Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, nonrepresentational and ph... more Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, nonrepresentational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual, and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the ‘media-saturated’ household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2013
Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully... more Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully problematized overly simplistic and individualistic models of consumer choice and behavior change. By taking everyday practices as the principal units of analysis, they have towards acknowledging the socially and materially structured nature of human activity. However, to inform sustainable HCI we also need to understand how practices are part of wider experiential environments and flows of practical activity. In this article, we develop an approach rooted in phenomenological anthropology and sensory ethnography. This approach builds on theories of place, perception and movement and enables us to situate practices, and understand practical activity, as emplaced within complex and shifting ecologies of things. Drawing an ongoing interdisciplinary study of domestic energy consumption and digital media use we discuss ethnographic and design practice examples. We demonstrate how this theoretical and methodological framework can be aligned with the 3rd paradigm of HCI.
In this article, we discuss how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a vide... more In this article, we discuss how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a video-based approach to sensory ethnography can be made meaningful and relevant to the applied practice of design and engineering scholars. We advance discussions of sensory ethnography by interrogating and making explicit the analytical processes that turn the sensory knowing of the ethnographic encounter into convincing accounts of everyday realities whilst engaging new sensitivities and ways of seeing that in themselves contribute to cross-disciplinary knowledge. We argue that through a more self-conscious appreciation of how and where experiential categories become applied knowledge the value of a sensory ethnography approach in design-centered energy research can be realized.
ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates... more ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent ‘networks of meaning’. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems.
Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, nonrepresentational and ph... more Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, nonrepresentational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual, and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the ‘media-saturated’ household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2013
Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully... more Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully problematized overly simplistic and individualistic models of consumer choice and behavior change. By taking everyday practices as the principal units of analysis, they have towards acknowledging the socially and materially structured nature of human activity. However, to inform sustainable HCI we also need to understand how practices are part of wider experiential environments and flows of practical activity. In this article, we develop an approach rooted in phenomenological anthropology and sensory ethnography. This approach builds on theories of place, perception and movement and enables us to situate practices, and understand practical activity, as emplaced within complex and shifting ecologies of things. Drawing an ongoing interdisciplinary study of domestic energy consumption and digital media use we discuss ethnographic and design practice examples. We demonstrate how this theoretical and methodological framework can be aligned with the 3rd paradigm of HCI.
In this article, we discuss how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a vide... more In this article, we discuss how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a video-based approach to sensory ethnography can be made meaningful and relevant to the applied practice of design and engineering scholars. We advance discussions of sensory ethnography by interrogating and making explicit the analytical processes that turn the sensory knowing of the ethnographic encounter into convincing accounts of everyday realities whilst engaging new sensitivities and ways of seeing that in themselves contribute to cross-disciplinary knowledge. We argue that through a more self-conscious appreciation of how and where experiential categories become applied knowledge the value of a sensory ethnography approach in design-centered energy research can be realized.
ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates... more ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent ‘networks of meaning’. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems.
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Papers by Kerstin Leder Mackley