Moving, Making and Atmosphere: Routines of Home as Sites for Mundane Improvisation

In this article, we examine how everyday atmospheres of home are made, maintained and improvised through habitual routines of movement, and the implications of this for co-design for energy demand reduction. Drawing on our ethnography of how people experienced and constituted a sensory aesthetic of home, we analyse the example of lighting use in night-time routines. We propose seeing these routines as sites of the possible, where everyday making might be engaged for co-design. Thus suggesting refocusing ethnographic design research beyond what people do in their homes, towards how they move through and make the atmospheres of their homes

The re-mediating effects of bio-sensing in the context of parental touch practices

This article investigates the remediating effect of bio-sensing technology on touch practices in the context of parent-infant interaction. We examine how the entry of a biosensing technology into the social, sensory and technological ecology of family homes interacts with the ways in which parents and babies know each other and communicate through touch. The paper centres on an exploratory case study of the Owlet Smart Sock (OSS), a bio-sensing baby monitoring device. We bring the social critical and experiential lenses of multimodality and sensory ethnography to studying the OSS as a socio-technological probe across a range of research encounters, including focus groups, home visits and video re-enactments with parents. In doing so, we provide an account of the ways in which the technology affects how babies and parents’ bodies are (re)imagined, assessed, controlled, interrelated, experienced, and cared for and move beyond generic social debate around the quantified-objectified baby and fears of touch deprivation in contemporary digital culture

Digitally-mediated parent–baby touch and the formation of subjectivities

This article examines how the use of emergent smart baby monitors re-mediates parent–baby touch, notions of connection, parental sensing and the interpretation of babies’ bodies, and contributes to the formation of subjectivities. Domestic baby monitors are a mid 20th-century phenomenon which normalizes parental anxieties. While baby monitoring is not new, the ‘next generation’ of wearable bio-sensing baby monitors offers a different relationship to the body via the physiological tracking of babies, and the sending of information or alerts to parents’ via connected mobile apps. These devices have been associated with creating unnecessary parental anxiety and the digital ‘replacement’ of parental touch, although little research exists on their use in the context of parent–infant interaction or touch. The authors present a qualitative case study of one such technology, Owlet, to explore how parents experienced, understood and negotiated the discourses of parent–infant touch that circulate around and through Owlet, with particular attention to the relationship between visual and tactile resources. The study focuses on both its multimodal design and take-up by parents through analysis of interviews with the Owlet designer, Owlet as a product, focus groups with parents and families’ home experiences of Owlet. Data is analysed through a tri-part lens, which first combines multimodal social semiotic and sensory ethnographic approaches, and then the analytical concept of governmentality. The findings are discussed in relation to four analytical themes: (1) creating a desire for digitally mediated touch; (2) spatiality of digitally mediated connection; (3) formulating the ‘right kind’ of touch; and (4) reconfiguring ‘knowing touch’. The authors discuss multimodal discourses pertinent to the shaping of parent–baby touch practices including: rationality and efficiency; individualism, autonomy and freedom; and self-improvement and empowerment. They conclude that the discourses that coalesce around Owlet contribute to the reconfiguration of parent–baby touch and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities

Multidisciplinary research: should effort be the measure of success?

Energy demand reduction and flexible demand from dwellings will play a critical role in achieving a low-carbon future. There remain many unanswered questions around the interaction of people with their environment and the technical systems that service them and, as a result, multidisciplinary research is a principal component of research funding internationally. However, relatively little published work considers the operational issues in undertaking epistemologically diverse, academic research projects. This paper makes a contribution by quantifying the operational effort involved in data collection on a large multidisciplinary project and connecting the operational issues encountered to knowledge production. It is found that the cost of the data gathering is £46,000/home, and participants can give upwards of 217 hours of their time per house engaging with data-gathering activities. The rate of knowledge production is found to be approximately three publication/full-time equivalents (FTE) over the lifetime of the project and the risk to generating interdisciplinary insights is shown to be dependent on largely unforeseeable operational issues that compound the characteristic differences in the collection of the data utilized by social and technical research communities

Methodological dialogues across multimodality and sensory ethnography: digital touch communication

There is a significant gap between technological advancements of digital touch communication devices and social science methodologies for understanding digital touch communication. In response to that gap this article makes a case for bringing the communicational focus of multimodality into dialogue with the experiential focus of sensory ethnography to explore digital touch communication. To do this, we draw on debates within the literature, and reflect on our experiences in the IN-TOUCH project (2016–2021). While acknowledging the complexities of methodological dialogues across paradigm boundaries, we map and reflect on the methodological synergies and tensions involved in actively working across these two approaches, notably the conceptualization, categorization and representation of touch. We conclude by honing in aspects of research that have served as useful reflective route markers on our dialogic journey to illustrate how these tensions are productive towards generating a multimodal and multisensorial agenda for qualitative research on touch

Methods for studying technology in the home

Technology is becoming ever more integral to our home lives, and visions such as ubiquitous computing, smart technologies and the Internet of Things represent a further stage of this development. However studying interactions and experiences in the home, and drawing understanding from this to inform design, is a substantial challenge. A significant strand of research on technology in home life has developed in the CHI community and beyond, with a range of methods being created, adapted and used in combination. This workshop brings together a diverse group of researchers to develop a coherent understanding of this methodological space, and to identify connections and gaps, where further development of methods can occur to overcome issues specific to studying the home