Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods 9781138241138, 9781315281254

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Atmospheres and the Experiential World

We live in atmospheres, we talk about them and we move through them. They offer us an important route into comprehending several aspects of human life and experience, what is important to people, the environments life is played out in, and the processes of change and possible futures. Atmospheres are an ephemeral yet inescapable element of our everyday experiential and conceptual environments. They are continually beyond our grasp as they undergo constant transformation. By interrogating atmospheres, this book arrives at new ways of thinking about the relationships between people, space, time and events. Atmospheres and the Experiential World explores the ways we engage with these affective modes, and the possibilities they offer for researchers, designers and policy-makers to make and intervene in the world. Chapters propose an approach to atmospheres that is not fixed to certain forms or boundaries. Instead, this book argues that atmospheres should be conceptualised as dynamic and changing configurations that allow analytical insight into a range of topics when we think in, about and through them. This book offers scholars, designers and creative practitioners, professionals and students a research-based way of understanding and intervening in atmospheres. Shanti Sumartojo is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research investigates how people experience their spatial surroundings, including both material and immaterial aspects, using ethnographic and practice-led methodologies. With a particular focus on the built environment and urban public space, this includes ongoing work on memorials and commemorative sites. She is author of Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness (2013), and co-editor of Nation, Memory, and Great War Commemoration (2014) and Commemorating Race and Empire in the Great War Centenary (2017). Sarah Pink is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research, based in design anthropology, focuses on design for well-being and emerging technologies, often through interdisciplinary collaborations with designers, engineers, artists and scholars from other disciplines. Her recent publications include the co-­authored books Uncertainty and Possibility (2018) and Making Homes (2017) and the co-­ edited books Anthropologies and Futures (2017) and Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice (2017).

Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Space Rainer Kazig, CNRS Research Laboratory Ambiances – Architectures – Urbanités, Grenoble, France Damien Masson, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France Paul Simpson, Plymouth University, UK

Research on ambiances and atmospheres has grown significantly in recent years in a range of disciplines, including Francophone architecture and ­urban studies, German research related to philosophy and aesthetics, and a growing range of Anglophone research on affective atmospheres within human geography and sociology. This series offers a forum for research that engages with questions around ambiances and atmospheres in exploring their significances in understanding social life. Each book in the series advances some combination of theoretical understandings, practical knowledge and methodological approaches. More specifically, key questions which contributions to this series seek to address include: • • •

•

In what ways do ambiances and atmospheres play a part in the unfolding of social life in a variety of settings? What kinds of ethical, aesthetic, and political possibilities might be opened up and cultivated through a focus on atmospheres/ambiances? How do actors such as planners, architects, managers, commercial interests and public authorities actively engage with ambiances and atmospheres or seek to shape them? How might these ambiances and atmospheres be reshaped towards critical ends? What original forms of representations can be found today to (re)present the sensory, the atmospheric, the experiential? What sort of writing, modes of expression, or vocabulary is required? What research methodologies and practices might we employ in engaging with ambiances and atmospheres?

The Aesthetics of Atmospheres Gernot Böhme. Edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud Atmospheres and the Experiential World Theory and Methods Shanti Sumartojo and Sarah Pink For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Ambiances-Atmospheres-and-Sensory-Experiences-of-Spaces/book-series/ AMB

Atmospheres and the Experiential World Theory and Methods

Shanti Sumartojo and Sarah Pink

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Shanti Sumartojo and Sarah Pink The right of Shanti Sumartojo and Sarah Pink to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-24113-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-28125-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

vii ix

1 Atmospheres and the experiential world 1 2 Situating atmospheres 15 3 Researching atmospheres 35 4 Space-times of atmospheres 55 5 Atmospheres on the move 75 6 Design and intervention 95 7 A new agenda for thinking atmospherically 119 Index

131

Figures

1.1 A service alley in the fresh produce section of the Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne. Photo: Nick Walton-Healey 2 4.1 Fresh produce stalls at Queen Victoria Market. Photo: Nick Walton-Healey 58 4.2 The noise transformation tent inside Charles Evans Reserve. Photo: Melisa Duque 63 4.3 Sarah (left) and Shanti undertake autoethnographic listening as a mode of inquiry. Photos: Sarah Pink and Shanti Sumartojo 64 4.4 The wall enclosing the park and hiding the freeway. Photo: Melisa Duque 65 4.5 A room at the Camp des Milles memorial and museum. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 70 5.1 Brian gestures as he describes the sensation of speed when cycling down a hill. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 80 5.2 The cleaning trolley was a valued ‘friend’ (left), and the catering trolley enabled the enactment of care through the careful and personalised plating and provision of meals. Photos: Shanti Sumartojo 83 5.3 A plated ‘minced meal,’ with scoops of food arranged carefully and drizzled with enticing gravy. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 85 6.1 The site of contain yourself, overlooking the Maribyrnong River in Footscray, Melbourne. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 103 6.2 Visitors to the fully installed contain yourself at night. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 105 6.3 Trees by Michael Killalea, one of the six installations of thinking spaces. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 108 6.4 Yandell Walton’s artwork Submerged installed at the 2017 Gertrude Street Projection Festival. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo 109 6.5 One of designer Chuan Khoo’s intriguing ‘interface objects’. Photo: Chuan Khoo 112

Acknowledgements

Foremost, we thank all the participants in our research projects for their contributions, as well as the valued colleagues with whom we have ­collaborated in the work discussed in this book: Sarah Barns, ­Martin Berg, ­Angharad Closs Stephens, Melisa Duque, Tim Edensor, Vaike Fors, ­Matthew Graves, Chuan Khoo, Christine Heyes LaBond, Fiona Hillary, Michael Killalea, Jordan Lacey, Kerstin Leder Mackley, ­Deborah ­Lupton, Joanne Mihelcic, Eliot Palmer, Bianca Vallentine, Laurene Vaughan, Malte Wagenfeld and Nick Walton-Healey. For supporting the research, we also thank the Fondation Aix-Marseille Université, the City of Melbourne, ­Transurban, Exemplar Health, the RJ Foundation Sweden, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK.

1 Atmospheres and the experiential world

We live in atmospheres, we talk about them and we move through them. Yet atmospheres are impossible to capture, elusive to define and continually beyond our grasp as they ongoingly transform. They are an ephemeral yet inescapable element of our everyday experiential and conceptual environments. In Atmospheres and the Experiential World we offer scholars, designers, creative practitioners, professionals and students a research-based way of understanding and intervening in atmospheres. In doing so we draw on both our own research and that of others to provide a firm basis of ­theoretical, empirical, methodological and practice-based discussion. We begin by introducing readers by way of our own experiences of researching atmosphere. In late 2017 the Queen Victoria Market, an inner-city Melbourne market in operation since 1878, began planning a refurbishment by local government. The development plans were not a settled matter, and some people objected strongly to the project on the grounds that something of the unique heritage and experience of the Market would be degraded, that it would lose its ‘vibe’ (Royall 2018). There were compelling reasons for changes to be made to the market: there was evidence of the need for urgent structural repair in some of the large sheds that sheltered vendors and shoppers; the market managers wanted to be able to respond to the needs of a growing inner-city population; and some aspects of day-to-day operations were perceived as dangerous or at least inefficient. But at the heart of the opposition to refurbishment were concerns about changes to how the site felt, based on the immaterial and intangible value that it held for the people who used it. For these people, the most commonly expressed anxiety about changes to the physical structure of the market was that precious qualities would be damaged, sanitised or even ‘lost.’ These concerns were quite explicitly about atmosphere. Despite its resistance to definition, atmosphere was not incidental, ­accidental or unimportant. On the contrary, it was commonly identified as vital to the identity of the market. In the research project we conducted there in early 2017, we sought to unravel what comprised its atmosphere and the terms in which it was valued by the people who used it most.1 Using a

2  Atmospheres and the experiential world sensory and mobile ethnographic approach that we discuss in this book, we found that it was lodged in and expressed through particular ways of tracing through the precinct, and bound up in routine and familiar patterns of site-specific interaction. It was also shorthand for sensory modes of engagement, described in terms that included what people could see, smell, touch and hear there. This included bodily movements as people chose produce, reached over c­ ounters to customers, navigated uneven pavement or dodged through crowds, pushing shopping trolleys, steering forklifts or shepherding ­ emory and imagination were also very important, as p ­ eople small children. M expressed the value of the site in terms of how they had used it before, the relationships that unfolded in, through and as a result of their work, shopping or visits there, and also because of the people they thought of, for example, as they bought a special piece of meat or set up their stall for the day’s trading. We discuss this example in more detail in Chapter 4, but it serves well to introduce atmosphere as crucial to how we understand places and events, as affecting how we feel about the people who accompany us or who we encounter, and as something that lingers in our memory when we recall past experiences. Atmosphere is not just how places and events feel, however. It is also what they mean. In the markets, atmosphere was valued: it linked experiences to meanings and how people carried these meanings forward in their imaginations. Atmosphere slid between and imbued different times and places, and was part of what stuck emotion to specific material surroundings and interactions.

Figure 1.1  A  service alley in the fresh produce section of the Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne. Photo: Nick Walton-Healey.

Atmospheres and the experiential world  3 As we discuss throughout this book, atmosphere offers us an important route into comprehending a number of aspects of human life and experience, what is important to people, the environments in which life is played out, and processes of change and possible futures. By interrogating ­atmospheres we can arrive at new ways of thinking about the relationships between people, space, time and events; the sensory and affective modes through which we engage with these; and the possibilities that researchers, designers and policymakers have to make and intervene in the world. In this book, however, we contend that we need to shift the frame by which we understand atmospheres. We want to move beyond approaches that try to pin down atmosphere as attached to particular environments or activities, that somehow sit outside us and that are bound or wholly defined by our material surroundings. Ours is an approach to atmospheres that does not demand that it cleave to certain forms or have boundaries that can be delimited or fixed. Instead, we argue that atmospheres can be fruitfully conceptualised as dynamic and changing configurations that allow analytical insight to a range of topics when we begin to think in, about and through them. We will show what we mean by this empirically, and how we have approached this methodologically, in the case studies in Chapters 4–6. Furthermore, despite their strong relationship to design and the material world, as our work in the market alludes to, atmospheres evade capture in the physical environment alone, speaking to sensory and imaginative forms of understanding. Our critical conceptual move, and our entry point to atmosphere, calls for conceptualising it as emerging ongoingly from our everyday worlds and as very much a part of how we constantly encounter and make sense of our surroundings, what we do in them and with whom and how we ascribe value and meaning to this. In the chapters that follow we will show that we do not (and in fact cannot) attune to atmospheres empirically without also understanding the conditions of their emergence, even if they continually exceed these. Indeed, as we have argued elsewhere: If atmospheres are conceptualized as already part of the world that we inhabit…the core question… centres on how we might: identify e­ mpirically the contingencies that constitute particular atmospheres; understand their qualities and affordances; and use this knowledge to generate ­insights into mundane everyday life worlds where atmospheres, people, things and processes together constitute everyday environments. (Pink, Leder Mackley and Morosanu 2015: 352) At the same time, however, this is not to suggest that we think atmospheres can be pinned down or reduced to the terms of their configuration. As we will show across different contexts, ways of thinking about atmospheres as coherent, contained, staged or somehow emanating from particular material environments do not catch their elusive quality. It follows that attempts to design, manipulate or engineer atmospheres – successful as

