Street has ‘taken this idea further into teaching neophyte nurses to attend to their senses and their embodied responses, in order to better understand the lived experiences of patients and their families’ (2007: 30). Lammer (2007) was also concerned to find ways to present her findings concerning the interactions between clinicians and patients (see above) to clinical staff and as part of this produced the documentary video Making Contact (2004). This and her later project CORPOrealities (n.d.) (which also involves collaborations with artists) create innovative links between arts and biomedical practice (Lammer, 2012). As noted above, my research with Jennie Morgan and Andrew Dainty also engaged a sensory approach to attend to how community nurses and occupational therapists who perform home visits, sense their environments, and to explore their sensory ways of knowing about health and safety (Pink et al., 2014).
Together these studies and forms of social intervention show that a sensory ethnography approach has a key role to play in applied research. It draws out the everyday realities of people’s experience and practice and provides insights about how to make these experiences and practices more pleasurable and effective – whether this means developing products that people will desire to use and foods they will enjoy eating or making medical procedures and care contexts more comfortable.
Sensory ethnography for design research and practice
Ethnography has long since been part of the practice of design researchers, although the ways and context in which it is used for design have tended to differ in significant ways from its development in anthropology. In part this can be explained through the applied nature of design research, and in that it has often been associated with the desire to make change through psychologically informed rational actor type behaviour change models (see Tromp and Hekkert, 2012). However, design research has been a constant strand in the ‘sensory’ turn since the beginning of the twenty-first century. For example, Malnar and Vodvarka (2004) led the way with their book Sensory Design which used examples from a range of practice-based and literary contexts to establish the importance of sensoriality in design (and see Lucas and Romice, 2008; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010; Leder Mackley and Pink, 2013; Pink et al., 2013). This shared emphasis creates potential for theoretical and ethnographic elements of anthropological practice to connect with the concerns of designers who, like Malnar and Vodvarka (2004), are concerned with questions including those relating to sensory perception and experience. In addition, forms of user-centred design, experience design and emotional design (all of which bear some relation to the sensory) play a role in contemporary design thinking. In my work with designers at Loughborough University, UK, we explored the relationship between a sensory ethnography approach and phenomenological approaches to design (Pink et al., 2013). There we identified that there are
clear parallels between the phenomenological sensory ethnography approach and the notion of embodied interaction that is core to 3rd Paradigm HCI [Dourish 2001a]. At the heart of both is a commitment to the idea that we encounter the world as a meaningful place within which we act [Harrison and Dourish 1996]: ‘It is through our actions in the world – through the ways in which we move through the world, react to it, turn it to our needs, and engage with it to solve problems – that the meaning that the world has for us is revealed’. (Pink et al., 2013: 10–11)
There we suggest that such an approach
provides us with both a theoretical and experiential framework for design because it allows us to on the one hand appreciate the meaning and nature of the experiential environments into which we seek to introduce design interventions. On the other it offers us a set of theoretical tools that guide us away from attempts to change ‘behavior’ and to instead ask how interventions might sit in relation to the existing routines, contingencies and innovations that ongoingly make and re-make the practices and places of everyday life. (Pink et al., 2013: 15)
Indeed, sensoriality is at the core of the agenda in the emergent field of design anthropology. As Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan put it, design anthropology
resonates with four areas of interest that are generating some of the most exciting new work in the discipline: exchange and personhood in the use of technology, the understanding of skilled practice, anthropology of the senses and the aesthetics of everyday life. (2012: 10)
In a contemporary context the relationship between design and the social sciences is growing, specifically in fields of applied research where the research orientation of the social sciences towards the present-past can grow through the orientation of design research towards the future. In the Afterword to this book I elaborate on this to suggest that sensory ethnography offers a new focus for change-making and future-oriented research.
Sensory ethnography and arts practice
Attention to the senses in arts practice has developed in parallel to and sometimes overlapping or in collaboration with ethnographic work on the senses (see, for example, Zardini, 2005; Jones, 2006a, b, c). It is not within the scope of this book to undertake an art historical review of the senses. Instead, I draw out some of the most salient contemporary parallels and connections between these fields. There is already a growing literature concerning the relationship between anthropology and arts practice (Silva and Pink, 2004; Schneider and Wright, 2006, 2013; Ravetz, 2007; Schneider, 2008), some of which places some emphasis on sensoriality (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2005) and highlights a turn to collaborative arts practice, noting how an anthropological approach can bring to the fore issues around the politics and power relations of such collaborations (Schneider and Wright, 2013).
There are some obvious crossovers between sensory ethnography and creative practice, such as the work of the ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (see MacDougall, 1998, 2005), the audiovisual practice of the sociologist Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007, 2012) and soundscape studies (e.g. Drever, 2002; Feld, 1991, 2003). These works are discussed in the following chapters. Specific connections tend to be less frequently made between ethnography, the senses and arts practices as developed in installation and performance art. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between recent developments in sensory ethnographic methods and arts practice. Perhaps the clearest example is in forms of practice in each discipline that uses walking as a method of research (e.g. the arts practice of Sissel Tolaas (see Hand, 2007) and the ethnographic practice of e.g. Katrín Lund, 2006, 2008; Jo Lee Vergunst, 2008; and Andrew Irving, 2010, 2013), representing or engaging audiences in other people’s sensory experiences or in specific smell- or soundscapes (e.g. the work of Jenny Marketou, discussed by Drobnick and Fisher, 2008). These discussions of arts practice and the sensory ways of knowing that are implied through them invite a consideration of how sensory ethnography practice might develop in relation to explorations in art. Contributors to Schneider and Wright’s Anthropology and Art Practice (2013) also bring questions around the senses to the fore. Some of these examples are discussed in Chapter 8.
An interdisciplinary context for sensory ethnography
Since the early twenty-first century an increasingly interdisciplinary focus on the senses has emerged. This has been promoted through a series of edited volumes including Howes’ Empire of the Senses (2005a). These collections unite the work of academics from a range of disciplines to explore sensory aspects of culture and society (Howes, 2005a) using modern western categories of audition (Bull and Back, 2003), smell (Drobnick, 2006), taste (Korsmeyer, 2005), touch (Classen, 2005) and visual culture (Edwards and Bhaumik, 2008). According to Howes this increased focus on the senses represents a ‘sensual revolution’ – an ideological move that has turned ‘the tables and recover(ed) a full-bodied understanding of culture and experience’ as opposed to one that is modelled on linguistics (2005a: 1; see also Howes, 2003). Although some would disagree that the revolution contra linguistics (e.g. Bendix, 2006: 6) should be the central concern of a sensory approach to ethnography, Howes is correct that the senses have come
