In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the data cleaning and repair processes of Big Data analysis and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday worlds.

Purpose: This article proposes and demonstrates a design anthropological approach to hospital design and architecture and engages this approach to advance recent discussions of the question of designing for staff breaks. Background: We respond to calls for attention to sensory and experiential dimensions of hospital architecture and design through social science approaches and to research into the sensory environments for staff breaks. Method: Design anthropology enables us to surface the experiential and unspoken knowledge and practice of hospital staff, which is inaccessible through conventional consultations, quantitative post-occupancy evaluation surveys, or traditional interviews. We draw on ethnographic research into the everyday experience, improvisatory activity, and imagined futures of staff working in the psychiatric department of a large new architecturally designed hospital in Australia. Results: We argue that while the sensory aspects of hospital design conventionally cited—such as light and green areas—are relevant, attention to staff priorities that emerge in practice reveals that well-being is contingent on other qualities and resources. Conclusions: This suggests a refocus, away from the idea that environments impact on staff to create well-being, to understanding how staff improvise to create environments of well-being. We outline the implications of this research for an agenda for design for well-being in which architects and designers are often constrained by generic design briefs to argue for a shift in policy that attends more deeply to staff as future users of hospital designs.

No abstract

No abstract

Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) like Google Home provide automated news, media and other content directly into the home. In this article, we outline how Google Home’s content delivery can support the wellbeing and independence of older people. We argue that automated media provided by DVAs enrols older people in a dialectic relationship with the automated content and feminised conversation they deliver, uniquely performed within people’s own everyday life circumstances. We demonstrate this by drawing on ethnographic insights generated during a trial of smart home technologies with older Australian households who are ‘ageing in place’ in regional New South Wales. For most participants, the trial was their first encounter with DVAs and the modes of media and content delivery including for music, news, weather, trivia, jokes, facts and images. While DVAs bring new experiences via content, communication and companionship, they are also subverted, ignored or transformed as people improvise to make them ‘fit’ within their homes and lives. These dynamics underpin how DVAs, automated content delivery and user’s interactions can support people’s sense of wellness and their independent daily practices at home.