In this article, we interrogate the utility of conceptualising the ‘first and last mile’ (FLM) as a ‘challenge’ to be addressed through automated and integrated mobility services. We critically engage with the concept through a design anthropological approach which takes two steps so as: to complicate literatures that construct the FLM as a place where automated, service-based and micro-mobility innovations will engender sustainable modal choices above individual automobility; and to demonstrate how people’s situated mobility competencies and values, shape social and material realities and future imaginaries of everyday mobilities. To do so, we draw on ethnographic research into everyday mobility practices, meanings and imaginaries in a suburban neighbourhood in Sweden. We show how locally situated mobilities both challenge the spatial and temporal underpinnings of the first and last mile concept, and resist universalist technology-driven automation narratives. We argue that instead of attempting to bridge gaps in seemingly linear journeys through automated systems, there is a need to account for the practices, tensions and desires embedded in everyday mobilities. © 2023 The Author(s).
In this chapter we discuss how automatic wearable cameras are imagined by their designers. Such technologies have most often been approached from a user perspective, which overlooks how developers invest their personal experiences and emotions into the technologies. Focusing on the Narrative clip - a camera that takes a photo every 30 seconds, we show how developers its developers have imagined this camera as a device that enables people to gain access to the assumed authenticity of a recordable world, that exists externally to the human wearing the device. As this example shows, when we account for developers’ visions and imaginations, particular stories emerge. Thus, we argue it is important to account for these and the agency they might have in the possibilities created by automated technologies. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016
In this chapter, we demonstrate how a design ethnographic approach to future algorithm-powered mobility solutions opens up possibilities to research social implications of automated decision making (ADM) from a situational perspective, by investigating the context of ADM rather than simply observing the technology itself and how it is used. The context of our discussion is one where the development of autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, in the service of transportation, has sparked a renewed research interest into shared mobility systems, and how these can respond to emerging challenges of rising traffic congestion and pollution levels. Our research addresses the gap between algorithm-based approaches to designing for optimizing, streamlining, and efficiency, the questions of how these systems and services are activated in people’s everyday life, and how they interfere with decision-making around traveling and shared mobility. We argue that to understand how these services and technologies will be adopted and implemented in society, research attention must be directed to people in real-life situations where this type of ADM operates.
This article outlines the implications of a theory of "sensory- emplaced learning" for understanding the interrelationships between the embodied and environmental in learning processes. Understanding learning as multisensory and contingent within everyday place-events, this framework analytically describes how people establish themselves as "situated learners." This approach is demonstrated through three examples of how culturally constructed sensory categories offer routes to knowing about the multisensoriality of learning experiences. This approach, we suggest, offers new routes within practice-oriented educational theories for understanding how human bodies become situated and embedded in cultural, social, and material practices within constantly shifting place-events. © 2013 Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition.
During the last decade academic interest in the senses has increased, indicating what David Howes refers to as a ‘sensual revolution’, a corrective to previous approaches that treat culture as readable text. Following this body of literature, this panel considers the idea of ‘places for learning’ from a perspective that acknowledges the mutlisensoriality of experience. This encompasses not only the directly and more obvious everyday sensoriality of tastes, smells and looks but also, the representations of the senses that saturate magazines, TV and the internet in our highly mediated C21 everyday lives. Studying the multi-sensory and aesthetic dimensions of peoples' learning practices, implies analyzing their actions in terms of experiences of perception – in ways that go beyond a conventional focus on visual perception. Recent ethnographic studies show the importance of sound, smell, taste and touch in how people experience, learn, construct their identities and remember. In this panel we develop these discussions further by exploring how the senses become implicated in contexts where people are engaged in processes of learning. Thus seeking to understand how sensory practices are both implicated in and created in relation to places for learning. In these three presentations we explore the relationship between personal multi-sensorial experiences of looking, tasting and hearing respectively and the collective practices that people engage in when visiting museums, eating and skating.