4  Atmospheres and the experiential world they might appear in enrolling people into shared ways of feeling or experiencing a place or event – cannot possibly fully account for the individual bodies, thoughts and actions that comprise the participants in an atmospheric ­eruption. This, we suggest, has been one of the challenges in understanding what atmospheres are, but more importantly, what they do and what they might make possible, which we discuss in Chapter 6 regarding design and ­Chapter 7 on politics and futurity. Accordingly, in this book we argue that while atmospheres cannot be reduced to the conditions that help them arise, these particular empirical configurations must at the same time be understood as absolutely implicit to them. This helps explain why atmospheres have such conceptual purchase – they make sense to us because they are something we have all experienced in specific places or at memorable ­moments in our lives. Indeed, much of the scholarly literature on atmospheres, which we discuss in Chapter 2, attends to sites or events that are somehow ‘atmospheric.’ While this is useful – and indeed our own work has contributed to this material – in placing atmosphere at the centre of inquiry, and by seeking to understand what ‘makes’ atmosphere, it can paradoxically seek to define atmosphere in terms that it will always transcend. This is our second main argument: that anchoring atmosphere in the changeable configurations of our surroundings and how we experience them demands methodologies that attend not only to how they feel, but also how they emerge, what they mean and how they are valued and understood by the people who experience and help to constitute them. Any understanding of atmospheres must be empirically grounded in the categories by which people might understand their experiences as atmospheric in their own terms. To put it another way, and as we say above, we treat atmospheres as always already existing, with understanding them being a question of attunement and attention to what has to configure for them to exist. This also carries connotations for what impact atmospheres might carry into the future, what they make possible in terms of our shared spaces and relationships at every level, and what new articulations of experience they might make imaginable. It follows that we are less concerned with how atmospheres are shared, transmitted or collectivised, because this would risk granting them a uniformity that we resist. Instead, we use atmospheres to think in, about and through experience, using it to unfold new perspectives on how we perceive and understand our surroundings. This is our final critical move and third main argument: that such an understanding of atmospheres as emergent and continuously configured allows us to see not only what meanings they might carry and what work they might do in people’s lives, but also what they make possible into the future and what they enable us to imagine and know in ways that were not possible before. This provides signposts to the relationship between atmospheres and design, points of potential intervention and the futures that thinking atmospherically might bring into view.

Atmospheres and the experiential world  5 To develop our arguments we draw on, but also critically advance, theories of atmosphere as they have been developed in human geography and anthropology. We do this through an approach inspired by our encounters with design anthropological research and practice, interventional and ­experimental ethnographies and our experience of collaborating on interdisciplinary projects in a range of empirical contexts. Definitions of atmosphere tend to focus on where it derives from, the effects it has on people or its sensory elements. Its very ephemerality and indistinctness, however, its resistance to capture, makes atmosphere an intriguing focus of inquiry. We know that it is important because we can feel it ourselves – yet establishing where it is located, how (and if) it is anchored and the nature and quality of its ebbs and flows is elusive and slippery. Put simply, in this book we treat atmosphere as an aspect of the way something feels to people, a contingent and fluid outcome of our perpetually configured surroundings, sensory perceptions, subjectivities and imaginations. In addition to arguing for a reorientation of atmosphere as emergent, we will also contend that as perceptual phenomena constituted through the affordances of other things, atmospheres are never self-determined. They do not themselves change or exercise causality. Instead, the concept of atmospheres allows us to take analytical steps forward in understanding people’s changing sensory and affective experiences as they move through their worlds. Accordingly, in this book we treat atmosphere as part of a configuration of things and processes that make up a perceptual environment. It follows that atmospheres do not themselves have ‘causal powers’ or singular agency in the world, because the capacity to change how a place ‘feels’ would be transient and constituted through the particularity of the shifting assemblages of persons and things through which atmospheres emerge. Atmospheres cannot make people feel particular things, precisely because it is the way that people feel about things that make atmospheres perceptible: anticipation, foreknowledge and pre-existing views of different material and immaterial elements play a crucial role in how atmospheres are co-­constituted and perceived (Sumartojo 2016). Thus the task at hand becomes one of determining how those feelings and the elements that they are inseparable from become named by people who experience them: that is, how do atmospheres become categories and what do those categories enable people to express or do? As we will discuss in Chapters 6 and 7 in particular, this orientation can allow us to see the political aspects of atmospheres more clearly, and their implications for envisioning or making futures. In the remainder of this introduction, we begin by explaining why atmospheres are a valuable frame through which to think about the world. We turn next to the relationship between atmospheres and affective and sensory experience on the one hand, and between memory and imagination on the other. These topics are at the heart of existing conceptual approaches, but are ones that we treat in quite distinct ways and trace through all our research. They lay the groundwork for our concern with

6  Atmospheres and the experiential world how people experience and make sense of the world atmospherically, a concern that we discuss in empirical detail in Chapters 4–6. We then build on this by introducing the tripartite analytical orientation to atmospheres that we adopt throughout the case study chapters, which is to think in, about and through them, before concluding with an outline of the book.

Why atmospheres? In this book, we argue that atmosphere is a quality of specific configurations of sensation, temporality, movement, memory, our material and immaterial surroundings and other people, with qualities that affect how places and events feel and what they mean to people who participate in them. This shifts our focus towards the importance of the specific conditions in which atmospheres emerge and the meanings that people ascribe to them – and crucially that these meanings might then move forward with people, continuing to shape their understandings of their experiences. As we will show, this means treating atmosphere as a coming together of ­different and subjective ways of understanding a site or event, based on different memories, expectations or foreknowledge, sensory or bodily capacities, cultural understanding and familiarity and the immediate contingencies of the experience, ‘felt from inside, within, and not in analytical distance’ (Pink et al 2015: 353). Here, ‘atmosphere is not simply an outcome of those things that make it; it is also a participant in the ways that the world it is part of is made’ (Pink et al 2015: 354). This highlights the value of empirically grounded investigations that attend to ‘how atmospheres are made and sensed by people in mundane everyday moments, and how they are generative of sensory, affective and empathetic forms of engagement’ (Pink et al 2015: 350). Accordingly, we build on accounts of atmosphere that locate it in the mixture of our surroundings and our activities. We treat it as an emergent aspect of our lives, manifest as we dwell in or move through our surroundings, instead of something that clings to particular places or structures, waiting to somehow be completed by our presence or activities. As we have said, we argue that it is now time to move on from these overarching accounts and instead build a methodologically grounded set of concepts that attend to ­atmosphere as a part of the range of mundane and extraordinary settings that we all encounter and comprise daily. Instead of questioning the presence of atmospheres, what intensities they entail or the fact of their eruption or dissipation – in short, what they are – in this book we are oriented towards their location, temporality, contingency and emergence in a range of empirical settings and the different ways in which they are perceived, understood and made sense of – in other words, what they mean and what they might make possible. This is also a part of what we mean by the politics of atmospheres, which we discuss in Chapter 7 – not only

Atmospheres and the experiential world  7 that the conditions under which they occur are shot through with power relationships in which their different elements and participants are differentially privileged, but also the ways in which they echo into the future as they form part of what our experiences mean to us. Indeed, Angharad Closs Stephens (2015a) focuses on ‘urban atmospherics’ as potentially offering a way to ‘imagine a different way of being in the world as well as another kind of future’ or as a different way of thinking politically about the city: ‘the provocation of an atmosphere presents a different image of political space: diffuse and nebulous, it forms a constantly morphing ­structure, with points of intensity and heightened charge rather than something ­h ierarchical and static that coalesces around a central point’ (2015a: 100). She starts to open up what atmosphere might make possible to see differently by attending to its ‘varying tonalities and intensities of power, as well as its messy ­dynamics’ (Ibid). Bissell (2010) similarly describes atmosphere as akin to ‘propensity,’ and we argue that this characteristic subtly privileges certain ways of doing things. For example, when embedded in habit or routine, familiarly felt experiences such as commuting (Bissell 2010) or ritual events (­ Sumartojo 2016) may be buttressed by anticipation that predicts and then helps to sustain familiar atmospheres. However, when these are ruptured – when a train is late or delayed, for example – atmosphere shifts, is disturbed and becomes more unusual or remarkable, foregrounding what the normal expectations are even as they are transgressed. In this way atmosphere can carry a sort of inertia, even when disrupted, what Philippopoulos-­Mihalopoulos (2016: 158) calls an ‘engineered atmosphere,’ with affects that are ­‘regularly manipulated or at least smoothed in an institutionalised direction.’ In this sense, atmosphere can also be used to do particular things, such as circulate ‘appropriate’ ways of feeling about a nationwide event such as the Olympic Games (Closs Stephens 2016) or enact forms of surveillance or security: atmosphere/ambiance…is being drawn upon as a resource for the ­conduct of security practices; a becoming highly attuned to the particularities of place and behaviour – as opposed to simply individuals – and the ‘sense’ of something suspicious emerging. Adey et al (2013: 302) In these examples, atmosphere is operationalised to enhance public attunement to something being ‘wrong,’ although the precise terms of this remain vague and elusive. This fine-tunes why we think atmosphere is important to understand – because it does certain types of work to define what feels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ that, while indeterminate, is powerful. This can happen at many different scales, but what these examples all share, as this book shows, is atmosphere’s importance is related to how people understand and value the worlds that they are a part of.

8  Atmospheres and the experiential world

Atmospheres and experience The key to making sense of atmosphere, as we have implied above, is to orient ourselves in the experiential world – in our own and in those of others. This is where atmosphere is configured, and where its meanings are made, have impact and are acted upon. One way to consider how to understand our experiences of atmosphere is by bringing together the sensory and affective dimensions of our experience. These two categories cannot of course be separated out from each other in any absolute way. However, in researching atmospheres we might consider how they are experienced in particular ways and how we as researchers might attend to them both within our own experiences and in those of others. Neither of these are simple categories, however; sensory experience refers to something that both social sciences and brain scientists still struggle to fully grasp, and affective experience is a means of seeking to define and refer to human feelings that are extremely difficult to circumscribe. Sensory experience is often written about in terms of perception, and in anthropology, there is a significant trajectory of debate and scholarship in this field. Much of the debate has centred around how the sensory tends to direct us towards the (problematic) five-sense sensorium and its separating out of the senses, and this enables us to engage directly with critical debates about the senses in the social sciences and neurosciences. These debates have increasingly emphasised the multisensory nature of human experience, which stands not for the bringing together of the culturally constructed five senses, but rather for the idea that sensory experience cannot actually be separated out in such a way in the first place (see Pink 2015 for a discussion of this). Sensory experience and atmosphere are similarly complex concepts in the sense that they are concerned with feelings that may not necessarily fit well to representational forms or divide easily into clear units for analysis. Likewise, affective experience, as discussed by geographers and others, is not easy to pin down, and is, as we will discuss in Chapter 2, very often associated with atmosphere. Architect Peter Zumthor (2006: 13) argues for atmosphere as an affective category of experience that we perceive ‘through our emotional sensibility – a form of perception that works incredibly quickly.’ Attunement to our surroundings here is manifest as we encounter affective intensities that course through our bodies, by way of how we feel, what we perceive and sense, what we may remember and what we imagine might happen; as such, atmosphere emerges and exists in the combinations of people with spaces and their range of representational and more-than-­ representational qualities (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015). Nevertheless, our own and others’ research has shown that people do commonly refer to atmosphere in sensory terms as much as they do emotional, historical or anticipatory ones. The notion of a chill running down our spines or the hairs standing up on the back of our necks are expressions of sensory experiences that stand in for emotional reactions and cognitive understandings.

