Design Ethnography

Methods for Researching Automated Futures

“…A concern with investigating futures, and subsequently with innovation in concepts and methods for researching futures, has been increasingly apparent across the social sciences and humanities over the last 10 or so years. The impulse toward asking how we research automated futures which underpinned my ambition to develop this was informed by a movement toward investigating, and reflexively developing methodologies for researching, everyday futures (Pink, 2021; Pink, Fors, et al, 2022; Pink, Ruckenstein, et al, 2022). This work has been inspired in turn by design anthropology (Akama et al, 2018; Smith & Otto, 2016), futures anthropology (Salazar et al, 2017), and the sociology of expectations (Brown & Michael, 2003) with a move toward sociologies of the future.…”

“…It also brings an alternative to the figure of the Futurist, as a professional identity and field that has long since participated as a gateway to the temporalities of what is next. Futurists (as discussed in Pink, 2022; Pink, Fors, et al, 2022; Pink, Ruckenstein, et al, 2022) do not necessarily believe that they can predict or know the future, and often make their statements conditional; however, they do tend toward making strong proclamations regarding what could happen in the future, and of this we need to be wary. The qualitative social sciences need to live alongside quantitative predictive and futurist approaches.…”

“…Following recent developments in this field, which I have been involved in myself (Pink, 2021; Pink, Fors, et al, 2022; Pink, Ruckenstein, et al, 2022), futures are always defined as uncertain, as possibilities (Akama et al, 2018; Halse, 2013) and as imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). Seeing futures qualitatively as the unknown and unknowable then raises the question of how we can know futures, and what we can know about them.…”

“…There is significant critical social science literature in this field. There is also a growing body of qualitative research about how people experience automated technologies in everyday life (e.g., by the contributors to Pink, Fors et al, 2022; Pink, Ruckenstein, et al, 2022).…”

Design Anthropological Filmmaking for Automated Futures

“…Usually based on quantitative surveys, big data analytics and deep rooted assumptions that technological advancement drives positive change, their predictive claims leave little space for the experiential realities, contingencies and serendipity of the everyday (Dahlgren et al, 2021; Strengers et al, 2021). They moreover fuel research investment in engineering, computer sciences and technology design disciplines (Pink, 2022a), where if people are accounted for they are already framed into simplified faceless roles such as those of user, consumer or citizen (Pink, Fors, et al, 2022).…”