In this article we propose an approach to digital health tracking technologies that draws on design anthropology. This entails re-thinking the pedagogical importance of personal data as lying in how they participate in the constitution of new possibilities that enable people to learn about, and configure, their everyday health in new ways. There have been two dominant strands in traditional debates in the field of pedagogy: one that refers to processes of teaching people to do things in particular ways; and another that seeks to enable learning. The first of these corresponds with existing understandings of self-tracking technologies as either unsuccessful behavioural change devices, or as providing solutions to problems that do not necessarily exist. When seen as such, self-tracking technologies inevitably fail as forms of intervention towards better health. In this article we investigate what happens when we take the second strand—the notion of enabling learning as an incremental and emergent process—seriously as a mode of intervention towards health through self-tracking technologies. We show how such a shift in pedagogical understanding of the routes to knowing these technologies offer creates opportunities to move beyond simplistic ideas of behavioural change as the main application of digital body monitoring in everyday life. In what follows, we first demonstrate how the disjunctures that arise from this context emerge. We then outline a critical response to how learning through life-tracking has been conceptualised in research in health and human-computer interaction research. We offer an alternative response by drawing on a processual theory of learning and recent and emerging research in sociology, media studies, anthropology, and cognate disciplines. Then, drawing on ethnographic research, we argue for understanding learning through the production of personal data as involving emplaced and non-representational routes to knowing. This, we propose, requires a corresponding rethinking of the epistemological status of personal data and what kind of knowledge it can be claimed to produce. Finally, we take up the implications of this and advance the discussion through a design anthropological approach, through which we refigure the interventional potential of such technologies as lying in their capacity to create possibilities for experiential, and often unspoken, ways of embodied and emplaced knowing.
Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so, the book proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.
How will autonomous driving (AD) features change how people will relate to, and act in and with cars? To understand these and similar questions, research within human-computer interaction (HCI) is concerned with how people will react and interact with the autonomous driving features while driving a self-driving car, and how these features can be designed to be perceived as both easy to use and useful. In this paper we demonstrate how a pedagogical design anthropological approach can push this agenda further by introducing a way of understanding use of AD that accounts for how technologies become meaningful in the contexts of the mundane everyday life circumstances in which they are actually used. This approach entails understanding use of technology beyond the moment of human-technology interaction, as a process in which experiential ways of knowing take over from rational action, and meaning becomes generated through the ongoing use of technologies in everyday life processes. In the context user experience of AD, this translates into a focus on how people learn to use AD features, and to imagine possible experiences of AD in ways that are situated in the mundane routines of everyday life.
We will draw on our ethnographic research into everyday life experiences and expectations of AD cars undertaken between 2016-18, to demonstrate how people need these technologies to become part of their everyday lives, and subsequently need to learn to use them in order to accomplish everyday goals.
HCI research on mobility and transport has been dominated by a focus on the automobile. Yet urgent environmental concerns, along with new transport technologies, have created an opportunity for new ways of thinking about how we get from A to B. App-based services, innovations in electric motors, along with changing urban transport patterns, are transforming public transit. Technology is creating new collective transit services, as well as new ways for individuals to move, such as through rental, free-floating e-scooters, so called 'micro-mobility'. This workshop seeks to discuss and establish HCI perspectives on these new mobilities - engaging with and even inventing new modes of transport, fostering collaboration between scholars with varied topical interests around mobility. We seek to bring together a group of industry and academic collaborators, bringing new competences to HCI around the exciting opportunities of redesigning our contemporary mobilities. © 2020 Owner/Author.
This themed issue of MIA advances our understanding of how digital media are implicated in processes of change. It interrogates how people engage digital media in creative practices that lead to interventions in their own or others' lives, and explores the intentionalities through which they do this, and the processes and experiences such activities involve. The intention is to bring to the fore the idea of intervening as a way of being active in the world as a scholar, creative practitioner, activist or simply someone living their everyday life in ways that seek to generate forms of change. The articles in this issue address the use of creative interventions for affective and community-constructing ends, examining and highlighting the conscious use of the digital to disrupt and subvert existing patterns in communication and culture, heralding new possibilities while promoting inclusivity and social innovation.
This paper demonstrates the role of pre-product user experience (UX) in product design. For automotive companies, questions concerning how users will experience not yet available products is pressing - due to an increase in UX design for products, combined with a decrease in time-to-market for new products. Conventional UX research provides insights through investigating specific situated moments during use, or users’ reflections after use, yet cannot provide knowledge about how users will engage with not yet existing products. To understand pre-product UX we undertook a netnographic study of three people’s experiences of expecting and owning a Tesla car. We identified how modes of anticipation evolve before using the actual car, through online social interaction, creating a pre-product experience. The study offers a foundation for theorizing pre-product UX as socially generated anticipated UX, as well as insights for UX design in industry. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.