Atmospheres and the experiential world  9 Atmosphere is described as all these things mixed together, with little concern for separating out bodily, emotional and intellectual responses or engagements with one’s surroundings, as all these aspects entangle. The emphasis on the affective dimensions of atmosphere is important, however, because by connecting this to the focus on perception through attention to the sensory elements of the experience of atmosphere, a new and significant dimension is accounted for. This is that our experience of atmosphere is indeed emotional and embodied, but it also has something to do with the ways that our minds and bodies are shaped incrementally over time. Accounting for this enables us to gain new understandings of how the way we ‘feel’ atmospheres is inextricable from, and indeed shapes and is shaped by, our status as organisms that are part of the environments in which atmospheres emerge (Ingold 2000). From another perspective, past experiences are also crucial in constituting the feel of places or events for people with whom we might undertake research. For example, memories of previous attendance at a particular event have been shown to be key in subsequent perceptions and understandings of those events (Edensor 2012, Sumartojo 2016), because they form a set of expectations for the future. In this sense, we might anticipate a gathering of a particular group of friends, or attendance at a ceremony or festival to cleave to previous encounters with those people or places. Tim Edensor and Steve Millington’s work on the festive illuminations in the British seaside town of Blackpool show that people frequently attend the annual installations repeatedly, sometimes even recalling it from their childhoods. This builds up both a sense of anticipation and a way of understanding the experience of the event, even when it inevitably varies from year to year. Indeed, Edensor (2012: 1114) insists that ‘atmospheric attunement… is frequently anticipated attunement,’ as people compare the atmosphere of one year to what they have felt before and what they expect will happen next. But memory can also work in unanticipated ways to constitute atmosphere. Muzaini’s (2015: 105) work on ‘memory returns’ shows how powerful stories about memories of specific places associated with the Second World War – memories which may have been purposefully suppressed – emerged as the researcher visited those places with research participants, as ‘encounters with the material [world] too can act as a trigger, reminding individuals of what they wish to render forgotten.’ As they erupted into the present, these memories occurred as a result of specific material encounters and inscribed themselves onto how these spaces felt in the present. Although Muzaini does not conceptualise this specifically in terms of atmosphere, his work shows how configurations of people, places, things and memories intersect and give rise to ways of feeling that draw people in, and can be shared with others, even in the context of the research encounter. The market-based research that opened this book – which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 4 – also revealed how memories of the past were sedimented into atmospheres experienced in the present. This occurred through  routines  built up over

10  Atmospheres and the experiential world time, recollections of people or previous events that had come to shade particular environments, or a sense of tradition, of things that ‘have always been done this way,’ that contributed to how people understood places. While our memories and imaginations work to contribute to atmosphere as it emerges, they also work to take it forward in time (we discuss atmospheres and futurity in more length in Chapter 7). As researchers, we enter the field or extend a line of inquiry in the context of what we already know (or think we know) and what we expect or hope to know about a particular research question. When considered in relation to atmosphere, this might refer to what we can draw from our own similar past experiences, what we have been told by others or what we can imagine. However, these ways of remembering, already knowing and anticipating need not only be things that we have consciously thought about but might also include sensory and embodied forms of imagining what particular future scenarios and atmospheres could feel like. In this sense, and foreshadowing our discussion in Chapter 3 concerning the incremental and processual nature of knowing in research, these ways of knowing about atmospheres circulate around the question of how we are able to engage with the resources of our own and others’ prior experience in order to prepare ourselves to know a new atmosphere. The foreknowledge that we can create in this way is an important element of doing research, since it informs our research designs and enables us to ‘fill in the gaps’ between a new question and previous experience. It is, however, also something we should treat with care. The foreknowledge that we assume we have should also always be something that we are prepared to critique or move away from; that is, we should always feel open to having our assumptions challenged. As we discuss in Chapter 6, this anticipatory way of knowing that forms part of this stage of research is not only part of the way that we imagine the atmospheres that form part of research environments. It is also part of the process of designing the elements that configure into atmospheres, and therefore is important to interrogate reflexively for both researchers and designers alike.

Analytical orientations How, then, might we come to know, or as we propose, to think atmospherically? In this book, we propose three distinct but interrelated frames to help in this endeavour, and in this section we lay these out and begin to explain how they might be used. In Chapters 4–6, we demonstrate how we have used these different orientations in our own collaborative research, but in the following we introduce them as ideas that bind together the conceptual and empirical material in this book. It is important to state, however, that we neither imagine nor adopt these approaches as separable from each other, because they all inform each other, and at any moment in a research project we might adopt a different stance. As our examples will show, each orientation can reveal different insights about how we and others experience

Atmospheres and the experiential world  11 our worlds and the impact that these experiences can have, but importantly these all work together and are mutually reinforcing. Knowing in atmospheres concerns how researchers and participants in projects live in, and as part of, atmospheres. This orientation leads us to ask: how we experience and know in atmospheres; the extent to which we might learn about others’ experiences and ways of knowing in atmospheres; how we might imagine in atmospheres; and the techniques we might engage to use our own sensibilities and to collaborate with others to produce such ways of knowing. This is the often unspoken, non-representational and sensory/affective dimension of our lives in atmospheres. Working from this position requires careful attunement to our own experiences and those of others and demands methodological approaches that respect this. Reflexivity and collectivity, which we consider in detail in Chapter 3, are important aspects of researching in atmospheres, and methods that seek to enter research participants’ worlds and go along with them in these worlds are also crucial. Here we must also work in a way that is emergent and processual, and that does not seek to define or presuppose particular outcomes. Instead, we must build our knowledge step by step as we come to make sense of how other people experience the world, how these experiences come to have meaning and what these meanings are. This includes ourselves as autoethnographic researchers who have our own memories, imaginations and ways of perceiving the world that we inevitably draw on in research settings, as we said previously. Knowing about atmospheres refers to the ways that as researchers we seek to define and describe atmospheres retrospectively. While recognising the impossibility of perfectly capturing them, it grapples with the modes of representation that we might develop to be able to discuss them both within the research process for ourselves and to communicate something of them to others. These might be collaborative modes of working with participants and in relation to imagined readers or viewers of our work. Here, we seek to describe an atmosphere based on what has to configure for it to be apprehensible, which can help us link to how it might be subject to design ­processes or be asked to do particular kinds of work. Although this orientation might somewhat artificially fix an atmosphere in a particular space-time, doing so makes it available as a conceptual resource for thinking through atmosphere, as we discuss next. Thinking about atmospheres relies on ourselves and others to be able to show, demonstrate or describe something after it has happened, which points to methods of making research materials, such as audio or video recordings, photographs, drawings or notes, that can be worked with subsequently to draw out new insights. This process of working with these materials after the moment of their creation might happen with our research participants, on our own or in collaboration with other researchers, but in moving beyond the moment of atmosphere’s emergence, it can enable us to reflect on

12  Atmospheres and the experiential world elements that may not have been at the forefront at the time. Accordingly, the process of working with these materials can also engender new insights on the part of participants that only occurred to them subsequently, and help us understand better what meanings atmospheres carry. Knowing through atmospheres is our third analytical orientation. This reminds us that atmosphere is not a ‘thing’ or entity out there in a research context to be encountered, but that rather it is, as outlined in Chapter 2, a concept. As a concept, atmosphere enables us to acknowledge and pull together the configurations of things and processes that we are seeking to research and to understand, and in doing so to use it as a form of technology or device through which to investigate, comprehend and potentially intervene in the world. Here we are able to connect to other concepts and to discern some of what atmosphere might be doing or might make possible. Thinking through atmosphere connects us conceptually to other aspects of experience as well as understandings of those experiences, and helps us to see how the empirical configurations that we have entered in and come to know something about might have impact in people’s lives. This will be evident in the examples in the case study chapters to come. It follows that thinking through atmospheres demands a process of analytical reflection and the creation of new conceptual links amongst things that might not at first glance seem obviously related. It also requires that we move across different scales, considering meaning from the individual and micro-level of the body and its sensations, for example, to the largest scale of national or global collectivity. Indeed, atmosphere’s comprehensibility at and across these different scales makes it a fruitful concept to think through.

Outline of the book This book is organised around a series of case studies of research we have undertaken together or with others that use thinking in, about and through atmospheres to reach new insights about how we experience, understand and ascribe meaning to the world. This is bracketed by chapters that lay out the treatment of atmosphere in the fields of human geography, anthropology, design and architecture. This body of existing scholarship is the focus of Chapter 2, where we situate our own arguments in this work and explain how we move forward from it. In particular, we lay the groundwork for many of the concepts that course through and tangle together in existing work on atmospheres, namely spatiality, temporality and movement. In Chapter 3, we build on and link our conceptual positioning to a research approach based chiefly in ethnography. In doing so, we flesh out our proposition that atmospheres must be understood as ongoingly emergent from the experiential configurations that people encounter and co-­constitute in their worlds. We do so by sketching out guiding principles for approaching atmospheres empirically and link this to the three orientations of thinking in, about and through atmospheres that we introduced above. Here we also

Atmospheres and the experiential world  13 stake a claim to a design anthropological approach to atmospheres, and discuss some of the particular ethical issues that can arise when researching atmospheres. The grounding in the existing literature in ­Chapter 2 and the methodological propositions in Chapter 3 set up the empirical case studies in Chapter 4 on space-times and Chapter 5 on movement. This is not to say that space, time and movement can be somehow separated out, but for this book’s structure, it is useful to present the examples of our work in terms that allow a conceptual entry to it for others who may wish to draw on it in their own work; in this sense, the way we have structured this book is intended to make our examples accessible rather than to simplify them. Accordingly in Chapter 4, we show how we have used atmosphere as a concept to attend to what configures to contribute to how our surroundings feel, and what some of the temporalities, materialities and sensorial components of this are. Our focus on movement reinforces this point in Chapter 5, and here we show how atmospheres are both a condition of movement and condition our experiences of them. Here, atmosphere is not so much a noun, but an intransitive verb, made and experienced through activity: moving through on foot, bikes, and/or in cars, trams and trains, the appearance of motion of other people and things, and active noticing and reflection as part of the research task. Through these examples we also explain the conceptual understandings that thinking atmospherically helped us reach in each research context, as well as the methods we deployed to create and analyse research materials alongside participants in our projects. In Chapter 6 we adopt a more interventional perspective, but also one that speaks to the persistent focus on atmospheres in design and architecture scholarship. Here we consider how as researchers and designers we might come to know atmospheres by intervening in or shaping aspects of the elements that configure to give rise to them. Or, put differently, how ‘designing’ atmospheres, something that many have sought to do, should instead be thought of as a process for attending to what already exists and how the affordances of these elements might be augmented, ameliorated or transformed through design processes. In doing so, we also focus on the productive potential of collaborations between social science researchers and designers when we research and think atmospherically. We close the book with Chapter 7, which works less as a conclusion than as a set of reflections on the implications of atmospheres to make change. We consider this along two lines: power/politics and possibilities for intervening in the future. Here we consider how atmospheres might not just be something that are passively apprehended, but actively shape how we understand our worlds, because they carry implications for what feels ‘right’ (or ‘wrong’), with the capacity to shape our ongoing ways of understanding the world. Connecting to our arguments about design in Chapter 6, we explore the relationship between atmospheres and futurity, arguing that, because they make things comprehensible or imaginable in certain ways, they shape our worlds into the future.

14  Atmospheres and the experiential world

Note 1 Our report for the City of Melbourne on the atmosphere of the Queen Victoria Market is available on www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/building-and-development/ urban-planning/local-area-planning/queen-victoria-market-precinct-­renewalplan/history-heritage/pages/ethnographic-research-project.aspx.

References Adey, P, Brayer, L, Masson, D, Murphy, P, Simpson, P and Tixier, N (2013) ‘Pour votre tranquillité’: Ambiance, atmosphere, and surveillance. Geoforum 49: 299–309. Bissell, D (2010) Passenger mobilities: Affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 270–289. Closs Stephens, A (2015) Urban atmospheres: Feeling like a city? International ­Political Sociology 9(1): 99–101. Closs Stephens, A (2016) The affective atmospheres of nationalism. Cultural ­G eographies 23(2): 181–198. Edensor, T (2012) Illuminated atmospheres: Anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30: 1103–1122. Edensor, T and Sumartojo, S (2015) Designing atmospheres: Introduction. Visual Communication 14(3): 251–265. Muzaini, H (2015) On the matter of forgetting and ‘memory returns’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40: 102–112. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A (2016) Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(1): 150–167. Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K and Morosanu, R (2015) Researching in atmospheres: Video and the “feel” of the mundane. Visual Communication 14(3): 351–369. Royall, I (2018) It’s just the ‘vibe’: Sight, smell key to market appeal. Herald Sun 12 February, p. 9. Sumartojo, S (2016) Commemorative atmospheres: Memorial sites, collective events and the experience of national identity. Transactions of the Institute of British ­G eographers 41(4): 541–553. Zumthor, P (2006) Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser.

