10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17421
application/pdf
2038-3460
17421
2
en
Alvise Mattozzi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra, Making Homes. Ethnography and Design, Bloomsbury, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Book Reviews
2019-01-31
2023-06-25
2019-01-31
2023-08-31
201-206
TS
Alvise Mattozzi
2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17421
201
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
2038-3460
2
en
206
Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra, Making Homes. Ethnography and Design, Bloomsbury, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17421/16273
9
Book Review                                                                 201
than a particularly effective tool in the competition for gaining markets.
    However, although Seitz’s thesis is convincing, a sense of incomplete-
ness lingers at the end of the story. A sense of flaw that will particularly
affect STS scholars. Many of the ingredients of this story are familiar to
them: ethnography, the emphasis on the materiality of non-humans, the
use of practice theory, the sociology of translation. However, as you enter
the text, the feeling grows that a conceptual toolkit has been borrowed
from the STS without having read the user manual. Flaws start cropping
up when concepts should be aptly used to give accuracy to the interpreta-
tion of field data. It then becomes clear that the author is acquainted with
practice theory exclusively in Robert Schmidt’s account (Soziologie der
Praktiken, 2012). The contributions of Schatzki, Shove, Turner, Warde are
overlooked. The whole debate about the agency of objects is missing, alt-
hough it would markedly enrich the book’s understanding of materiality in
design-thinking activities. As a matter of fact, Latour is often referenced,
but the lack of a general understanding of the actor-network theory pro-
duces a series of blatant misunderstandings of his thinking, e.g. regarding
the concept of script or the relationship between researcher and social ac-
tors. Taking into account Reassembling the Social would have helped
avoiding part of those misunderstandings. Finally, the sociology of transla-
tion is summed up in isolation from the discussion that derived from its
elaboration.
    Some books produce dis-pleasure. I mean that you do not just dislike
them, e.g. because they are obscure, incomplete or badly argued. They ap-
pear to be lost opportunities. They miss the opportunity (and the urgency)
to fill an empty space in shared knowledge that they have been able to rec-
ognize. When a book fails to grasp this opportunity, when it does not keep
a promise that seemed exciting, it is not just disappointing, it actively pro-
duces a destruction of potential pleasure, it severs an anticipated fulfill-
ment. In fact, it produces dis-pleasure. It is with this feeling that I finished
reading Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus.



                                     ***

   Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu,
Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra
Making Homes. Ethnography and Design, London, Bloomsbury, 2017,
pp. 176

Alvise Mattozzi Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
202                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