As machines become increasingly intelligent, the HCI community is presented with new challenges regarding methods to capture and understand user experience (UX). In the case of autonomous driving (AD), this involves new scenarios where humans and intelligent vehicles need to act together in real-life traffic situations with other road users. This article responds to this context by 1) outlining a longitudinal design ethnography method whereby participants drove semiautonomous cars in their everyday environments to capture such human-machine relations in real-life settings, 2) demonstrating the complexities of the relations between humans and AD vehicles, 3) engaging theories of socio-materiality and entanglement to understand the human-machine relations of AD cars, and 4) identifying anticipatory experiences that emerge from these relations and their implications for informing UX design. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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 often provides insights into situated uses of products, and reflections after their use, however tells us little about how products and services are experienced before use. We propose anticipation theory as a way to understand how shared experiences between people in an online discussion forum relate to UX of cars before they are actually experienced in real-life. We took an ethnographic approach to analyse the activities of members of a self-organised web-based discussion forum for Tesla car enthusiasts, to understand how product anticipation emerges in a digital-material setting. Our study identifies how anticipatory experiences create UX of car ownership which evolves through members’ engagement in a self-organised online community enabled through the digitalisation and connectivity of the car, and how such car experiences generate new forms of digital anticipation of the car. We conclude that the shift towards digitalisation of cars and subscription services creates a need for more interdisciplinary research into spatial and temporal aspects, where socially shared anticipatory experiences are increasingly important for the overall UX. © Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems,.
Traditional User Experience (UX) research provides insights into situated uses of products, or reflections after their use, but tells us little about how products are experienced before use. In this article we demonstrate how people's engagement in web-based discussion forums creates ways through which they can experience products before they have actually used them, and reflect on the implications of this for UX research. To understand how product anticipation emerges in a digital-material setting we undertook an ethnographic analysis of members' contributions to http://www.teslaclubsweden.se, a web-based discussion forum that connects Tesla car enthusiasts. Anticipation developed as a shared endeavour that evolved through five ways which forum members engaged and participated in their community of practice. Through their online interactions their UX evolved before using the actual car. Our findings provide deeper understandings of anticipatory UX, and insights for UX design in HCI. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery
In this paper, we discuss how people’s user experience (UX) of autonomous driving (AD) cars can be understood as a shifting anticipatory experience, as people experience degrees of AD through evolving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in their everyday context.We draw on our ethnographic studies of five families, who had access to AD research cars with evolving ADAS features in their everyday lives for a duration of 1ó years. Our analysis shows that people gradually adopt AD cars, through a process that involves anticipating if they can trust them, what the ADAS features will do and what the longer-term technological possibilities will be. It also showed that this anticipatory UX occurs within specific socio-technical and environmental circumstances, which could not be captured easily in experimental settings. The implication is that studying anticipation offers us new insights into how people adopt AD in their everyday commute driving. © 2020, The Author(s).
A growing body of Human-Computer-Interaction research and the automotive industry has identified that un- derstanding user needs and creating positive user experience (UX) is crucial in order to successfully introduce Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles to the market. AD research is commonly undertaken to provide user insights by studying the individual-technology experiences in lab settings or by forecasting attitudes and acceptability through large surveys. However, these approaches base their knowledge on people’s past or present expectations and limited real life experiences of AD. To better understand upcoming individual user needs and to enable new innovations beyond acceptability forecasts and UX lab tests, we need to identify new concepts through alter- native methodologies that can generate user foresights based on users’ evolving anticipations of AD in their everyday lives. We propose an ethnographic approach with iterative speculative scenarios, which we demon- strate through a study undertaken with participants from five families who were introduced to evolving levels of AD, in real-life situations. To demonstrate the methodology, we draw on empirical findings which reveal anticipatory experiences, which we abstract through the concepts of confidence, hope and being-in-the-moment. We show how these concepts structured our user foresights, and outline the implications of engaging them in innovation processes.