2 Situating atmospheres

Atmospheres are enduringly present, continually changing and inevitably part of the everyday and more extraordinary events, journeys and experiences of our lives. Yet they are difficult to grasp and hold onto, making it a challenge to describe, research and analyse them. This has meant that in much existing research, atmospheres are either only discussed theoretically or discussed as given elements of our experience but only partially theorised. This gulf between the theoretical and experiential elements of atmospheres makes them difficult to research, and demands methodological innovations to accompany conceptual ones. In this chapter we outline a way forward. Our approach to atmospheres situates the concept both theoretically and empirically and suggests that atmospheres can be understood as the ongoing sensory and affective engagement with our lives and their impressions, sensations and feelings and the environments through and as part of which they play out. They also draw in how we understand our experiences in light of what we remember from the past and what we imagine and anticipate for the future. In this chapter we first critically review existing approaches to atmosphere in the social sciences and humanities, in order to establish how concepts of atmosphere have developed, how they have been mobilised in research theoretically and empirically, other key concepts with which they intersect and what their implications are for understanding the experiential, everyday, and political contexts in which we live. We then build on this in two ways. First, we bring together a processual concept of atmosphere as developed in human geography with the ethnographic-theoretical dialogues that are part of a design anthropological approach to uncertainty and emergence. In doing so we emphasise the importance of creating a dialogue between theoretical scholarship and ethnographic knowing, through which atmosphere as both a conceptual container and as an experiential way of making sense of the world can inform our understandings of the affects, politics and implications of atmosphere. We also provide a precursor to our discussion of atmosphere and design practice in Chapter 6. We do this by outlining how, acknowledging the emergent qualities of atmosphere as cohering with the idea of design as possibility rather than designing for solutions, we might

16  Situating atmospheres re-mobilise atmosphere beyond a theoretical concept into a category for design practice and intervention, taking it beyond how it is usually understood or theoretically deployed.

What is atmosphere? Atmosphere is a difficult concept to work with theoretically and empirically because it already has a rich set of personal, societal and culturally specific connotations. This means that there is always a danger of slippage between theoretical and conceptual renderings of atmospheres and local, cultural or personally subjective ways of thinking about and knowing them. Therefore, the first step in understanding atmospheres should always be to determine what we mean when we talk about an atmosphere theoretically and conceptually and how this might differ from localised uses of the term outside the academic context. As the description of the Melbourne market study that opened this book shows, people reach for the label of atmosphere to express not only their experiences, but also how these experiences feel sensorially and how they feel about them. This has been partly because atmosphere refers to something that is not necessarily experienced or easy to represent in ways that are conventional to academic scholarship, thus making it difficult to pin down. For instance, ­A nderson and Ash (2015: 38) ask ‘how is it possible to name an atmosphere, if naming is generally considered to be a representational act that fixes and therefore reduces a phenomenon?’ whilst also insisting on the necessity of naming as a means by which ‘atmospheres are rendered present’ (2015:  48). ­Atmosphere simultaneously works as both a way of representing and perceiving the world, with meanings that can be easily taken for granted as shared, even when these are lodged or emerge from the experiences of other people. This creates a challenge in terms locating atmospheres, both conceptually and empirically, with answers to this affecting how we theorise and research them. Much of the social science scholarship on atmospheres has occurred in human geography and anthropology, where a common starting point has been architectural theorist Gernot Böhme’s framework of atmospheres as imbricated with things and people, where atmosphere ‘is the reality of the perceived as the sphere of its presence and the reality of the perceiver, ­insofar as in sensing the atmosphere s/he is bodily present in a certain way’ (1993: 122). This places our sensing bodies within the environments in which we dwell and move, locating atmosphere in our sensory perceptions even as it relies on our surroundings to take on its particular character. Böhme also proposes that atmospheres have aesthetic qualities that ‘unify a diversity of impressions in a single emotive state’ (2013: 2). The problem with this, however, is that it describes atmosphere in a way that suggests it has a sort of uniformity or a discernible shape that draws things together into a holistic experience. It suggests one could be either in or out of an identifiable

Situating atmospheres  17 atmosphere, fixing its particular configuration in time and place, when, as we argue throughout the book, the experience of it happens ongoingly and in emergence. Other early work located atmosphere within the affective realm, rendering it ‘a kind of indeterminate affective “excess” through which intensive space-times can be created’ (Anderson 2009: 80). This approach was concerned less with the sensory ways in which we engage with our worlds as with ‘prepersonal or transpersonal dimensions of affective life and everyday existence’ (Anderson 2009: 77). Critical responses argued that this focus on affect ‘runs the risk of understanding atmospheres by proxy, translating them into another concept whereby they lose their material grounding’ (Bille et al 2015: 35). Stewart (2011: 445) focuses precisely on this material grounding when she writes of ‘atmospheric attunements’ that are ‘palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial’. As the examples in this book show, the material configurations of atmospheres are a key part of how they are constituted and made sense of. This is not to propose, however, that affect is not a key element of atmospheres, and indeed conceptualising affect as distributed amongst different configurations of people, objects, human and non-human bodies, environments and technologies can help us understand how these elements are enrolled into ‘affective fields’ that make possible ‘temporary configurations of energy and feeling’ (Conradson and Latham 2007: 238). Nevertheless, we agree with accounts (Edensor and ­Sumartojo 2015, Bille et al 2015) that challenge the conflation of affect with atmosphere, and that argue that ‘atmospheres are multiply composed out of phenomenological and sensual elements, and the social and cultural contexts in which they are consumed, interpreted and engaged with emotionally as well as affectively,’ and that if we focus solely on its affect aspects, we risk suggesting ‘that an atmosphere pre-exists the presence of those who are suddenly subsumed within its affective field’ (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015). Indeed, the notion of ‘affective atmospheres’ implies that space ‘precedes any individual body or subjectivity, and [is a realm] in which cognition, interpretation and motivation are rather minor processes’ (Rose et al 2010: 338–339). This misses how affect is created in social and cultural conditions that make particular affects more (or less) possible (Highmore 2017) and does not recognise how affective experience is ‘a cumulative, and therefore historical, process of interaction between human beings and place’ (Kobayashi et al 2011: 873). Indeed, Wetherell (2012: 22) similarly argues that ways of thinking about affect are not progressed ‘by dividing representation from the non-representational, marking out the former as the province of consciousness and deliberation, and the latter as the province of the unconscious and the unconsidered.’ More expansive concepts provide a better starting point for our arguments about atmosphere as emergent in ongoing experiential configurations, such as the proposal that ‘in essence it

18  Situating atmospheres [atmosphere] must be understood as a spatial experience of being attuned in and by a material world’ (Bille et al 2015: 35), which recognises the importance of sensory perception, or Edensor’s suggestion that ‘atmosphere folds together affect, emotion and sensation in space’ (2015: 83). If a decoupling of atmosphere and affect as contiguous is one critical move we concur with, another is a shift in emphasis away from the notion that atmospheres are necessarily ‘intensive’ (Anderson 2009: 80), or involving the production of intensities (Bille et al 2015). Edensor has proposed that ‘The capacity of atmospheres to affect bodies and emotions varies in intensity,’ inviting us to ‘consider the calm atmosphere produced through meditation, the animated atmosphere of a market or rock concert, or the sombre atmosphere of a gothic church’ (2012: 1106). We agree that atmosphere can be usefully understood as mundane and somehow always present, should we attune to it, a stance that tempers the emphasis on intensity and shifts the question away from whether atmosphere is present or at what level of intensity it might be able to be experienced (something that is difficult to measure or compare in any case). Instead, in order to understand what atmosphere means to people, and what work it might do, we must attend to ‘the specificities of particular atmospheres that are generated in the context of actual research sites, and the everyday contingencies in relation to which they shift and change, as well as the different ways in which they might be perceived’ (Pink et al 2015), and consider the conditions in which we tune in to atmospheres. Bille et al (2015: 37) posit that atmosphere is ‘the very sensuous interface of people, places and things; as a vague yet anything but weak phenomenon that is staged, culturally informed, and manipulated to achieve social, political, and economic goals by tapping into people’s emotions and affects.’ This begins to get at a thread we will trace throughout the book, which concerns the political implications of atmospheres, and what knowing through them allows us to understand in new ways. This vagueness of atmosphere (see also Griffero 2014) indicates its indeterminacy, a quality beyond representation that makes it difficult to pinpoint. For us, this means that treating it as an emergent outcome of our tangible worlds made up of ‘people, places and things’ is productive in understanding it and what it might make possible. ­Existing theories of atmosphere do not seek to resolve atmosphere’s vagueness, which we believe is an advantage because this indeterminacy leaves open ways of conceptualising it as emergent, ongoing and not able to be fully known. Yet we do not want to suggest that atmosphere is simply an outcome or a product of the things that configure in particular ways to give rise to it. As Ingold (2011: 95) reminds us: We are these days increasingly bombarded with information about what is known as ‘the environment’ … that we are, I think, inclined to forget that the environment is, in the first place, a world we live in, and not a world we look at. We inhabit our environment: we are part of it; and through this practice of habitation it becomes part of us too.

Situating atmospheres  19 As we will develop in Chapter 3, this had led us to a framework for understanding atmosphere as something that we can know in, about and through, and as Ingold’s work reminds us, seeing atmosphere as part of the environments we inhabit means we live and make meaning about our world in ­atmospheres, even when these are mundane or slip in and out of notice, as we have pointed out above. If atmospheres are conceptualised as already part of the world that we inhabit, there is no question of if there is atmosphere. Instead, what is important is how we can identify empirically the configurations that constitute particular atmospheres; how we can know their ­qualities, affordances, and effects on us and our understandings and experiences of our lives and environments; and what particular ­atmospheric configurations make possible. As Schroer and Schmitt (2018) insist, one ­implication of this is investigating atmospheres ethnographically, an approach that we endorse. As we detail further in Chapter 3, knowing in, about and through atmospheres can provide a useful set of orientations to chart a path through some of this conceptual and empirical complexity. Having identified some of the conceptual framework in which this book is situated, in the next section we unpack categories of the empirical terms through which atmospheres are often framed and where existing scholarship provides a useful starting point. These are spatiality, temporality and mobility, all of which concern how things configure, and are therefore ideal concepts to use to understand not only how people experience atmospheres, but also what meanings they carry and what they make possible in their emergence. We continue to trace these themes in Chapters 4 and 5 with indepth case studies showing how they have been central to our own research on atmosphere. These also foreshadow the discussion in Chapters 6 and 7 about design, intervention, politics and futurity. Atmosphere and spatiality A common entry point for scholars of atmosphere is the specific spatial configurations in which it might arise. Architectural theory is particularly rich here, treating atmosphere as a quality directly linked to how the built environment is imagined, designed and experienced. Indeed, it is easy to understand built spaces in terms of how they feel – from sites of worship to cosy bedrooms to imposing courtrooms – because their explicit design intent, and the way they are imagined by their designers, is often aimed at communicating or engendering a sense of power, safety or solemnity, for example, through their symbolism or ways of engaging us bodily. The soaring interiors of a cathedral, for example, give visitors an altered spatial sense and draw the gaze upwards; the intricate tracery and ornate decoration demonstrate the dedicated time of craftspeople and the wealth necessary to buy it; and the dazzling stained-glass windows illustrate aspirational narratives in the stories of saints or martyrs. This combination of the bodily postures that visitors are compelled to adopt, the evident labour and wealth

