How can ethnography which allows us to study human knowledge and practices in situated ways, be applied to the study of what is not current but lies ahead of us? Is it suited at all to help in such an endeavour? In this blog post I want to argue not only that it is but that, moreover, ethnography offers a distinguished and remarkably different way to study the future, and can therefore bring a radically new perspective to discussions of this topic. In this post I also want to dedicate some words to how we might approach anticipatory user experience research.
But what exactly might seem so problematic about the future as an ethnographic area of study? At a first instance, ethnography and the future can seem antithetical. Ethnography is produced through an attention to the lived, to what is actually experienced. The future, however, is characterised by how it escapes the present moment, thereby always carrying with it a hint of speculation and aura of the unknown. People might talk about what the future holds, but they cannot experience it in such way that it makes it observable or accessible to an ethnographer. Or can they? What if ethnography’s potential offering to the study and our understanding of the future lies exactly in the way it introduces elements of situatedness and the contemporary and connects them to the seemingly opposed – the future?
“The present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies a radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas : the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities.”
If we think about the future as necessarily carrying an element of uncertainty, we might say that studying it is, in fact, problematic for all sciences. This is especially true for those practitioners who interpret what they do as hard science. How could claims and predictions about the future possibly live up to expectations of methodological rigour, objectivity and testability? Looking at it from this perspective, anthropology and ethnographic enquiry, with their long standing contribution to critiques of scientific objectivity, suddenly don’t seem that ill-suited to study the future.
Anthropology is not that concerned with discerning what is true and what isn’t or with describing an external world seperate from the social context that produces it. Rather, it’s interested in the complex layers of the ‘actual’, that is, how society and culture work as filters through which humans perceive and interpret such an external world- and showing how they do so in very creative ways. In this sense, anthropology can study the future not by concerning itself too much with predictions of what the future will look like in actual terms but by focusing precisely on the imaginations and projections that people have and produce of the future.
This, however, doesn’t mean we’re limiting ourselves to what is actually observable and loosing focus on the actual interesting questions about what the future holds. Quite the opposite, it’s actually making a strong claim about how the present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies an even more radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas about the future, which is that “the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities.”
That is exactly what the field of Anticipatory Anthropology does, a field which is surprisingly older than one might think and actually goes back to the legacy of Margaret Mead who has written extensively on the topic. What draws the field together is the observation that humans have and make heavy use of the capacity to anticipate. People have dreams, fears and hopes regarding the imminent and distant future – and express these all the time.
Technology is, and has long been, at the very heart of all Western imaginings of the future. Whether it is robots or flying cars, new technologies are imagined to shift the possibilities of human life in radical ways. Big, powerful corporations today play a central role in this. What is so interesting about their role is how they contribute to a dynamic that could be described as ‘unequal futuring’ or unequal access to the future.
In a previous blog post, I’ve alluded to the ethnographic work of STS scholars Grint and Woolgar who point to influential power imbalances in ‘user-centred’ design processes in a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes (Grint and Woolgar 1997:78). Although conducted in 1997, much is still true for the present. It is typical for corporations to spent large sums of money and resources on determining what the future might hold and how requirements and actions of users might change. However, in that effort of thinking through and placing strong emphasis on future scenarios (often in a race against competitors) corporate actors actually develop the framework and conditions of the future they are trying to predict.
“Looking at technology through a future lens also teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities.”
There are many (more recent) examples of interesting fieldwork carried out in the space of future and technology, for example, Hannah Knox’s fieldwork in Manchester which looked at the city’s plans to transform and prepare for the transformation from a post-industrial to a much anticipated new ‘knowledge’ economy. What is so interesting about ethnographic work like Knox’s is that it pays attention to the passage from the present to the future. It looks at planning and ‘futuring’ efforts and locates them in the present, within strikingly mundane processes. It thereby helps us understand which ideas of the future persist into the future, which get lost or abandoned and how these decisions come about.
Looking at technology through a future lens, then, teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities.
How might we research the user experience of emerging technologies that are predicted to be part of people’s future lives but aren’t really here yet? ‘Anticipatory user experience’ is a term that has been circulated quite a lot amongst UX practitioners and focuses attention on anything that happens before the actual interaction with a ‘product’. This could be all actions that users take in order to prepare for the first interaction or their general expectations around this experience. However, looking back at the ways that the relationship of the future wiht the present has been theorised in anticipatory anthropology, I think this attention could benefit from an expansion in focus, to include more interesting aspects and perspectives on future use that go beyond simply what users expect this interaction to be.
As part of a wider research team, anthropologist Sarah Pink has just recently brought together interesting methods in a volume titled “Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds” (2017). When researching user experience in an anticipatory mode, the volume shows us, we can and should draw on many different creative methods and techniques: From the production of speculative documentaries that blur the lines between fact and fiction, films about potential futures co-created with various participants, to workshop activities that deliberately confront participants with uncertainty and situations of uncertainty. In another, especially interesting example, Pink herself conducts in-car ethnographies to explore the future of autonomous driving. She does this by employing existing technologies and familiar commuting scenarios as probes to imagine the future possibilities of this technology.
The volume is an incredibly interesting array for any UX researcher interested in playfully analysing and speculating about the future with their research participants.
Here are further resources:
The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (2005)
edited by Robert B. Textor
Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds (2017)
edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjöberg
Un/certainty(2014)
by Sarah Pink, Yoko Akama and Participants