Smart Cities have been around as a concept for quite some time. However, most examples of Smart Cities (SCs) originate from megacities (MCs), despite the fact that most people live in Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs). This paper addresses the contextual setting for smart cities from the perspective of such small and medium-sized cities. It starts with an overview of the current trends in the research and development of SCs, highlighting the current bias and the challenges it brings. We follow with a few concrete examples of projects which introduced some form of “smartness” in the small and medium cities context, explaining what influence said context had and what specific effects did it lead to. Building on those experiences, we summarise the current understanding of Smart Cities, with a focus on its multi-faceted (e.g., smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living) nature; we describe mainstream publications and highlight the bias towards large and very large cities (sometimes even subconscious); give examples of (often implicit) assumptions deriving from this bias; finally, we define the need of contextualising SCs also for small and medium-sized cities. The aim of this paper is to establish and strengthen the discourse on the need for SMCs perspective in Smart Cities literature. We hope to provide an initial formulation of the problem, mainly focusing on the unique needs and the specific requirements. We expect that the three example cases describing the effects of applying new solutions and studying SC on small and medium-sized cities, together with the lessons learnt from these experiences, will encourage more research to consider SMCs perspective. To this end, the current paper aims to justify the need for this under-studied perspective, as well as to propose interesting challenges faced by SMCs that can serve as initial directions of such research.
Experimental ‘Wizard of Oz’ (WOz) User Experience (UX) research in the context of Autonomous Driving (AD) car development is becoming more interdisciplinary, human-centric and open to innovative methodological collaborations. In this paper, we demonstrate a mixed-methodological approach to research how people engage with and make sense of automated features that do not yet exist in everyday life contexts. We present how the combination of WOz testing and ethnographic ride-alongs have been developed and how the two different approaches can benefit from each other. We selected two everyday driving examples - emerging from T-junction and changing lane on the motorway - to demonstrate the value of mixing these methodologies. We propose that by building new collaborative test practices, we can create a more everyday-life oriented approach that better attends to people’s experiences, imaginaries and projections into possible futures of driving, which is particularly important to incorporate in AD vehicle design for mixed traffic environments. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
This article outlines a novel way of performing experimental "Wizard of Oz" (WOz) User Experience (UX) research that specifically targets driving in different levels of self-driving modes. The reasons for exploring the possibilities of combining experimental and ethnographic WOz-testing have been twofold. On the one hand, this mixed-method approach responds to a growing body of critique concerning how the WOz test is biased by the claim that it explores real-life behaviour in an experimental setting. On the other hand, our approach also meets the demands for innovative research methodologies that can contribute to deeper understandings of how to better evaluate and account for human expectations and experiences when automated technologies become integrated in everyday life contexts. This knowledge is inevitable for a broader understanding of the overall user experience and expectations of autonomous driving and, more specifically, building an interdisciplinary collaborative testing approach.
New digital, automated and intelligent technologies and services – including self-driving cars, drones, smart home technologies, digital health applications and more – are becoming increasingly possible, available and integrated into everyday circumstances and imagined near and far futures. Investigating digital futures moreover demands research methods that surpass the conventional anthropological tendency to take refuge in the epistemological and ethical past. The term digital futures has the obvious connotation of being concerned with the roles played by technologies in a time that has not yet happened and is used across many contemporary contexts. Autonomous driving (AD) cars are a pertinent example of a technology in development. AD futures research therefore enabled our team to better understand – theoretically and ethnographically – how people imagined and experienced possible digital futures scenarios and how and why they began to feel confident and comfortable in these situations and when they did not.
This chapter elaborates on two concepts which the author have used in his existing work, and that he would consider to be part of a theoretical ‘tool box’ that digital media scholars might draw on: place and wayfaring. The concept of place is well established across a range of literature, and has been used most consistently in human geography, as well as in anthropology. In the case of digital photography and its online sharing, for instance, photographs might be produced in localities, they might represent aspects of localities and they might also be viewed in localities. Camera phone photography is particularly interesting in this respect because people might take photographs of their environments and/or themselves in them, upload them and engage with people in relation to them online. Digital photography is one of the everyday life, professional and technological practices and activities that are entangled with everyday life, and both photographic technologies and practices become increasingly ubiquitous. © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Edgar Gómez Cruz and Asko Lehmuskallio; individual chapters, the contributors.
The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. Sarah Pink focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile, and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues. By doing so, she convincingly outlines a robust theoretical and methodological approach to understanding contemporary everyday life and activism. © Sarah Pink 2012.
Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices. © 2015 Sarah Pink and Simone Abram. All rights reserved.
Self-tracking is an increasingly ubiquitous everyday activity and therefore is becoming implicated in the ways that everyday environments are experienced and configured. In this article, we examine theoretically and ethnographically how the digital materiality of these technologies mediates and participates in the constitution of people’s tacit ways of being in the world. We argue that accounting for the presence of such technologies as part of everyday environments in this way offers new insights for non-representational accounts of everyday life as developed in geography and anthropology and advances existing understandings of these technologies as it has emerged in sociology and media studies.