20  Situating atmospheres embedded in the materials and craftsmanship, and the graphically rendered symbolic narrative can work to hush and awe us as we enter these spaces, even if we are not religious. In a discussion of architecture, I­ ngold foregrounds its sensory qualities, rather than its material articulation: a building is in the first place its atmosphere, to which solid and immoveable elements add a structure of support…a building is as much a thing of air, light, sound and mood as it is a construction wrought from solidary elements. (Ingold 2016: 163) This unmoors architecture from the material world, focusing on its sensory and atmospheric qualities, likening it to a blur, cloud or fog. Here, ­atmosphere demonstrates its immersive quality, as it surrounds and seeps into us, working to ‘bathe everything in a certain light’ (Böhme 2013: 2). It is ‘a quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies whilst also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’ (McCormack 2008: 413). This recalls architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2014: 232) description of atmosphere as ‘an exchange between material or existent properties of the place and the immaterial realm of human perception and imagination.’ Sites like a cathedral – obviously designed to create particular responses or impressions in people – are described as ‘atmospheric,’ even though this is a form of shorthand for other, more specific feelings related to spatiality, such as awestruck, impressed or overwhelmed. Indeed, what people mean by ‘atmospheric’ is often a complex combination of very specific sensations, memories and symbolic environments. The ways that particular designed environments feel, however, cannot necessarily be precisely imagined by architects. Atmosphere design, and the subsequent experience of this design, is more complex for a number of ­reasons. In other literature connecting atmosphere to architecture, atmosphere is treated as given, and its meaning is also connected to narratives emerging from literature and history: ‘Urban atmosphere is both simply there, and it is made’ (Kulper and Periton 2015: 121). Following this argument, the atmosphere of cities is constituted not so much through their everyday use and mundane ordinariness but from the grand narratives with which they get caught up and from intellectual and public discourses: ­‘Cities and the narratives of the urban imaginary are co-constitutive – these narratives generate and are generated by their settings, which they help to conceive, to propagate and sometimes to dismantle’ (Kulper and Periton 2015: 121). ­Nevertheless as we show in our discussion of urban noise transformation and atmosphere in Chapter 4, urban environments are experientially constituted by many very mundane elements that shape what it feels like to be in a city, and in the specific localities from which they are comprised. What these approaches share is an orientation towards where atmosphere is located or anchored. Together they show how atmospheres are part of our

Situating atmospheres  21 perceptual worlds and defined, to some extent, through the imaginaries of public discourse. However, while atmospheres, and how they are experienced and thought of, are doubtlessly sometimes inflected with these elements, this view can risk treating atmosphere as coherent, uniform and irresistible, as we discuss above, even if its boundaries can be hard to discern. Although authors such as Zumthor (2006) and Griffero (2014) describe atmosphere in terms of specific material or immaterial elements – the wafting clouds of cigarette smoke in a student canteen, or richly textured wooden cladding in shadowy twilight – it is almost treated as an implicit quality of the fixed configuration of these aspects, taken up in experience but rooted in specific locations and furthermore not subject to differential apprehension by different people. The authorial voices that pronounce atmospheres to be as such therefore overshadow the experiential realities through which atmospheres belong to everyone and are in fact constituted in multiple and contiguous ways at the overlaps between different perceptual worlds and ways of feeling and knowing. Examples of this lie in the attempt to create ‘atmospheric’ spaces that feel particular ways, a practice as long-standing as architecture itself, with designers often thinking about such spaces by pondering the effect they want the building to have on the people who use or encounter it, and then crafting space – using materials, light and shadow, air circulation, colour, volume and other sensory aspects – to their desired ends. For instance, Peter Zumthor (2006) celebrates the atmospheric qualities of particular materials and the sensory experiences they make possible in combination with light, movement of water or wind and the presence or absence of other bodies. Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 82) explains that: Architectural space is not a mere lifeless frame for our activities, as it guides, choreographs and stimulates our actions, interests and moods. Even more importantly, it gives our experiences of being specific ­contents and meanings. Every space, place and situation is tuned in a special way, and they project specific atmospheres. Here buildings play a decisive role in our experience of the world, ‘tuned’ to affect us in particular ways, imagined by the designer from the beginning. According to Pallasmaa (2014: 82), this process of imagining is an empathic one, in which the architect must mentally encounter their creation in a way that allows it to become ‘part of the person’s existential experience and sense of self, as in the real encounter with material reality…the empathic imagination evokes human embodied and emotive experiences, judgements and moods.’ He continues to argue that ‘a talented designer is…capable of entering an imaginary room in his or her imagination and sensing the ­atmosphere and tuned-ness of the space’ (ibid: 84). One problem with this argument, however, is that it appears to situate the atmosphere outside the designer, even though the designer themselves is

22  Situating atmospheres imaginatively immersed in it. Atmosphere is here abstracted, disassociated from the messy, embodied and contingent experience of actually being in a building, and indeed, of designing one. It places atmosphere at the centre of inquiry and in doing so cannot sufficiently account for all the other thoughts, feelings and sensations that are part of how we understand the world, all the time. This pulls against the argument we have begun to sketch out: most existing accounts of atmosphere have not sufficiently accounted for its emergence in actual configurations of people’s ongoing worlds, and that atmospheres cannot be divorced from the specific feelings that are part of them. Indeed as we discuss further in Chapter 6, the atmosphere of the designer’s imagination might not be that of the experience of the users of the space. Obviously, the ‘empathic imagination’ of any one of us has its limits, and buildings – especially public ones – are likely to be encountered by people of whom we have no knowledge, and with whom we potentially have nothing in common. In using the empathic imagination to tune spaces that will ‘choreograph’ or ‘animate’ its users in particular ways, the designer inevitably introduces something of themselves, shaping the building towards some articulations and away from others. Thus, the politics of atmospheres – or put differently, what they make possible and what they might preclude – are ­i mplicit in the attempts of designers to make or stage them spatially. ­Rancière (2004: 13) describes politics in terms of aesthetics, ‘a delimination of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience.’ In this sense, the atmospheres that we might experience in particular buildings or places has already been at least partially shaped by the imagination of their designers, even if we might take these up or constitute them in a variety of ways. This is a question of politics because it makes some things more readily possible than others or helps smooth the way for some experiences preferentially. It also assumes things about the participant; as Ahmed (2010) reminds us, we might have a completely different impression of an encounter than any other person in that encounter. We discuss the political implications of atmospheres further in Chapter 7. Atmosphere and temporality Thinking about atmosphere as a changing configuration means that we must also think about temporality. Work that attends to how particular events and everyday processes and routines feel locates atmosphere through duration as well as spatially. For example, Ingold (2016: 175) identifies ‘buildings not as architectural creations in themselves, but as the instruments of creation, machines for the ongoing and never-ending formation of the dwelt-in world.’ Existing research demonstrates this across a range of spatialities, ­including public spaces, public events, neighbourhoods and homes (e.g. Pink et al 2015).

Situating atmospheres  23 The atmospheres of events have long attracted the attention of researchers in human geography and anthropology. For instance, in the 1980s the anthropologist Garry Marvin (1988) wrote about how the Spanish concept of ambiente was used to describe the performance of the bullfight, (see also Pink 1997, Pink et al 2011). In Spanish, used as such, ambiente referred not just to any atmosphere, but rather to a culturally specific atmosphere with particular qualities that were generated in situ and had relevance for the aesthetic and moral judgements that people made about the event. Because the bullfight is a controversial performance, its atmosphere would moreover be specifically situated within a wider complex of beliefs, moralities and sensory and affective feeling about the event. The example of the bullfight demonstrates how a locally specific concept of atmosphere can be encountered and can be seen to correspond to a wider theoretical concept. It provides an example of how the concept of atmosphere can be used to interpret local meanings and forms of experience. Similarly, the concept of atmosphere has been used more recently to interpret other culturally specific phenomena. For example, geographer Tim Edensor’s (2015) work on the atmosphere of a major football game describes the affective intensities of a 90-minute match that saw a long-awaited win for one club and promotion to a higher league – although this outcome was obviously not known to the crowd at the match on the day. Edensor details the surges of emotion around goals being scored, the increase in tension in the crowd as the clock ticked into the final minutes and the uncontrolled and visceral explosion of relief and delight with the final result. He accounts for atmosphere by charting the change in how it felt to attend the historic match, and the anxiety, elation and ecstasy that ebbed and flowed throughout the 90 minutes but was built on many years of the team not progressing to the next league, and that flowed into the hours and days after the match as supporters continued to celebrate the win. Edensor’s account was based on his own feelings while attending the match, his expert knowledge of the team and concomitant investment in its promotion, and his observations of the people around him as the game wore on. At the heart of both this account of the football match and Marvin’s (1988) and Pink’s (1997) discussions of the bullfight are the entanglement of the presence of the crowd, the foreknowledge of the significance of the performance or match, and the immaterial qualities of the sound of the crowd, the movement of the performers or players on the pitch or arena and the standing up and sitting down throughout the event. The constantly shifting and contingent affective experience of the event is entangled with all its other elements, and this ongoingness, according to Massumi (2015: 13), can help explain the political potential of affect and by extension atmosphere: Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that’s not necessarily about commanding movement, it’s about navigating movement. It’s about being immersed in an experience that is already underway.

24  Situating atmospheres By thinking of atmosphere in this way it is evident that it entails both a mode of experiencing the present moment, and anticipatory mode relating to what might come next and the feelings that this might involve. Thus atmosphere’s temporality is not only about duration, but also about the ways that the past and the future are folded into, perceived and understood in the present. For example, Sumartojo (2015, 2016) discusses how anticipation is part of the way that atmospheres have been constituted in commemorative events, with patterns of ritual, foreknowledge, collective experience, symbolic environments, and specific durations that work to create specific and intense atmospheres of solemnity, pride, grief and reflection. She examines the annual Dawn Service of Australia’s national day of war remembrance, Anzac Day. This 30-minute public event begins just before daybreak, and makes explicit use of the early start to the day by presenting it as small sacrifice that honours dead soldiers. It also frames it as a shared experience with Australian troops who launched a major attack on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, an event treated in the mainstream national narrative as the birth of modern Australia. She accounts for the atmosphere of the event by locating it in a very specific symbolic, material and immaterial context but also attends to the temporality of the event, identifying how the atmosphere is generated in part by the anticipation that people feel as they prepare to attend the ceremony in the preceding hours, and the ways that it is legitimised by way of a ritual linked to the past. The methodological implications for thinking about events as atmospheric in this way are that the researcher must try and approach their durations, rhythms, surges and ebbs (see also Schroer and Schmitt 2018). Both Edensor and Sumartojo base their work on their own attendance at the events they focus on, observing, photographing and video-recording as they go, and in Chapter 3 we discuss the value in researching atmosphere ethnographically in more detail. Thinking durationally also means attending to what happens before a given event and how this shapes the experience of it for people. Anticipation and preparation to join an event can be embedded in a range of temporalities. For example, Edensor (2012) describes how people who visit annual public illuminations in Blackpool bring with them memories of ­previous visits, which are entangled in recollections of the people who accompanied them – often family or friends – or the repeated visits over the years that build into family traditions. These affective echoes of fun times with others over the years inflect current visits with an anticipation of pleasure that often flows through into the activities themselves. Similarly, foreknowledge of what to expect – what favourite or new displays there might be and the best way to experience the installations – shapes how events feel. These encounters obviously do not happen as alienated from previous experiences, as affective memories imbue the present. This is similar to Ahmed’s (2010: 41) observation that ‘if we arrive at objects with an expectation of how we will be affected by them, then this affects how they affect us’. In her work on commemoration, Sumartojo (2016) similarly

