General methodological approach

This study investigates the material practices, political dynamics and potential of par-ticipatory sensing. I use a qualitative, multi-sited, mixed-methods approach based on post-ANT to focus the researcher on the liveliness of non-human actors such as the par-ticipatory sensing devices (section 2.1). In this way this study follows in the tradition of classic ethnographic laboratory studies of science (Latour 1987, 1999) and studies of tech-nical environments such Aramis (Latour 1996a), Aircraft Stories (Law 2002) and Body Multiple (Mol 2002). Mol offers a very succinct summary of the role an ANT inspired ethnographer as narrating practices that connect human bodies, techniques and tech-nologies:

“An ethnographer/praxiographer out to investigate diseases never isolates these from the practices in which they are, what one may call, enacted. She stub-bornly takes notice of the techniques that make things visible, audible, tangible, knowable. She may talk bodies—but she never forgets about microscopes” (Mol 2002, p.33)

The study adopts the fundamental approaches and concepts of ANT such as ‘actors’ and

‘translation’, but uses the theory largely as a sensitising approach rather than fully adopt-ing its theoretical jargon. For example, in ‘Aircraft Stories’, Law (2002) tells the story of a military aircraft via technical manuals and demonstrates how a seemingly boring mathe-matical formulae is actually based on Cold War fears of Russian air defences. He uses the theoretical term ‘heterogeneity of tellable otherness’ (p.102) to describe the sense of ab-sence and preab-sence of missiles. Yet what I take from this study is not the term he coined but the ethnographic sensitivity that allows him to tell a story via a formulae.

This study follows Bruno Latour’s dictum to ‘follow the actors’ (Latour 2005a), with a methodological focus on ‘devices’ (Law & Ruppert 2013) and ‘infrastructure’ (Star & Ruh-leder 1996). In this approach, ‘devices’ are socio-material-semiotic assemblages that are composed of physical material, semiotic signs and act ‘socially’ to assemble and arrange social relations around them. This concept is in the tradition of Foucault’s ‘dispositif’, where an apparatus or device is “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings” (Agamben 2009, p.14). This notion of the device has been used extensively within STS to account for the extended and unbounded na-ture of interactions technology, actors and methods. The device is a notion that helps account for slippages where it is hard to pin down the boundary between a physical ob-ject and its various dimensions of action and configuration. While devices often have a physical aspect, this is not a requirement; instead, they are characterised by concentra-tions of intensions. In Law and Ruppert’s formulation devices are ‘patterned teleological arrangements’, meaning they have their own aims that require ethnographic analysis to identify their goals, since “what devices are doing is not necessarily written on the pack-age” (Law & Ruppert 2013, p.230). Singleton & Law (2013) argue that “devices may be found anywhere that practices embed sets of relatively repetitive and teleologically or-dered strategies” (p.260). I combine this notion of the device with Star’s concept of an

‘ethnography of infrastructure’, where the researcher should “attend ethnographically to the plugs, settings, sizes, and other profoundly mundane aspects” (Star 1999, p.379). Star argues that these apparently trivial aspects of technology are the material conduits that connect actors across different scales. So when a person is bending down to plug in an electric device, they are engaging with technical standards that allow the plug to fit the socket, as well as legal and commercial relationships that allow electricity to flow from

the national grid. This approach emphasises the importance of observing the usage of devices and becomes what I refer to as ‘material practices’, which describe the situated interactions between people, environment and technology where materiality functions as an active agent. Bruni (2005) uses the ethnography of infrastructure to make “the soft-ware guide me through the organisation and confront me with other actors and processes, whether human or artificial” (p.363). I similarly use this approach of letting the sensing objects bring me into contact with relevant actors and define the boundary of each case study. Throughout this study I will be referring to this ethnographic approach as a ‘device study’, since it places the sensing object at the centre of the enquiry and pays attention to who and what is taking place around it. This treats the objects more expansively as

‘devices’ (Law & Ruppert 2013) that have agendas, create practices and arrange social relations around them as well as ‘infrastructure’ (Star & Ruhleder 1996) that can create and prohibit structural connections across scales. While lots of entities are in contact with the sensing devices, only certain ones become actors that transform the devices and are in turn transformed by them. Transformation is not just the physical modification of the object but includes semiotic positioning in a press release or academic funding proposal.

