Roxana Moroşanu

Applying the lens of sensory ethnography to sustainable HCI

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 move 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 on an 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.

Hanging out at home: Laundry as a thread and texture of everyday life:

Laundry, one of the most mundane but most fundamental everyday life activities, has received little attention in cultural studies of everyday life. In contrast it has attracted the analytical attention of sociologists of everyday practices and social relations, and energy and health researchers. Here we suggest that an approach which attends to theoretical turns towards phenomenology, spatiality and materiality can offer a new interpretation of the significance and implications of laundry in everyday life. Drawing on research in 20 UK households, we focus on the example of indoor laundry drying to interpret laundry through a theory of place and materiality. We suggest that such an approach offers new understandings of how home is made and has implications for how cultural studies research into everyday life might be engaged in applied research relating to climate change and the environment.

Researching in atmospheres: Video and the 'feel' of the mundane

In this article, the authors advance recent discussions of atmospheres by developing an approach that builds theory in relation to methodological understandings of how and what we can we know about atmospheres. They argue that, in order to be able to understand the significance of an atmosphere empirically, a theory is needed that can account for the specificities of particular atmospheres that are generated in the context of actual research sites, the everyday contingencies in relation to which they shift and change, and the different ways in which they might be perceived. To do this, they propose that atmospheres should be understood as part of and as emerging from within environments Simultaneously, to be able to build theory thorough empirical research, an approach is needed that is capable of researching how atmospheres are made and sensed by people in mundane everyday moments, and how they are generative of sensory, affective and empathetic forms of engagement. Situating video recording, like atmospheres, as emerging from within environments, the authors show how video ethnography can enable us to build the theoretical and empirical ambitions of this field of investigation.

Knowing the world through your body: children’s sensory experiences and making of place

In this chapter, we discuss what theoretical considerations of place, embodiment and sensory perception, drawn from phenomenologi-cal anthropology, human geography and media studies, can bring to the study of children’s experiences in environments that traverse the physical and the digital. In doing so, we advance a steadily growing area of research that goes beyond mainstream psychological and developmental approaches to childhood studies and instead takes into account sensory and ‘more-than-representational’ modes of inquiry and lived experience. We propose an understanding of children’s environments as composed of material and immaterial -invisible and imagined — entities, and of children as perceivers, makers and ‘knowers’ of ever-changing configurations of place. This, we will argue, has implications for the kinds of questions we ask of young people’s lifeworlds and the methodologies through which we might explore them. Yet, rather than prescribing how to research children’s sensory experiences of place, our conceptualisations of place, embodiment and sensory perception aim to provide a coherent theoretical framework that might offer new methodological and analytical routes within increasingly interdisciplinary contexts of research.

Meeting the Families

This is an ethnographic chapter that introduces the key family participants. The development of the relationships between the people who took part in the research and the fieldworker are described, together with the ways in which the former responded to the findings of the overall research project.

“Family Time” and Domestic Sociality: Forms of Togetherness and Independence with Digital Media

This discussion of “family time” as both a temporal modality and as a concept that people use in order to “measure” the quality of home life brings together English middle-class kinship literature with social constructivist critiques of the normativity of family time, and with work on family practices. The ethnographic material reveals some ways in which people use digital media at home in order to combine and balance togetherness and independence. Two forms of domestic sociality are described, and the role of digital technologies in their enactments is outlined. Alongside semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the chapter is based upon knowledge that was co-produced through the use of participant-led and arts-based methods.

Saving Energy in British Homes: Thoughts and Applications

Potential applications of the anthropological knowledge that was co-produced in the ethnographic fieldwork and in the analytical process are discussed here. These suggestions refer to the context of applied interdisciplinary work that framed the research and the concerns of other disciplines, as well as of policymaking expressed in the domestic sustainability research agenda. After a discussion of the epistemologies of interdisciplinary research and of the ways in which anthropological knowledge can be employed for suggesting responses to applied considerations, two sets of propositions are developed. The first one regards questions of morality in English middle-class kinship, while the second set looks at ways to reconcile the folk models of time that are employed in everyday life and the temporality expressed in the Climate Change Act.

Encountering Middleborough: Impressions, Methods, and Tacit Knowledge

How to address tacit knowledge in ethnographic research is the focus of this chapter. The first part is an arrival story; the field site is situated in relation to conceptualizations of locality and place in the anthropology of Britain, and reflections are developed on the tacit knowledge that emerged from the ethnographer’s everyday experiences outside the applied research. The position of the author in relation to the “academic-applied divide” in anthropological research is outlined. A specific methodological approach to ethnographic research that addresses tacit knowledge—“sensory ethnography”—is discussed. A set of participant-led and arts-based methods—the Tactile Time collage, the Evening Times video diary, and the Five Cups of Tea self-interviewing with video activity—are described in relation to the knowledge that emerged through their employment.

Anticipation and the Mother-Multiple

Here, the temporal modality of anticipation is introduced and discussed in relation to the concept of Mother-Multiple. As a mode of being that any family member can access when engaged in activities of caring oriented towards one’s “domestic others”—family members, pets, or the home itself as an entity—the Mother-Multiple ontological position is analytically situated in relation to literature on ontological multiplicity and a discussion of individuality and dividuality in personhood. The ways in which anticipation is employed in enactments of the Mother-Multiple, the techniques of imagination that anticipation entails, as well as the possible effects of activities of anticipation on domestic energy consumption are considered.

Introduction: The Time We Have–The Time We Make

Here, Morosanu introduces her research and situates the theoretical take of the book in relation to the anthropology of energy and social sciences of sustainability literatures. She identifies two interrelated calls—fora reconceptualization of human agency and for new approaches to time—and shows the ways in which the monograph will respond to both. She then looks at the context of the research, focusing on: the interdisciplinary academic framework as well as research funding related to climate change policy in the UK, a set of cultural ideas about the concept of family, and the temporal frameworks and approaches to time that family participants employed in their everyday lives.