Situating atmospheres  25 argues that foreknowledge of the ritual means that people are in a reflective and sombre frame of mind as they make their way to the ceremony, and that this shapes how they ­respond to it. Here, atmosphere is not simply a product of the here-and-now, but has tendrils that reach back into previous places, events and experiences for people, even as they emerge ongoingly. Another significant aspect of duration is that it might also stretch out over much longer periods than just a few minutes or hours. In an intimate account, Paris-based sociologist Sarah Gensburger (2017) documented the changes in her neighbourhood near the Bataclan nightclub in the 11th arrondissement where 130 people were murdered and hundreds injured in a terrorist attack in 2015. She describes her analysis of the changes to her neighbourhood as a ‘living memory,’ and although she does not frame this work explicitly in terms of atmosphere, it does demonstrate a powerful methodology for interrogating how places feel. This unfolds in terms of specific places’ subtle and ever-changing affective flows, her own sensory and embodied complicity in the emergence of these affects, and the importance of the other people on the scene, in this case her children, neighbours and strangers who dwell and move through her local streets, shops and squares as she does. In Gensburger’s work, the changes to the material environment – as bunches of flowers and mementos like notes or candles appear, begin to disintegrate or rot and are removed, for example – show how the feel of the streets in her neighbourhood gradually transforms with both material changes and the accretion of memories about these changes. She traces the textural details that contribute to a dynamic and complex atmosphere of anxiety, resistance, commonality and uncertainty that wash over or dissipate within her understandings of her surroundings. This fine-grain detail that might otherwise go unnoticed takes on new significance as meanings accumulate and unfold over time and progressively contributes to how her surroundings feel to her and the ways in which she attunes to them. Atmosphere and mobility The relationship between atmosphere and mobility has underpinned a significant body of research, particularly in human geography, but also more recently in design anthropology. This work has been particularly important in enabling a conceptualisation of atmosphere, as the mobilities scholar John Urry has suggested, ‘in the relationship of people and objects. It is something sensed often through movement and experienced in a tactile kind of way’ (Urry 2007: 73). However, much of the work of the mobilities paradigm has been associated with the social sciences, and Sheller and Urry (2016) have outlined this as one that seeks to change the social sciences and that ‘develops three other theories: complexity theory’s emergence into social science, socio-technical transitions theory and social practice theory’ (2016: 12). Yet as Merriman and Pearce (2017) have emphasised, there is more to the mobilities paradigm when we start to consider how it has become

26  Situating atmospheres inflected by the work of humanities, arts and design. This latter point is a significant element of the context in which we write, since the understandings of the relationship between atmosphere and movement we advance here are specifically beyond, and indeed critical of, the social science theories of complexity, the socio-technical and social practices. While such theories typically focus on societal structures, and the interactional relations between people and technologies or systems, we are specifically concerned with how mobility is entangled in and indeed constitutive of an emergent world whereby socio-technical relations can never be separated from the environments they are part of, and the ongoingness of human activity cannot be divided up into social practices. Instead, we recast the relationship between mobility and atmosphere into a theory of atmosphere as a way of understanding how we feel as we move through and make ongoing emergent environments and what these feelings might make possible into the future. This does not mean that our approach is definitively anti-­sociological, but rather that it is not compatible with theories that seek to divide up these worlds into discrete sociological units, then treat these as entities that can be redesigned. Instead, we argue that a theory of atmosphere needs to enable us to better understand how people, feelings, things and environments are ongoingly configured and constituted together as we move through the world. ­Moreover, as we will suggest and outline in more detail in Chapter 5, ­atmospheres are not necessarily only sensed through movement, but are also made as people move through the world. Thus, just as atmosphere and space need to be understood as part of the same configurations of life, so do atmospheres and movement. As we take up in the next section, if we also see movement as a form of temporality – in that movement is concerned with our trajectories through the world and through life that occur durationally – then it is possible to pull together these three concepts to understand movement through the world as integral to how atmospheres and their changing temporalities are simultaneously constituted, made and experienced. Given that these connections can be made theoretically, it is therefore not surprising that we encounter discussions of movement in much of the existing literature about atmospheres, or that we discover references to atmosphere ­ obility in research about movement. This accounts for different forms of m and movement, ranging from the global movements of migrants (Urry 2007), to moving through public space (Sumartojo et al 2016) to the everyday paths people take when commuting (Bissell 2010) or moving through their homes (Pink et al 2015). Much of Gensburger’s (2017) account outlined in the previous section takes place as she walks or runs in her neighbourhood. Like many other accounts of space and atmosphere, hers is one in which motion is implicit, yet mainly emerges within the context of the discussion of other aspects of atmosphere. Similarly, movement animates Edensor and ­Lorimer’s (2015) autoethnographic accounts in which they move through the darkness of night, or where attendees at a festival encounter illuminated displays as

Situating atmospheres  27 they move past, towards or away from them, or as the displays themselves roll past on moving carriages (Edensor 2012). Thus atmosphere is, on the one hand, both constituted by the movement of things of different qualities and affordances that, through their movement, configure together in particular ways. As the examples above suggest, this involves both people moving in their environments and things moving around or with them. On the other hand, when we put human subjectivity at the centre of the configurations through which atmosphere is experienced, then atmosphere can be seen as something that changes as we move through it, making our way through different fields in such a way that our subjective standpoints enable us to feel that we have passed from a moment in one atmosphere to a moment in another. Atmosphere is thus something that we take up in movement itself, what Spinney (2011: 162) likens to ‘those fleeting, ephemeral and often embodied and sensory aspects of movement’ that we can feel. We might move in and through atmospheres, or they might move around us, but either way we experience this as embodied change. As these examples show, movement and atmosphere both tend to make each other directly obvious in the investigations of researchers who attend to environments from the inside, thus producing a very different approach to those that assume that atmosphere can be crafted through the built environment. David Bissell’s (2010) work on train passengers helps demonstrate this latter point. In his study of the affective conditions of train carriages, mobility is often understood in terms of temporality – how long a journey takes and what happens when the expectations of duration or movement are disturbed. The regular journeys that his research participants embark on are of limited duration, which shapes the feel of the trip in particular ways: for example, as people focus on the work they want to complete before they arrive home at the end of the day. Temporality is also important because certain times of the week, such as a Friday afternoon, might see fellow passengers grow to include people going out for the evening, changing the atmosphere from one of routine commuting to one that is more relaxed as people chat, sing or laugh in the confines of the carriage. Different times of the day or week also feel different. Finally, Bissell (2010: 275–276) connects atmosphere with mobility and temporality by considering what happens when the train stops unexpectedly. Here, the affective experience of the journey, evident in the frowns and sighs of passengers, shifts to annoyance: Kinetic affects emerge as the slowing and eventual halting of the train cause a change in the disposition of passengers. The slowness of the train here becomes out of sync with the desired or expected speed of passengers, their itineraries and aspirations, which generates negative affects associated with frustration. This last example is particularly helpful in showing how the two aspects of movement and atmosphere, identified above, might take hold at the same

28  Situating atmospheres time. The feeling of moving or stopping in Bissell’s account is helpful because it enfolds temporality – and the perception and treatment of it by his research participants – as a part of what constitutes the particular and changing atmospheres of a train carriage on a given journey. While much research in human geography has focused on how atmospheres are made in public and collective events, anthropologists have instead taken a closer focus on the home as a site for the making and experience of atmosphere. For instance, Sarah Pink and Kerstin Leder Mackley’s (2016) research into how people move around their homes at night offers insights into how atmospheres of home are constituted, likewise through temporalities and routines of movement in the home. Here, Pink and Leder ­Mackley understand atmospheres as ‘emergent from processes of making,’ by which they ­ aterials mean atmospheres emerge ‘from the encounters between people, m and other elements of the environments of which they are part (e.g. air, light, warmth, scents).’ Through a discussion of how lighting, locking and switching off happen during bedtime routines, they show how particular ways of feeling sensorially and emotionally are achieved through such activities and how these activities are inseparable from, and indeed contingent on, the specific human, material and intangible configurations of things and processes that compose the home. Movement is implicit here. As such, Pink and Leder Mackley (2016: 176) insist that ‘Atmospheres are not as such products but they are produced or emergent ongoingly as people improvise their ways through the world.’ We discuss this in more detail in Chapter 5. In this example, the discussion of atmosphere as ongoingly emergent connects with understandings in the social sciences and humanities of the home, not as a static site or as a built object but as a configuration of things and processes that is continually being made and remade (Pink et al 2017). Here, if we put movement at the centre of the analysis (and as we examine further in Chapters 3 and 5) and treat it as a methodological device, it becomes possible to understand how the home as a kind of locality or place, as above, is constituted as an experienced entity through the movement of people, their activities and the other things that they encounter. Turning back to a theory of atmosphere, if we regard these relationships between people, their activities, materialities and processes as constitutive of atmosphere, it is possible to understand the experience of being in the home as felt through movement. This example, like Bissell’s research about people who are in movement in trains, shows how atmosphere is generated by the temporalities of moving through. However, in both examples we see how atmosphere is generated differently in relation to the specific modes of movement involved, and the particular types of contingencies that combine through and around processes of movement. Taken together, these examples show that if we live in a world of and in movement, human movement offers us a useful conceptual tool through which to follow through the trajectories of how atmospheres are made and why they feel the ways they do at particular moments in people’s journeys, routes, routines and lives.

Situating atmospheres  29

A new approach to atmosphere The scholarship that we have discussed so far has focused on identifying what constitutes atmosphere; has located it in human perception, in our surroundings, or in an indeterminate in-between space; has traced its changing configurations over time; and has honed in on the particular affordances of thinking about it on the move. Spatiality, temporality and movement are key elements of the ways that atmosphere has been studied in existing research. As we have shown above, they offer ways in which to enter the research field and to frame our investigations. No one concept of the three needs come first, since in practice and in the research projects we have undertaken they tend to work in interdependent ways. However, we suggest that this work can be pushed further by more explicitly bringing existing theoretical and empirical work into dialogue with methodology, and that until we do this there is a limit to what we can ever know about atmospheres. We argue that this also limits how the concept can be mobilised for both understanding what atmosphere does in terms of how it is experienced, but also its politics and how we understand its possibility for contributing to intervention and change in the world, or what it makes possible. Accordingly, in this section we extend the theory of atmosphere established above by focusing on emergence and uncertainty, arguing that atmosphere is a holding concept for how things configure experientially and processually. We progress this approach throughout the book by way of examples of our own recent projects, but here we outline the conceptual framework for this move. Atmospheres in emergence Much scholarly work on atmosphere has been dogged by attempts to locate it as somehow caught between subject and object, or between our perceptions and our surroundings, already formed up and distinct in the world in a defined or coherent sense if only we notice it. Anderson (2014: 147) seeks to reconcile this by focusing on how atmospheres are perceived experientially: An atmosphere’s openness to change as it is emanated, expressed and qualified makes it less a property, a finished thing in itself, and more a condition constantly being taken up in experience. We are in the midst of atmospheres that constantly flip between the objective and subjective, undoing the distinction between the two terms. Approaching from a slightly different angle, Ahmed (2010) rightly points out that bodies are not neutral in terms of how they attune to and understand their surroundings and that our own ‘moods’ make it easy to misapprehend what sense others are making of a situation. Even the most ‘atmospheric’ design cannot completely account for how a shared moment – a university