    Any academic essay is a node in a network of knowledges and re-
searches that we can retrace mainly, but not only, through citations. Mak-
ing home. Ethnography and Design is a portal. Not only a node in a net-
work of other knowledges and researches, but a platform that works as an
entry point and a synthesizer for a research project, its results and its fur-
ther branchings.
    The research to which this book provides access and insight is LEEDR
(Low Effort Energy Demand Reduction), an interdisciplinary project
drawing together anthropologists, engineers and designers in order to
achieve a deeper understanding of how energy and media consumption fit
into everyday practices and habits in home life.
    The LEEDR research was based at Loughborough University and ran
between 2010 and 2014, with the collaboration of the Design Research In-
stitute of the RMIT University. RMIT University is, indeed, the seat of Sa-
rah Pink, first author of the book, who has provided the general epistemo-
logical, theoretical and methodological framework for the research in
terms of “sensory ethnography” (Pink 2009), as well as connections to
other related research projects. The other authors of the book are, tellingly,
two social scientists, Kerstin Leder Mackley (cultural and media studies)
and Roxana Moroş anu (anthropology), and two designers, Val Mitchell
(user experience design) and Tracy Bhamra (sustainable design).
    The first node to which Making Homes provides access and insight is
the internet site Everyday and Digital Living (http://energyanddigitalliv-
ing.com), which complements the book – there, all the videos to which the
book refers are stored and the design outcomes of the research – still in
concept form – are introduced with a much greater detail. However, the
Internet site is not just a repository of materials referenced in the book. It
has its own autonomy and provides an overview to the research, by dis-
playing in a summarized way the theoretical-methodological framework,
some stories of everyday living in homes, design inspirations and design
concepts resulting from the research.
    The book, instead, provides a deeper reflection on the theoretical-
methodological framework of the research, illustrating it through various
empirical example from the LEEDR research fieldworks, as well as from
other researches. It addresses the issue of how to best research, understand
and design for change in and through the home.
    Thus, the book and the Internet site are two complementary ways of
introducing a research, which however, can be actually grasped in all its
details and developments only by following the various links to the various
publications, reports and design projects.
    The fact that it is “just” a theoretical-methodolgical introduction to a
research project, written, moreover, “in an accessible form for interdisci-
plinary researchers” (p. 6), thus, without articulated theoretical-epistemo-
logical discussions – a fact highlighted by the absence of notes –, does not
mean, however, that the book is not worth reading, especially if you are
Book Review                                                                203
interested in issues related to everyday life, design, sustainability and chan-
ge from a STS point of view or, more in general, from a social point of view.
    Indeed, the book is ambitious and challenges STS in various ways. In
between the lines, we can read an introduction to a whole research pro-
gram, not just to a research project. It, delving on, but also going beyond,
the material culture researches on homes, like those carried out by Daniel
Miller, lays the foundation for a different approach to issues tackled by the
various strands of the theory of social practices, as well by Actor-Network
Theory and by other STS related approaches. In doing so it provides a clear
framework for the emerging and variegated field of “design anthropology”,
here however addressed only as “design ethnography”.
    Besides the first introductory chapter, the book is divided into three
parts: an introduction to the framework of the research project; an intro-
duction to the research methods used to engage with homes and to collect
information and data; a conclusive part, where also the design outputs of
the projects are touched upon.
    Whereas the second and third part take only one chapter each, the first
part is much more articulated and unfolds across three chapter (Chs. 2-4).
Each chapter introduces “a conceptual theme concerning researching and
designing for homes and everyday life in homes: temporalities, environ-
ments, and activity and movement” (p. 19).
    As underlined in the introductory chapter, “[e]ach theme”, emerged
also through various researches that have predated LEEDR, “represents a
set of engagements between research and design in and about homes and
theoretical understandings” (p. 19).
    In “Temporalities” (Ch. 2), various temporalities related to homes and
everyday life, but also to the disciplinary approaches of ethnography and
design, are interrogated, looking at the way they coalesce in the practice of
design ethnography of homes.
    On the on hand, the chapter questions the “ethnographic present”, i.e.
the crystallization of people, culture and societies into a moment set in a
specific present. Such “ethnographic present”, through which most of eth-
nographic research has characterized itself, is clearly at odds with design,
which is future oriented, as well as with the way people live their homes,
future oriented too. On the other, the chapter provides various example of
the intertwining of temporalities in homes’ everyday life. These, for the
most part, are future oriented: the home is perceived as an incomplete or
not yet completed project, activities are run through various forms of tim-
ings and various forms of planning.
    One of the results of this attention to temporalities is the fact that hom-
es needs to be considered always as processes. This feature also character-
izes “environments” (Ch. 3). In the book, they are considered as continu-
ously constituted through the entanglements of diverse processes, among
which human activities, part and constitutive of environments. Environ-
204                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

