This paper presents a study of new technologies potentially enabling access to a sensory feast of places by ‘wired up’ flanêurs, real-time as well as remote ‘native’ description and interactions and situated oral histories excavated through ‘being in a place’. We describe an inter-disciplinary...
Tag: senses
Silence: Divergent Listening in the Anthropocene
Divergent listening describes a listening practice which seeks to raise consciousness or expand on our understanding of reality through the perception of sound. The multichannel sound installation, ‘Silence’, offers a space of quiet reflection, a place to ask questions, share, or rest. It is a...
Come to Your Senses: Ethnography of the Everyday Futuring
Our practices of research, design, and strategy create landscapes of possibility. Anticipation, an approach that has informed much of the recent ethnographic work on the future, is shaped by how these symbolic and material landscapes, and the forms of agency they make possible, are distributed....
Smelling Fear: How Tattooing Inspired Me to Explain Sensation
I harness my experience as a tattoo artist to affirm the power of bodies and sensation in ethnography. The talk...
The Power of Not Thinking
The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them Simon Roberts 2020, 336 pp, Blink Publishing/Bonnier In The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them, Simon Roberts aims to resuscitate the human body from the sepulchre of Western thought,...
Our ‘New Normal’—The Sensory Landscape
Sanitization has been a key word during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sanitization not just in terms of cleanliness, but also in terms of the revised interactions people have had with each other and with the environment around them. COVID-19 has created a Sanitized Landscape – supposedly free of germs in...
Numbers May Speak Louder than Words, but Is Anyone Listening? The Rhythmscape and Sales Pipeline Management
In this paper I explore the often fleeting, seemingly constrained acts of expression performed through participation in everyday, routinized actions and practices. The vehicle I use for this exploration is the tools, processes and practices sales professionals use to manage the list of possible...
Digital Living and Sensory Perception: Implications for Ethnography and Design
As an ethnographer working at the interface of theory and praxis, I frame my research by the need to understand the sensory and digital environments in which we live. Approaching the world through the prism of the digital and sensory offers us a novel and effective way of engaging with...
The “Race to Embrace the Senses” in Marketing: An Ethnographic Perspective
Pier 1 Imports is a store that specializes in home decor, including wood and wicker furniture, draperies, and scented candles. On the cover of its Fall 2000 catalogue there is a picture of a tabletop fountain made of slabs of brown and grey speckled marble. Down the right edge of the cover is a...