30  Situating atmospheres lecture, tram or train journey to work or half an hour spent in a doctor’s waiting room – might feel different (and in this sense might not even be shared) for the different people involved. This idea begins to get closer to our approach, which is to treat atmospheres as ongoing experiential configurations, dynamic and emergent from what we do, how we sense and understand our activities, who and what we do them with and how we understand them in the light of previous experience. Such an approach requires us to be specific about what they mean, what affects are associated with them, and what experiential configurations they are part of. As such, as proposed above, atmosphere can be understood as the ongoing sensory and affective engagement with our lives that takes in many impressions, sensations and feelings. Here, we can turn to Bille and Sørensen’s (2016: 3) work on architecture that argues for it as ‘a process and as a sensory and affective experience, enabling rather than merely reflecting ideas, hopes, practices, politics, economy and social lives.’ Atmosphere does not so much reside in place as emerge from our ongoing encounters with it, opening up potential as we feel our way through the world, a process animated by affect (but not completely defined by it), a ‘spatially extended quality of feeling’ (Böhme 1993: 117–118) or ‘feelings poured out into space’ (Griffero 2014: 108). At the same time, reducing atmosphere to ‘affective fields’ (Conradson and Latham 2007: 238) that can be transmitted from person to person, entering and taking hold of us (Brennan 2004) diminishes the importance of individual experience, environmental, social and cultural factors, and the specific configurations of places and temporalities in which atmospheres might be felt and shared. Atmosphere has affective properties, but is not reducible to them. As Edensor and Sumartojo (2015) argue, to take this approach diminishes recognition of its co-production by many different elements and treats it as a sort of force field into which people are helplessly enrolled and with its own rhythms and logics that somehow stand apart from the people within it. Accordingly, we argue that atmosphere must be thought of as pulling together affect with sensation, materiality, memory and meaning, and call for close attention to what comprises such combinations and what they make possible or draw into being. This prompts questions of what atmospheres might enable or what they might do, questions we grapple with in Chapter 6 and 7. In considering them, we insist that it is crucial to attend to their politics. Linking ‘affect, politics and contingency,’ Anderson (2014: 15) offers a way to understand atmosphere as charged with potential that might offer ‘new ways of being and doing that events may open up.’ Here atmosphere is a way to think about change and transformation, not as something that simply sticks to or arises from particular material and immaterial environments, but as a shifting configuration that offers the possibility of feeling and thinking differently about the world, including through proximity to things not previously ­encountered. This returns to the sense of intimate exchange or suffusion

Situating atmospheres  31 that Pallasmaa (2014) describes, except with the additional possibility of making new futures possible. Here, our recasting of atmosphere as part of how things and processes configure ongoingly in our world starts to reveal new insights about the work that it might do, and what it might open up. One way to start to unpick such a politics of atmospheres is to return to spatiality and look at what people do in or to ‘atmospheric’ places that can change how they feel, enhancing or ameliorating the impression they create or even undermining their meanings for future encounters. For example, artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice confounds the established meanings of imposing public monuments through projected images that subvert their official messages. In one work he invited people to experience and understand British military power differently by recasting Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square as a giant Trident nuclear missile. He relies on the i­ mmaterial and transformative qualities of light to change what the built environment looks like, and therefore, how it feels. This artwork then changed how the column was understood by people who saw the work, with its impact ­r ippling forward into the future. On a less monumental scale, the small improvisational alterations that people make to the design of a domestic space (Pink et al 2015), for example, seeking to make it ‘feel right,’ or the tactics they use to move around urban neighbourhoods (Sumartojo and Pink 2017) may change how it feels to them or to others. This starts to hint at what an orientation towards atmosphere might help us imagine, and how this links to a concept of atmospheres as about possibility, questions we trace throughout this book. In the next chapter we turn to methodology, bringing this together with the conceptual arguments in this chapter and showing how in conjunction they progress our reframing of atmospheres.

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32  Situating atmospheres Brennan, T (2004) The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Conradson, D and Latham, S (2007) The affective possibilities of London: Antipodean transnationals and the overseas experience. Mobilities 2(2): 231–254. Edensor, T (2012) Illuminated atmospheres: Anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30: 1103–1122. Edensor, T (2015) Producing atmospheres at the match: Fan cultures, commercialization and mood management in English football. Emotion Space and Society 15: 82–89. Edensor, T and Lorimer, H (2015) ‘Landscapism’ at the speed of light: Darkness and illumination in motion. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 97(1): 1–16. Edensor, T and Sumartojo, S (2015) Designing atmospheres: Introduction. Visual Communication 14(3): 251–265. Gensburger, S (2017) Mémoire vive. Chroniques d’un quartier, Bataclan 2015–2016. Paris: Anamosa. Griffero, T (2014) [2010] (de Sanctis, S, trans.) Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces. Farnham: Ashgate. Highmore, B (2017) Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics. ­London: Routledge. Ingold, T (2011) Being alive: Essays on being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Abingdon: Routledge. Ingold, T (2016) Lighting up the atmosphere. In Bille, M and Sørensen, T (eds) ­Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces. Routledge: London: 163–177. Kobayashi, A, Preston, V and Murnaghan, A (2011) Place, affect, and transnationalism through the voices of Hong Kong immigrants to Canada. Social & Cultural Geography 12(8): 871–888. Kulper, A and Periton, D (2015) Urban atmospheres: An introduction. Architecture and Culture 3(2): 121–126. Marvin, G (1988) Bullfight. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Massumi, B (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity. McCormack, D (2008) Engineering affective atmospheres on the moving geographies of the 1897 Andrée expedition. Cultural Geographies 15: 413–430. Merriman, P and Pearce, L (2017) Mobility and the humanities. Mobilities 12(4): 493–508. Pallasmaa, J (2014) Space, place and atmosphere: Emotion and peripheral perception in architectural experience. Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of ­Experience 4: 230–245. Pink, S (1997) Women and Bullfighting. Oxford: Berg. Pink, S (2011) From embodiment to emplacement: Re-thinking bodies, senses and spatialities. Sport, Education and Society 16(34): 343–355. Pink, S and Leder Mackley, K (2016) Moving, making and atmosphere: Routines of home as sites for mundane improvisation. Mobilities 11(2): 171–187. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K and Morosanu, R (2015) Researching in atmospheres: Video and the “Feel” of the mundane. Visual Communication 14(3): 351–369. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K, Mitchell, V, Wilson, G and Bhamra, T (2016) Refiguring digital interventions for energy demand reduction: Designing for life in

Situating atmospheres  33 the digital material home. In Pink, S., Ardevol, E. and Lanzeni, D. (eds) Digital ­Materialities: Anthropology and Design. Bloomsbury: Oxford: 79–98. Pink, S., Leder Mackley, K, Morosanu, R, Mitchell, V and Bhamra, T (2017) Making Homes: Ethnographies and Designs. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Rancière, J (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics (trans. Gabriel Rockhill). New York: Continuum International. Rose, G, Degen, M and Basdas, B (2010) More on ‘big things’: Building events and feelings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 334–349. Schroer, SA and Schmitt, SB (2018) (eds) Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Sheller, M and Urry, J (2016) Mobilizing the new mobilities paradigm. Applied Mobilities 1(1): 10–25. Spinney, J (2011) A chance to catch a breath: Using mobile video ethnography in cycling research. Mobilities 6(2): 161–182. Stewart, K (2011) Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 445–453. Sumartojo, S (2015) On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication 14(2): 267–288. Sumartojo, S (2016) Commemorative atmospheres: Memorial sites, collective events and the experience of national identity. Transactions of the Institute of British ­G eographers 41(4): 541–553. Sumartojo, S, Pink, S, Lupton, D and Heyes LaBond, C (2016) The affective intensities of datafied space. Emotion, Space and Society 21: 33–40. Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017) Moving through the Lit World: The emergent experience of urban paths. Space and Culture. DOI:10.1177/1206331217741079 Urry, J (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wetherell, M (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. ­London: Sage. Zumthor, P (2006) Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser.

3 Researching atmospheres

In this chapter we outline a methodological approach to researching ­atmospheres. As emphasised in Chapter 2, our proposal is that to advance the role of atmospheres research in both scholarly and practical interventions, a closer dialogue is needed between theory and empirical research. In this and the following three chapters we frame our discussion by way of three orientations to research practice and process to ask what we can know by researching in, about, and through atmospheres, as outlined in Chapter 1. These three ways of approaching atmospheres offer different dimensions of research practice, which span the empirical and experiential, the ­representational and definitional and the theoretical and abstract. They are not necessarily separated out in any research process and they are not linear or sequential. Instead, they exist in dialogue with each other. We will return to this point later in the chapter. In what follows we attend to these dimensions in relation to different methodological and practical aspects of doing research, to examine how we can know atmosphere; the modes of knowing that pertain to the process of researching in emergent and uncertain environments; the techniques and technologies that are engaged for knowing; and the modes of representation that we might engage for creating research knowledge during the process of investigation.

Knowing in, about and through atmospheres Knowing in atmospheres In the preceding chapters we have begun to sketch out how atmosphere is an ongoing but continually changing state that we live in all the time, an argument that we develop in the more empirically focused chapters to ­follow. As Conradson and Latham (2007: 238) remind us, ‘atmosphere is best understood as empirically grounded in specific configurations of people, things, technologies and immaterial qualities of places.’ If this is the case, then all knowing happens in atmospheres and is part of the processes of embodied and emotional change that we ongoingly experience. If we know

36  Researching atmospheres in atmospheres, then we must move towards ways of researching that are purposefully immersed in them. This creates routes to understanding how atmospheres are constituted, what our own and others’ experiences of them are, what range of meanings might accompany them and what the local and wider consequences of them might be. In Chapter 2 we posited that atmosphere must be understood as located in and emerging from the ongoing and particular flow of configurations of people, things, places, feelings and imaginaries, rather than something abstract or bounded in space-time that we might somehow step into or out of. Thinking atmospherically moves beyond simply what our senses perceive because individual subjectivity informs and is bound up in our experience of the world; Ahmed (2010: 37) makes this point when she says that ‘the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point.’ Indeed, she argues for attention to ‘the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near’ (Ahmed 2010: 30). This means that any investigation in atmosphere must attend to the ‘specific point’ from which it is understood, but that it must also account for what is included in its constellation of elements and how these might change in relation to each other. Following this understanding, atmosphere is something that we are in the flow of, rather than something that we are researching from the outside, or that it would even be possible to step out of and observe. If we follow this through methodologically, the implication is that we need to seek ways to understand what it means to be in and part of the process whereby the atmospheres we inhabit and help to configure are ongoingly emergent. This question remains relevant whether we are seeking to create scholarly work about or through atmosphere, as we discuss below, or if we ultimately desire to make interventions towards futures through atmosphere, as we discuss in Chapters 6 and 7. The shifts between human subjectivity and intentionality that these different modes of research and implicatedness invoke do not change the argument that we are necessarily in atmosphere. Being in atmosphere is therefore a consideration for the research approach and practices discussed in this section about knowing in atmosphere, but also sets up a way of thinking that informs the subsequent sections on knowing about and knowing through atmosphere. This is because acknowledging that we are in atmosphere has a dual purpose: first, to enable us to research with other people what it means to be in particular atmospheres that we seek to understand; and second, because it generates a reflexive awareness about what and how we can possibly know about and through atmosphere. Reflexivity and collectivity are thus key aspects of this orientation, as we turn to in the next section. First, however, we would like to move towards this by way of emergence and uncertainty, key concepts which run through this book and which animate our interest and approach to atmospheres overall. In Chapters 1 and 2

Researching atmospheres  37 we have emphasised the emergent and processual nature of atmospheres and the inherent uncertainty that we need to acknowledge in relation to how they manifest in the future. Such an approach might be applied to any research field, however it is particularly relevant to researching in atmospheres. This is because it draws our attention to the need to be ongoingly aware of the contingencies that shape both atmospheres and how they are experienced – by us as researchers and by the people we engage with through our research. Moreover, the study of the contingent circumstances through which atmospheres are constituted should beneficially underpin our understandings of how they can be researched, designed and experienced. An important implication is that in researching in atmospheres, we as researchers are also in and part of the emerging environments that are the focus of our efforts, and we participate in the ways they are shaped. This raises a series of questions about the changing and uncertain qualities of atmospheres, as well demanding that we consider how we as researchers are positioned in relation to this. Noting the need for reflexive awareness that we discuss next, it also reminds us that we need to attend to how our own actions and presence in any context contribute to the atmospheres in which we research and how this impacts on what we can ever possibly know in such environments. This has implications for all of the empirical areas we focus on in ­Chapters 4, 5 and 6. For our interest in the space-times of atmospheres developed in Chapter 4, for example, it means that we consider how we research and know in space-time as being played out in an emergent and processual world where we do not know what will happen next. Such uncertainty is foundational to processes of research in social science and the humanities, in that when we undertake research we do not know what we will find out. While we may use memory, foreknowledge and imagination to fill the gaps, as we touched on in Chapter 2, we must always be ready to be surprised and to be attentive to the moments where our understandings shift or when things ­begin to unfold in ways that we could never have possibly known in advance. This can be a delicate balance in scholarly contexts when we have questions that we want to answer, but we also do not want to preclude what might emerge from the research encounters we set in motion. For example, in Chapter 4 we discuss a project at an official memorial site, the Camp des Milles, in which we intended to investigate the links between the atmosphere of the place and the presence and visitor use of digital technologies there. What emerged, as we discuss, was much more subtle and complex as our research participants explained the concatenation of the personal and official; memory and immediate experience; and the sensory, discursive and representational. Digital technologies were a part of all of these accounts in some ways, but how they configured atmospherically was extremely varied. If we had driven the research along lines of inquiry explicitly related to digital technologies, the crucial atmospheric qualities would not have been able to emerge as they did.

