Beyond Walking With Video: Co-creating Representation

The Theoretical Background

I studied architecture because I am interested in how people create meaning in space. The academic branch of architecture interested in this question is called either environment/behavior [E/B], or, more ponderously, but appeasing to those leery of the causality implicit in E/B, Social Factors in Architecture. Founding figures are anthropologist William Whyte, who used film and stop motion photography to make recommendations for better plazas in New York City; anthropologist Edward Hall, who introduced the idea of proxemics; and, the somewhat more controversial figure of filmmaker Oscar Newman, whose film and book Defensible Space continue to inform urban design. Out of its allegedly deterministic roots, the field of Social Factors in Architecture has evolved to recognize that space and human behavior are mutually constituted. Ethnographic research has found a home in a few architecture firms, such as HOK, although it is much more firmly entrenched at consultancies such as IDEO. Berkeley professor Galen Cranz has developed a method for applying ethnography in the context of architectural design. Her method, based in semantic ethnography, was developed and continually tested as part of a course she has taught for the past 25 years. It laid the groundwork for my research method.

My area of interest is the home, as it is the space over which individuals tend to have the most control, and, therefore, where expression is the most revealing of the unpredictable relationship between attitude and behavior, and where identity is formed and reflected (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981; Marcus 2006). Hygge is closely linked to the home, but the challenge of studying it as a concept, I realized, is that hygge is not all about space, but is rather a product of interaction in space. In many ways, hygge is invisible.

At the time, I was reading the literature of Science and Technology Studies. Reflecting upon the ethnomethodological principle of building theory out of conversation, I thought if there was some way to have a conversation about practices in the home, a discussion about hygge might naturally arise. I also had concerns about building rapport. Hygge, I had learned from a 1976 study by anthropologist Judith Freedman Hansen, was closely linked to Danish identity; how would participants react to an outsider studying something so closely linked with their culture? From prior experience doing in-home ethnography, I was also concerned with how I might help participants get over the fear of their home, their image, and their voice being recorded.

The method I developed is similar to that visual anthropologist Sarah Pink outlines in her article “Walking With Video.” The key difference is that whereas Pink holds the video camera while conducting research, my method puts a camera in the hands of both the researcher and participant. Many, if not all, of the benefits Pink identifies in her work also apply to my method. For example, in “Walking With Video,” Pink relays how video can help relay a sense of place through capturing sensorial experience. She claims that video can help explain how people relate to their environments in two ways:

First, video provides us with a tool that can enable embodied communication about empathetic understandings of and representations of other people’s perceptions of their environments. Second… anthropological film/video that represents people ‘walking with’ the camera person/anthropologist also stands as film about place as it is made, in the sense that the film/videomaking context serves as a process through which people, things and sensory experiences are drawn together.

Looking back upon my research, I can identify other benefits of my method for applied ethnography:

Speed with reflexivity. This method quickly generates a rich set of data that the participant and researcher can reflect upon while the data is being collected. This is the same aim as working with cultural probes such as photo journals, but it takes away the time needed for a participant to complete the assignment—as well as eliminating the risk that the assignment will be forgotten or left undone. Interestingly, putting the camera into the hands of the participant, perhaps because it serves as a tangible reminder that they are creating a representation, leads to some of the same types of conversations a researcher might have with a photo journal. Thus, this method can reduce time spent by both researcher and participant, while still providing opportunities to reflect on the data.

The method also worked to quickly build rapport with informants. The power dynamic shifted the instant the participant picked up the camera. Behavioral psychologists explain this as the well-known mimicry effect; with our posture and movement aligned, participant and researcher were having a similar physiological and emotional experience (Lakin 2003). This also might have to do with the level of trust implied in allowing a relative stranger to handle expensive video equipment—or in the simple and humbling act of asking for help.

Understanding Place as Representations of Human Action. This method remaps the traditional division between subject and object. The material objects become the object, or what is interviewed; the researcher and the participant are doing the interviewing.

Before using this method, I saw my time in the field as data collection. My goal was to extract as much data as possible so that I could sit down at my desk with quiet and time to think and make sense of it all. While in the field, I always had the nagging feeling I was missing something important: what key object would I neglect to photograph? What simple question would I forget to ask?

But this method, with the clear focus on documentation, created an opportunity to conduct analysis with the participant early in the research process. When I carried a camera alongside the research participant, it became clear that we were both creating representations and doing research. Barthes’ discussion of photography (1981) is useful here. The participant would explain not only the studium, or the ostensible subject of the photograph just snapped, but also the punctum, the “element that rises out of the scene” to “pierce” the viewer.

This is a significant point because, as Bruno Latour points out, we researchers are engaged in the transformation of representations themselves into research. In “Circulating References: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Rainforest,” Latour analyzes how an interdisciplinary team of researchers create a theory by taking physical samples of the soil in the rainforest, transforming them with the aid of scientific tools into data points that can support or negate a scientific hypothesis. The dirt gets pulled out of the ground and put in a suitcase that is taken out of the Amazon, much as the information the soil samples represent gets figuratively pulled out of the suitcase and turned into a report published in a scientific journal.

Latour sees these elements—the dirt, the soil samples, the scientific paper—as representations that exist in an unending chain. Going one way, Latour sees representations as being amplified. They gain compatibility, standardization, and relative universality. Going the other way on the chain, and representations are reduced. They gain particularity, materiality, and become local. Changing from one phase to another means making a trade-off between what is gained through amplification and what is lost through reduction.