The environments in which ethnography is currently being played out are in many ways shifting as part of a world where academic research is increasingly implicated in applied and public scholarship and practice. This calls not simply for new ways of applying ethnographic insights to societal, industry, and policy problems but, we argue, for a reconfiguration of how we understand the possibilities, potentials, and impacts of ethnographic practice when situated as part of a world in progress. It invites us to revise how we understand ethnographic processes, practices, and ethics as they are played out with and through different sets of stakeholders, beyond researchers, participants, and the academic communities of critics (Strathern, 2006) who were their traditional audiences. This new context, we argue, takes us beyond past iterations of applied ethnography because there is a more widespread and institutionally driven aim to seek to do ethnographic work that has impact and may intervene in the world. This new institutionally endorsed and indeed encouraged way of practicing as an ethnographer and scholar brings new configurations and considerations to our profession. It makes partnering with industry or with creative practitioners unsurprising, yet at the same time potentially challenging. This Special Section represents our interest in exploring how this new and emerging context might be conceptualized and how it might be played out through responsible and ethical ways of conducting ethnographic research and forms of intervention in contemporary worlds. © The Author(s) 2017
In this article we take the novel step of bringing together recent scholarship about mobile media and communications with new ethnographic research and scholarship about mobile self-tracking. The correspondences and entanglements between mobile media and self-tracking technologies, and scholarship, we argue, are usefully considered in relation to each other both empirically and theoretically. Indeed, we propose that the convergence between self-tracking and mobile media means that we will increasingly need to account for their entanglements in mobile media research, and that there is therefore a need to explore the implications of taking the new step of approaching self-tracking research through the prism of mobile media scholarship. © The Author(s) 2017
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-methodological approach towards researching this context based in design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. In doing so we explain and discuss the findings of an in-car video ethnography study designed to investigate the usually unspoken and not necessarily visible elements of car-based mobility. Such an approach is needed, we argue, both in order to inform a research agenda that is capable of addressing the emergence of automated vehicles specifically, as well as in preparation for understanding the implications of automation more generally as human mobility is increasingly entangled with automated technologies and the future imaginaries associated with them. © The British Association of Hand Therapists Ltd 2017.
In this article we outline and demonstrate a design anthropological approach to investigating automated mobile futures as a processual opening up of possibilities, rather than as a process of technological innovation. To undertake this we investigate the example of how the car-smartphone relationship is configuring in the contingent circumstances of the mobile present and the implications of this for automated mobile futures. Our discussion is set in the context of the growing possibility that automonous driving (AD) features are increasingly part of everyday mobilities (even if unequally distributed globally) and in which personal mobile smart technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will exist in some form and will interface with humans and be interoperable with other technologies. In developing this we draw on ethnographic understandings of how people live with the possibilities afforded by technologies in everyday life. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This book roots the bringing together of ethnography and design firmly in social science theory, showing readers how to best use theory in design ethnography and how to develop a coherent relationship between research and practice. It promotes interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and takes design ethnography beyond the content of the 'project' to ask how it contributes to a wider agenda for a better world and the creation of ethical and responsible futures.
In this article we outline two different ways of ‘seeing’ autonomous driving (AD) cars. The first corresponds with the technological innovation narrative, published in online industry, policy, business and other news contexts, that pitches AD cars as the solution to societal problems, and urges users to trust and accept them so that such benefits can be accrued. The second is a narrative of everyday improvisation, which was visualized through our video ethnography and participant mapping exercises. Our research, undertaken in Sweden, involved possible future everyday users of AD cars. We argue for a research and intervention agenda that examines how the visual narration of how AD cars might participate in human futures, could be shifted to create new modes of trust and reassurance for publics.
This chapter outlines and demonstrates a collaborative and interventional design anthropology of emerging technologies, through the example of autonomous driving (AD) cars. AD cars have been framed as solutions to everyday problems within proposals for platform-based future automated mobility systems. However when reframed through the lens of everyday local mobilities these industry driven future visions are revealed to be misaligned with the real priorities of people’s everyday lives. Thus showing how revealing how the everyday present complicates dominant futures narratives. However, we emphasise that rather than stopping at this critique, we should productively collaboratively engage with city and automotive stakeholders in this field in pedagogies of mutual learning, experimentation, and creativity. To develop our discussion we draw on ongoing conceptualisation and research undertaken over a period of over six years.