ments are considered as material, digital, sensory and affective and ana-
lyzed mainly through the kind of atmosphere they enjoy, thus through the
way they are perceived and felt. Taking into account various temporalities
and environments as atmospheres are interesting and productive moves. In
so far as they are innovative, they are not groundbreaking and pursue, as
acknowledged, various threads of contemporary social, aesthetic and de-
sign research. On the contrary, the choice of focusing on “Activity and
movement” (Ch. 4) – and, especially movements – is introduced as break
away from contemporary social research, focused on the concurring no-
tions of behaviors and practices.
    For the book, movements allow focusing on what people do, without
providing too strict categorizations into more or less coherent, discrete and
a priori established practices. Moreover, movements, which unfolds con-
tingently and improvisationally in relation to the affordance provided by
the environment and in relation to what takes place next, allow focusing
on the tension between present and future. Therefore, the research has fol-
lowed movements in homes, mapping them in various ways, and looking
at how various activities are articulated through various movements.
    Through the examples provided in the book, we can see that the frame-
work outlined in Making Homes allows attending details and features of
homes, which sound actually relevant and not previously considered, as
well to thematize homes as felt process, which seems productive.
    In this way, the research seems able to provide grounds to understand
how homes can or cannot be sites of sustainable practices, as well as of
human well-being and happiness. Through such insights, it is also able to
provide indications for design interventions that would allow to foster sus-
tainability and well-being.
    In any case, as I have said, this is just an introduction – though a prom-
ising introduction. Therefore, in order to actually understand, if the appro-
ach used in LEEDR is as productive and innovative as the book paints it,
we will need to consider the research thoroughly, by looking at articles as
well as at the details of the design outcomes.
    As for now, I cannot but notice few things which can provide a sort of
guideline for possible weaknesses to prove, while considering the research
thoroughly.
    Firstly, in the conclusive part, where designing and its outcomes are
actually addressed, the book touches upon the fact that the LEEDR de-
signers had the need to propose and explore a further methodology to
gather data: PORTS (People, Objects and Resources through Time and
Space). PORTS, thus, seems a sort of redoubling of a work already done
through the design ethnography. Therefore, it seems that there is a sort of
division of labour between a sensory ethnography – which however should,
then, not be called “design ethnography” anymore –, which provides only
“inspirations” to designers (as acknowledged in the Internet site) and an-
Book Review                                                               205
other kind of more behavioral observation which provides the actual infor-
mation designers can work with. If it is so, the results of the LEEDR project
in terms of dialogue between social sciences and design would be very
weak, not adding much to existing attempt of dialogue between social sci-
ences and design. Moreover, if the proper ethnographic part is only tasked
with providing inspirations, there is no need to carry out sensory ethnog-
raphies anymore, since inspirations related to improvisation, how the
house is felt and movements (see http://energyanddigitalliving.com/de-
sign-inspirations/) have been already provided. What needed for further
projects would then only be observations using the PORTS methodology
carried out by the designers alone.
    Secondly, it does not seem to me that the outcomes of the observations
are more future oriented than usual research result. Considering future,
expectations, hope, what to do next, etc. in order to produce analyses of
activities and movements does not make these analyses more future ori-
ented: the resulting analysis or descriptions cannot but freeze a certain mo-
ment – just look at the results of PORTS or other methodologies used in
order to collects data like Tactile Time collage (p. 120). Despite the inter-
esting reflections emerged within design anthropology about the future
orientation of design and the past-present orientation of sciences – I would
say sciences more in general, not just social sciences –, in my opinion it is
not an issue of what is considered in the observations, but of what Latour
(2013) would call “modes of existence” of sciences and of organizations.
Recovering the classic STS notion of “script”, Latour (2013) shows how
organizations are future oriented, because they are based on “scripts”, in-
scribed in verbal agreements or in technologies, that tell what to do next.
Sciences instead pertain to another mode of existence, where inscriptions
beget other inscriptions, which only allow to recover, backwards, the first
source of these inscriptions.
    Thirdly, among these future oriented elements there are, then,
“scripts”, as classically elaborated by Akrich and Latour and recently re-
covered in a proper future oriented framework (Latour 2013). Thus, de-
scription, as proposed by Akrich and Latour, can provide the adequate
categories to de-scribe and analyze movements, as proposed in the book,
taking into account their future orientation. This would maybe provide di-
rectly usable insight for designers, not in form of general “inspirations”,
but almost in forms of specific guidelines. This is actually what proposed
also in the book through an analysis of the affordances (p. 78) – notion
strictly related to the one of script. However, such cited analysis of the af-
fordances has not been carried out within the LEEDR research project,
but in another project, by a completely different team, which does not seem
to have anything to do with LEEDR (Paay et al. 2015).
    Making Homes sets a promising perspective for the dialogue between
social sciences and design – and because of that it is worth reading, espe-
cially for those interested in the issue. However, such promises are clearly
206                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (2)

future oriented, since at the moment the book provides inspiring ideas
more than empirical evidences.


References
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
       University Press.
Paay, J., Kjeldskov, J. and Skov, M. (2015) Connecting in the Kitchen: AnEmpirical
         Study of Physical Interactions while Cooking Together at Home, in Pro-
         ceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Coopera-
         tive Work & Social Computing, CSCW ‘15, New York, ACM, pp. 276–87.
Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography, Thousand Oaks, CA., Sage.




                                      ***

   Damon Krukowski
The New Analog. Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, Cam-
bridge MA, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 240

Paolo Magaudda University of Padova

    The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World is a
book by the musician, journalist and poet Damon Krukowski, focused on
the implications of the shift from analog to digital technologies in music
production and circulation. Although this is not a book rooted in science
& technology studies, but an essay for a wider and non-academic, it anyway
offers several relevant points of interest for a STS audience interested in
music and sound technologies. This is especially true for those of us in-
volved in the field of sound studies, which is the way STS has approached,
in the last fifteen years, the role of technology in relation to music, sound
and the acoustic environment – a field distinctively leaded, among others,
by prominent STS scholars such as Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld
(Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003; 2012).
    Before entering more deeply into the issues The New Analog raises for
STS-oriented sound studies scholars, let me quickly present what the book
is about and its major thesis. First of all, The New Analog’s author, Damon
Krukowski, is a musician (drummer for the late ‘80s alternative rock band
Galaxy 500) and journalist (for major music magazines like “The Wire”
