 2008), but little empirical work on what the eyes actually focus upon; at what viewers actually gaze at when watching a movie. The eye-tracking technology employed by the authors of this chapter affords us the opportunity to find out what viewers actually gaze at, for what length of time, and with what intensity. However, the authors of this chapter consider sound to be one of the key determinants in directing or influencing gaze patterns: we recognize that as an object of study film is an audio-visual medium with a complex and multi-layered sonic field in operation.

Drawing on cinematic theories of sound, and neuroscientific understandings of the eye and the gaze, we undertake a comparative analysis of two film sequences: the ‘chase sequence’ from the animated film, Monsters, Inc. (Docter et al. 2001), and the first five minutes of the Omaha Beach landing scene from Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998). Both films involve complex sound design, moments of perceptual shock, spatial and temporal shifts in sound, and heightened sonic agency.

Six viewers were eye tracked, and the data gathered analyzed through a combination of close textual analysis and the statistical interpretation of collated gaze patterns (with the generation of heat and contour maps, for example). The viewers were shown these sequences twice: once with its normal audio field playing, and once with the sound taken out. In this chapter we interpret this data to answer the following questions: to what extent do viewers’ eyes follow narrative-based sound cues? How does the soundtrack affect viewer engagement and attention to detail? Is there an element of prediction and predictability in the way a viewer sees and hears? Do viewers’ eyes ‘wander’ when there is no sound to guide them where to look? Ultimately, we ask how important is sound to the cinematic experience of vision?

Data anxieties: Finding trust in everyday digital mess

Digital data is an increasing and continual presence across the sites, activities and relationshi... more Digital data is an increasing and continual presence across the sites, activities and relationships of everyday life. In this article we explore what data presence means for the ways that the everyday is organised, sensed, and anticipated. While digital data studies have demonstrated how data is deeply entangled with the way in which everyday life is lived out and valued, at the same time our relationships with data are riddled with anxieties or small niggles or tricky trade-offs and their use is often chaotic and muddled, part of the inevitable uncertainty about what will happen next. If the presence of data is part of the environments we inhabit, this raises the question of how and why data is valuable to us and what forms of hope and trust enable this value to further develop

Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

by Jennie Morgan and Sarah Pink

SI: A marriage on the rocks? Transdisciplinary travels of ethnography, 2017

Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here,... more Anthropologists intermittently reflect on the danger and risk that ethnography can involve. Here, we advance this question in a contemporary research environment where the regulatory logics of occupational safety and health (OSH) encroach increasingly on anthropological practice through institutional research governance. We draw on our research into workplace OSH in the construction, healthcare, and logistics sectors – a research field dominated by behavioural theories that support the preventative logics of OSH regulation. Taking an autoethnographic approach, we explore how researching in potentially dangerous environments requires ethnographers to learn how to be safe through others’ situated safety logics and through those of researcher safety. It is, we argue, through these engagements with the improvisory ways that workers generally, and researchers specifically, engage with safety, that another set of inconsistencies between OSH preventative logics and our anthropological understanding of how ethnographic knowing emerges become visible.

Keywords: Autoethnography, audit cultures, researcher safety, regulation, improvisation, reflexivity, anthropology

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UNDERSTANDING ENERGY FUTURES THROUGH EVERYDAY LIFE OBSERVATION FOLLOWING AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

by Yolande Strengers, Sarah Pink, and Amalia Sãbiescu

This paper argues for an ethnographic approach to developing new types of knowledge about and des... more This paper argues for an ethnographic approach to developing new types of knowledge about and designing for sustainable forms of energy consumption and demand in homes. Such an approach offers: 1) in-depth insights into the sensory and usually unspoken aspects of everyday householder experiences, which are nevertheless fundamental to understanding energy consumption and demand; 2) enables new understandings of how domestic routines, habits and activities develop in relation to the contingencies of everyday life including new and emerging 'smart' technologies; and 3) has implications for how we might best design for environmentally sustainable energy use as we move on into the future. In this sense it provides understandings of the relationship between what might be technologically possible and imagined, and actual lived everyday realities. The paper will draw on examples of how this methodology was designed and applied in two discrete projects. The first is the video ethnography strand of the UK-based Low Effort Energy Demand Reduction (LEEDR) project. LEEDR was a four-year interdisciplinary EPSRC-funded project (leedr-project.co.uk), which included the production of ethnographically informed digital design interventions and the Energy and Digital Living web site (energyanddigitalliving.com). The second is an ongoing study (2015-18) on the 'automated smart home' funded by the Australian Research Council. This study involves in-home interviews, photography and tours with Australians who are living in, designing and/or building smart homes. Finally, the paper calls for further research-based interrogations of how and where energy futures figure in the imaginations of everyday domestic energy users.

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Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures

by Brit Ross Winthereik, Joshua Kirshner, and Sarah Pink

What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternati... more What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. Through ethnographic studies of bulbs, bicycles, dams, power grids and much more, the contributors shed light on practices that are often overlooked, showing how electricity is enacted in multiple ways. Electrifying Anthropology moves beyond the idea of electricity as an immovable force, and instead offers a set of potential trajectories for thinking about electricity and its effects in contemporary society. With new contributions on an emerging area of research, this timely collection will be of value to students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology studies, geography and engineering.

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Sarah Pink

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