The simile I use to describe the device study approach is like the view from a GoPro ac-tion camera. These small video cameras are often attached onto rigid objects such as bicycles, helmets or drones to show a fixed view of the world. While one sees the world rushing by in these action videos, the rigidity of the view and the surprising camera an-gles mean that one can never forget that this is a view from a machine. The ethnographic device studies are similarly an attempt to keep the sensing device rigidly at the centre of the view and to document the material practices taking place around it. The aim is to destabilise the prevailing assumptions in the literature about who and what is acting in participatory sensing. This approach does not aim at a scientifically objectivist view from nowhere, or a humanist perspective that would place the ‘citizen’ at the centre. Instead, this study aims at a situated perspective from the sensing device itself (Haraway 1988).

The aim is not to create an anthropomorphic cartoon, where an object is made to speak to the reader, but to construct an object-centred ethnographic perspective that is sen-sitive to the properties and enactments of the device. This approach is informed by my extensive personal experience, having invented a participatory sensing device called Bio Mapping (Nold 2004) and spent a decade using it with thousands of participants across

the world. Bio Mapping involved people wearing a sensor on their finger that measured their physiological arousal as an index of emotional state as well their geographical loca-tion. Together this data was visualised as spatial arousal maps that were annotated by the participants to create collective emotion maps of the local area (Nold 2006, 2007, Nold & Boraschi 2007). These projects were staged in the context of participatory art but over time morphed into alternative public consultations and urban planning. Seeing the way the practices around my device changed and were redirected by outside actors, I came to understand the disruptive potential as well as the constraints of participatory sensing. By applying a device study approach to a fresh set of devices, my goal is to create ethnographic accounts of these kinds of political dynamics from the device’s point of view.

To account for the politics of devices, this study uses the theoretical notion of ‘ontologi-cal politics’ as a methodologi‘ontologi-cal focus. In Mol’s words “different enactments of a disease entail different ontologies. They each do the body differently. But they also come with dif-ferent ways of doing the good” (Mol 2002, p.176, emphasis in original). The point is that by treating the interaction around the devices as ‘enactments’ it is possible to demonstrate that different configurations of the device make different normative realities. The study’s main methodological focus are Mol’s questions of “Where are the options? What is at stake? Are there really options? How should we choose?” (Mol 1999, p.79), which asks how things could be done differently and invites the researcher to ‘interfere’ (Law 2004b) with the case studies. The shift from analysis towards interference is done via a design approach of ontological design and ‘infrastructuring’ (Karasti & Syrjänen 2004, Ehn 2008, Björgvinsson et al. 2010, Hillgren et al. 2011, Björgvinsson et al. 2012, Le Dantec 2012, Dis-alvo et al. 2014). In the book ‘Inventive Methods’, Lury & Wakeford (2012) describe the way devices such as stethoscopes and tape recorders are “complex, and constantly changing constellations of things, procedures, abstractions, mediations, sensitivities and sociabili-ties in the apparatuses, configurations or assemblages of social research” (p.9). Devices thus bring with them methods and sensibilities for collaborating and intervening in the world. Thus ‘device’ and ‘infrastructure’ become practical methods for ‘infrastructuring’.

Estalella & Criado (2015) describe the way they use Law and Ruppert’s notion of the de-vice as an intervention method

“to deploy experimental collaboration as a methodological device, a mode of assembling material and social conditions for the production of knowledge in

our empirical work. Conceptualizing collaboration in terms of a device makes visible the different heterogeneous entities that have to be mobilized so as to bring into existence this relational mode in the empirical work as well as its epistemic conditions” (Estalella & Criado 2015, p.304).

In this way, devices and infrastructures become physical prototypes that are collabora-tively designed with communities to form collective interventions in controversies (Lane et al. 2011). This approach is crucial for demonstrating the alternative potential of partici-patory sensing and reflecting back on the other device studies.