Beyond observation

Design Anthropological Filmmaking for Automated Futures

“…Three of these inform design anthropological filmmaking: sensory ethnographic filmmaking, participatory observational documentary, and fictional approaches to shared filmic anthropology. These approaches correspond with my design anthropological interest in: the sensoriality, affect, contingency and human creativity and improvisation of the everyday; collaborative and experimental engagement with participants, as methods of encountering the everyday, and to surface its realities, contingencies and sensory and affective states and sentiments; and documentary as a media for the exploration of everyday futures (Henley, 2020;MacDougall, 1998MacDougall, , 2005Pink, 2021b;Stoller, 1997). Second, the design anthropology of emerging technologies is underpinned by a processual theory of emergence and introduces and revises concepts of trust and anxiety as categories through which to analytically comprehend our relationships with automation (Pink et al, 2021).…”

“…Anthropological film is a reflexive and usually participatory practice (MacDougall, 1998), where authorship is interrogated (Henley, 2020) and which goes "beyond observation in the sense that the film-maker and subjects, far from being obscured or ignored, is central to the process of production, and is inscribed, in varying degrees, in the filmic text itself" (Henley, 2020, p. 453). I trained in ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology (GCVA) at Manchester University in the United Kingdom in 1989 to 1990, but subsequently left filmmaking behind for 25 years to focus on developing interdisciplinary anthropology through visual, sensory, digital and design ethnography and academic writing.…”

“…Design anthropological filmmaking for automated futures involves an interdisciplinary theory and practice which brings together design anthropology (Smith & Otto, 2016), anthropological documentary filmmaking (e.g., Henley, 2020), visual ethnography (Pink, 2021b), futures anthropology (Pink & Salazar, 2017) and the critical perspective of the anthropology of emerging technologies (Pink, 2021a;Pink et al, 2021). This constitutes a "blended practice" between anthropology, design (Pink et al, 2017) and filmmaking.…”

“…It is a methodology for intervention which harnesses methods, theory and concepts from three fields. First, ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking have a long history and a range of approaches (Henley, 2020). Three of these inform design anthropological filmmaking: sensory ethnographic filmmaking, participatory observational documentary, and fictional approaches to shared filmic anthropology.…”