My method made the shift from one phase of representation to another more visible. In so doing, it acknowledged to the participant their essential role in the research. Because we were both engaged in the act of recording, it was necessary for the participant to explain what the object behind the lens meant. Perhaps this is simply because putting a video camera in the hand of a research participant makes it clear that the participant is helping to create a representation that will have a “life of its own” separate from them. This method of collaborative and reflective representation gives the participant chance to help create—and therefore control—the representation with which their identity is inextricably linked.

Figure 2. Discussing the process. More than one participant took a picture of me, the researcher, which lead to a discussion about the research process.

At a basic level, putting a camera with an on/off switch in the hands of the participant offers a sense of direct control over the interview process, which is often taking place in their own home. In this way it might help overcome feelings of intrusion. There are obvious limits to this remapping of control—I left with the photographs and video; the participants signed a release; a third party controls the data; but these are the conditions typical of most academic and corporate research.

Cataloging with narrative. This method helps the research to be more wide ranging in subject. Home tours feel less invasive when the participant is pointing the camera, and I noticed a give and take between who is leading the tour of the home and who is following. Video is also a rich resource for generating a record which can be used to make accurate floor plans, diagrams, inventories, and so on, of the parts of the home that actually matter to the people who live there. This is a critical benefit of this method; with my background in architecture, I certainly could have created measured drawings of the home, but doing so would have been problematic, both for the time it would have taken, and for the message communicated by visibly measuring a person’s home. But working from the video, I can generate a representation of the space that is arguably more accurate than the most carefully measured floor plan. My representations are shaded by the time I was able to spend engaging with the participant and understanding their relationship to the space, rather than an undifferentiated, if complete, inventory of every last object in their home.

Figure 3. Multiple representations. The cognitive maps help to highlight objects of interest in the photographs and video.

It is also possible to ask the participants to create floor plans or cognitive maps while recording that process on video. I did this in the second interview when I asked participants to draw cognitive maps of their homes (see Lynch 1988 and Hasbrouck 2007). Comparing these maps to the video and the photographs generated in the house tours is revealing of the spaces, objects, and practices participants actually regard as important in their own homes, which come to mind first, and how these things relate to one another. Methods using probes, such as house tours, inventories, or evocative objects, do not get at personal importance as effectively. For example, one participant, Karin, explained that the significance of the photographs in her home office. Her home office is where Karin connects with her family using Skype and email on the computer, and it is where she hangs pictures of her relatives. Photographs and other things hung on the walls in other rooms are reflective of her identity and the relationship she has with her husband. The value of the video is that the narrative that goes along with each object stays attached them to place where the object is displayed.

Implications for Research

Because the method requires that researcher and participant work together to create a representation, it is particularly well suited for understanding concepts such as hygge that involve things that slide back and forth between the material and the social world. Examples of this slide in action include aesthetic taste, as explained by Cranz (2006); Latour’s explanation of how soil samples become scientific theory in “Circulating References” (1999), and the many examples of the material effects of categorization schemes in Susan Leigh Starr and Geoffrey Bowker’s book Sorting Things Out (1999).

The video-and-photo method captures the stories behind material objects. It preserves the sense of spatial and temporal order in the home. Like other methods involving video, it shows objects and practices in context (see Ruby 2005). And, most importantly, it lets people act out ideas or show concepts that do not fit easily into words.

Figure 4. “That’s not a lie.” Poul and Karin performing hygge.

The key difference to this research method is the shift in the power dynamic between researcher and participant. More so than material probes, this method addresses concerns about the effect on research of the power differential between corporate researcher and participant by providing a way to use the camera as a technological tool to turn the research focus on place and space. This method offers numerous practical benefits, too. It provides alternative ways to practice ethnography that work well when time is limited, or where it might be difficult to build rapport with a respondent. Also, using more than one camera at a time generates a rich set of representations, and an opportunity to reflect upon the creation of those representations in the usual way—in the analysis phase of the project, after the interview is completed—and also at the very time the representations are created.

Because the method offers both the researcher and the participant the opportunity to reflect upon the representations they are creating together, it method is an effective way to learn about concepts that float between the material and the immaterial, or the social and the “real.” By situating the material environment as the subject of the study, I found that it is possible to create deeply meaningful—and visible—representations of things that are normally invisible, such as feelings, thoughts, and expectations. Blurring the lines between subject and object can be especially beneficial when the thing being studied is one of those intangible—or invisible—things “you just have to experience yourself” in order to fully comprehend — such as hygge. In this way, the method is well suited for studying the kinds of taken-for-granted cultural ideals Elizabeth Shove explores in her 2003 book Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience.Put another way, these are words or concepts that may seem hackneyed or clichéd, but which still have great cultural force.

The key to the method is an interdisciplinary approach that holds that space is a key way of understanding culture and that builds on a wide-ranging set of theoretical approaches. The method works because, to use the language of Actor-Network Theory, it creates a sense of symmetry in the analysis between the researcher, the participant, and the space, objects, and practices that make up the participant’s home. So, while hygge—like so much else—may go away as soon as it is named, that does not mean that it can not be understood.

Jonathan Bean is a spatial ethnographic research and design consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, and PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Architecture.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2008, pp. 104–115. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.