Vaike Fors

Multisensory Emplaced Learning: Resituating Situated Learning in a Moving World.

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.

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

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.

Self-tracking and mobile media: New digital materialities

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.

Sensory experiences of digital photo-sharing - ‘‘mundane frictions’’ and emerging learning strategies

Digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life forming part of the way we live and experience the world. This article will specifically scrutinise how mobile phone cameras, digital photographing and the use of web-based photo-sharing sites and communities become part of the meaning-making practices through which the everyday is lived and understood. In doing so, I advance the concept of “mundane friction” through which to discuss the experience, meaning-making and pedagogy generated through operating screen-based technologies. Indeed, media participates in everyday worlds beyond its role as a provider of content and for communication. The question that will be addressed here is how this media presence can be understood from an embodied and sensory perspective, and is based in a study of sensory aspects of teenagers use of web-based photo-diaries. Further, this discussion leads to questions of how an appreciation of digital visuality as more than representational acknowledges the meaning of mundane friction caused by habitually touching, rubbing, clicking, pinching through media technologies as part of the sensory emplacement process that establish people as situated learners. In turn, problematising this tangible friction as pivotal for understanding digital visuality gives reason to argue for research methods that acknowledge digital visual material as more-than-visual and theory that moves toward the unspoken, tacit and sensory elements of learning in everyday practices. Thus, the aim of this article is to elaborate on the embodied, the methodological and the pedagogical dimensions of “mundane friction” in meaning-making activities, and its pedagogical implications.

Automated futures and the mobile present: In-car video ethnographies

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 contingent futures of the mobile present: automation as possibility

Abstract 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.

Experiencing Expectations: Extending the Concept of UX Anticipation

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.

Ethnography, Stakeholders, and Audiences: Toward Openness and Inclusivity

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 ...