In this article we demonstrate how design anthropology theory, methodology and practice can be mobilised to create interventions in how possible human futures with emerging technologies are understood and imagined. Drawing on our research into Human Experience and Expectations of Autonomous Driving (AD) cars we show how: we engaged ethnographic insights to redefine concepts of trust and sharing which contest dominant problem-solution narratives; and we mobilised these insights in applied contexts, through our AD Futures cards which employ ethnographic quotes and examples to disrupt common assumptions, align stakeholders with everyday experience, and pose new questions. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Emerging technologies—such as autonomous driving (AD) cars, blockchain, robotics, and drones—are increasingly part of popular narratives and industry and policy agendas. They are commonly understood as new digital, data-driven, intelligent, or automated technological innovations in development, or at the cusp of being launched into a market. Thus, the anthropological question of how they might become part of everyday, experiential, possible worlds demands our attention. In this chapter we outline an approach to emerging technologies that is rooted in design anthropology and takes an interventional stance. In doing so we situated design anthropology of emerging technologies within an interdisciplinary field which has tended to be dominated by technologically determinist approaches. Through the example of the notion of trust in AD cars, we show how policy, industry, engineering, and social science approaches configure to provide different and critical understandings. Drawing on our own design ethnographic research, we show how design anthropological attention to people offers an alternative and viable mode of understanding how emerging technologies become part of emerging worlds. © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the data cleaning and repair processes of Big Data analysis and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday worlds.
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. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into peopleâs experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This article develops and mobilises the concept of 'mundane data' as an analytical entry point for understanding Big Data. We call for in-depth investigation of the human experiences, routines, improvisations and accomplishments which implicate digital data in the flow of the everyday. We demonstrate the value of this approach through a discussion of our ethnographic research with self-tracking cycling commuters. We argue that such investigations are crucial in informing our understandings of how digital data become meaningful in mundane contexts of everyday life for two reasons: first because there is a gap in our understanding of the contingencies and specificities through which big digital data sets are produced, and second because designers and policy makers often seek to make interventions for change in everyday contexts through the presentation of mundane data to consumers but with little understanding of how people produce, experience and engage with these data.
The theoretical concept of trust has been identified as highly important to the successful design of intelligent technologies such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). In human-centred transport research this has resulted in a focus on trust in the technical design of future AVs and has raised the question of how the conditions that form trust change as technologies become more intelligent. In this article we discuss the first stage of an interdisciplinary project that brought together ethnographic and experimental user studies into trust in intelligent cars. This stage focused on the development of an interdisciplinary methodological framework for the user studies, through a review of 258 empirical HCI research articles on trust in automation and AVs. The review investigated the following research questions: a) what are the key themes in HCI methodologies used to research trust in automation and AVs; b) how do they account for trust in AVs as part of wider contexts; and c) how can these methodologies be developed to include more than momentary and individual human-machine interactions. We found that while theoretical understandings of trust in automated technologies acknowledge the relevance of the wider context in which the interaction occurs, existing methodologies predominantly involve experimental studies in simulated environments with a focus on reliance related aspects of trust. We identified that ethnographic user studies can potentially contribute to new connections between theoretical understandings and conventional experimental methods. Therefore, we propose a framework for an interdisciplinary approach that combines experimental and ethnographic methodologies to investigate trust in AVs. © 2020 The Authors
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 HumanComputer 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. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
The concept of datafication - which refers to the idea that many aspects of life can be rendered into digital data which can subsequently be analysed and used to understand, predict and guide interventions in society - has been both enthusiastically engaged with and critically deconstructed in recent literatures. In this article, we explore the relevance of datification for understanding the spatiality of everyday life. In doing so, we argue for a refigured concept of datafication through theoretical and empirical scholarship focused on affect. We suggest that a renewed concept of datafication - that is, of datafied space - offers a framework for how we dwell in and move through a world where digital data about humans have an increasing presence. To make our arguments, we offer an account of a recent study of cycle-commuting and self-tracking in Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. We used helmet-mounted action cameras and video interviews in a 'digital sensory ethnography' to explore the entanglement of bodies, bicycles, digital devices, data and affect that shape how people move through and make sense of what we call 'datafied space'. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.