38  Researching atmospheres Emergence and uncertainty are also at the heart of our consideration of mobilities in Chapter 5, where they imply that as we and others move through the world, we are ongoingly stepping over the present into as-yet-unknown futures. Indeed, we can never return to previous space-times or the atmospheres that were a part of them. In this process of temporal ­movement we actively slip through atmospheres, contributing to them as we go and never being sure exactly what we will find ourselves in next, or how they transform and imbue our changed environments as we go. For example, in the research on self-tracking and cycle commuting that we discuss in Chapter 5, we found that as our research participants made their way to or from their homes, they made sense of their journeys as atmosphere on the move. Some of these were anticipated, as certain places on their regular routes were subject to feelings of achievement, dejection or anticipation, but these changed with each day and each ride, and as things that they encountered helped them make sense of what came next. In the discussion of design in Chapter 6, it is particularly pertinent to note that when we imagine future atmospheres and seek to create the experiential affordances that they imply, the outcomes of our interventions will also be contingent on what encounters have occurred before and after them. These concepts are of central and particular importance to thinking and researching in atmospheres. In the remainder of this section, we link them to reflexivity and collectivity. Reflexivity Reflexivity is a key and essential element of qualitative research and, as argued elsewhere, should never be an add-on that is tagged to a project to ensure an objective stance on how researchers impact on their own research processes (Pink 2013). Instead, being reflexive and creating an awareness of how we as researchers create meaning should be at the basis on the ways that we understand any knowledge that we purport to have produced. A reflexive approach unifies the three approaches to atmosphere research we propose here because it invites us as researchers to interrogate how we can know atmospheres – that is, what personal and cultural resources we draw on to generate understandings and ways of knowing and how these impact what we can possibly know and communicate to others. Moreover, if we are always and inevitably in atmospheres, then this means that the ways of knowing that we are engaged in during research processes are also emergent from the atmospheres in which research is undertaken (whether or not this is the specific environment we are researching or if our research interests are directed beyond it). It follows that this shapes what we can know about something else, or are able to understand through the particular environment we are in. In this interpretation, knowing is an ongoing and incremental process. We as researchers build on what have already known and experienced in order to give meaning to what we newly experience. Anthropologies of

Researching atmospheres  39 knowing have emphasised that we know and learn incrementally as we move through our lives and worlds (e.g. Harris 2007, Pink 2015), and therefore show us that research does not necessarily produce objective units of knowledge or data that can be packaged out of projects. Rather, knowing is gradually accumulated as we go through research sites and processes and is contingent on the configurations and encounters in which we find ourselves. ­Applying this to atmospheres, we need to understand all of our encounters with them as being part of that source of processual knowing that will enable us to generate further and deeper research insights. However, in a practical sense, as we are always in atmosphere, this does not mean that we need to always consider every atmosphere we have felt, but instead to take with us an awareness of those atmospheric configurations where we have realised or known something that has enabled our research. It also means reflexively self-interrogating the ways that our feelings and ways of knowing emerge in the atmospheric conditions we find ourselves in. Design practice provides examples of this, and our discussion in Chapter 6 of the multi-­ sensory ­installation contain yourself, we show some of how reflexivity about being in, thinking about and exploring through atmosphere was enacted. This form of reflexivity, however, is important in a number of ways beyond simply making researchers more self-aware about how they produce knowledge. Knowing how we know is particularly important in team-based research, since when working across a group of researchers we need to have a basis upon which to both understand and compare our own and other researchers’ experiences, findings and insights. In this sense, researching ­atmospheres always involves an autoethnographic engagement with our own experience. In some projects this will be deeper than others depending on the extent to which the autoethnographic engagement seeks to define or only contextualise the knowledge base of the project. For example, in Chapter 4, we discuss our experiences of doing sound transformation research. There, our autoethnographic engagements enabled us to experience a ­research intervention that participants would also experience, and in doing so to be participants in the research ourselves, to have a basis upon which to empathetically discuss the experiences with participants and to have our own experiences through which to seek to understand the embodied and sensory experiences of participants. Collectivity As we have been arguing, when we attend to experience, our investigations need to be empirically situated in the particular configurations of people, places, things, sensations, memories and feelings where those experiences are located. In other words, attending to atmosphere means attuning to its specific spatialities and socialities – this also implies paying attention to entanglement with everything else that people might be doing, feeling, sensing or thinking when encountering a place or event. Accordingly, the encounter

40  Researching atmospheres between people and these elements in their surroundings is a crucial part of what must be attended to empirically. Seigworth and Gregg (2010: 1) take this up in terms of affect, but the same applies to how we might think about how atmospheres are located, when they argue that it is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, ­between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. In other words, affects here are both shared feelings and changes to those feelings. In terms of atmosphere, this points to the variability, contingency and ephemerality of shared moods, and their genesis and location (at least partially) in encounters. They are shared, and they erupt, dissipate and transform through and as a result of their sharedness. Previously we have accounted for the reflexive or autoethnographic ­researcher who is in the site of her or his research. Likewise, the collaborative researcher works with other participants to produce ways of knowing in a shared environment with others. Participants in research are always in ­environments and part of our work involves seeking to know what these configurations feel like for others by working with them, rather than ­doing research about them (Ingold 2008). When we are in environments with them, then we also need to maintain some reflexive awareness about how we, together with participants, are active in constituting atmospheres. This includes the wider contexts in which we become involved – for example, if we attend an event with participants at which a certain type of comportment is expected and when performed collectively sustains a particular ­feeling. Examples of this might be at a public site like the market discussed in ­Chapter 4. However, it also refers to the atmosphere of the research encounter itself, the material circumstances and the sensory and affective dimensions that surround the processes through which we engage with participants in research. For example, when an interview takes place in someone’s home, such as with the sound transformation project in Chapter 4, as researchers we invited participants to attune to aspects of their everyday surroundings to which they may rarely have attended explicitly. This not only shifted how they made sense of their environments during the research encounter (such as by listening more closely to ambient noise) but might also echo forward as a result of becoming aware of something they had never noticed before. ­Another example is when we create workshop environments as part of research processes, which themselves generate atmospheres that are in part designed and imagined by the researchers, but are only ever made and experienced once participants collaborate to generate them further. If emergence, uncertainty, reflexivity and collectivity are all key concepts for knowing in atmospheres (and also present in how we know about and through them, as we will discuss), then they demand methodological

Researching atmospheres  41 approaches that can come to grips with these aspects in some way. The foremost consideration therefore is how we can best invite our research ­participants to attune or attend to atmospheres as part of the configurations of their worlds. This means working ourselves, or together with others, to identify the appropriate and best ways to recognise and articulate how atmospheres manifest and what they do, a process that often takes the form of dialogue as we move forward together with our research participants in our shared understandings. It also means working together as researchers, and of finding ways to share or express our own affective and sensory experiences in ways that can often move beyond text into other forms of communication such as images, sound or gesture. Here, video and go-along techniques have been crucial in our work (see Pink 2015), as they include processes that compel us to reflect and recompose our understandings as we subsequently edit and work with materials we have made in the research setting. In Chapters 4–6 we explain in detail how we have used ethnographic approaches, individually and in teams; attended to the sensory, material and affective aspects of our research settings; and deployed technologies such as video and sound recording and photography, or techniques such as go-along interviews and workshops. Knowing about atmosphere Knowing about atmosphere suggests methodologies for examining it after the moment of its emergence, attempting to understand its configurations, the conditions that allowed it, the effects and impacts that it might have and what else it makes possible. It means transforming accounts of the experience of being in atmosphere discussed so far into something descriptive or representational of those atmospheres. As we discuss next, this can also open the way to knowing through atmosphere by attending to what thinking atmospherically draws into being or makes it possible to know. However, this does not mean somehow fixing or rendering it lifeless, as knowing about atmosphere should still able to account for its variability and multiplicity. In this sense, knowing about atmosphere means investigating something in the past, even when it might be the quite immediate past, and will always involve descriptive accounts that appear to present atmosphere as somehow complete or resolved. This can pull against our arguments for thinking about atmosphere as ongoing and constantly in emergence, as the world ­ nowing configures and reconfigures around and with us. However, as with k in atmosphere, what is important here is that the means of recording or accounting for atmosphere – in other words, the research materials that we create as we investigate it, and the ways in which we create these – must grapple with its emergent qualities. Indeed, scholars in human geography, anthropology, design, architecture and cultural and memory studies have accounted for this in various ways. Adey et al (2013: 299) explore the ‘contingent outcomes of a multiplicity of

42  Researching atmospheres relations between techniques, technologies, practices, materiality, sociality and much more’ in terms of feelings of security in public places by using their own bodies to attune to their surroundings (see also Closs Stephens et al 2017) and creating visual and audio materials as a form of record of these experiences. In doing so, they sought to ‘look at, listen to and feel the space differently, even away from the field site’ (Adey et al 2013: 303), ­seeking to make possible new ways of understanding the place through making and ­reflecting on these materials. Indeed, in terms of knowing about atmosphere, the consideration of this record could only occur outside the particular configurations that the researchers were focused on. Other examples reach further back into the past to try and reach some understanding of what particular configurations felt like and what effects these atmospheres may have carried forward. In terms of explicitly historical accounts, an example is in Merriman and Jones’ (2017: 2) work on ‘national forces and affects,’ in which they use the historical record to investigate ‘the intermittent emergence, continual foregrounding and backgrounding, and flickering spatialities of national resonances, associations and feelings.’ They provide an example of how physical infrastructure can act as a ­processual ‘thing,’ with distinctive atmospheres coalescing around it, that resonates with ‘particular feelings, memories and meanings’ (­ Merriman and Jones 2017: 7), and draw evidence from archival and historical sources to establish the way ‘affects, emotions and feelings have gathered around ­mobility infrastructures in Wales.’ In research on a more recent expression of national identity, Angharad Closs Stephens (2016: 182) uses the record of media coverage of the 2012 London Olympics to discuss ‘national affective atmospheres’ in an attempt to account for their unexpected but widespread popularity in a ‘short period of happy flag-waving.’ These accounts focus on particular events and places, and make use of descriptive accounts that are located in the past. Highmore (2017) adopts a similarly archival approach to his exploration of ‘cultural feelings.’ For Highmore, atmosphere is always historical and retrospective, because although we are always experiencing it in emergence, as scholars we often consider and write about it after the fact. ­Nevertheless, certain historical periods – in the case of his research, this includes the UK during the Second World War period of the Blitz (1940–1941) – can be ­characterised by certain ways of doing things, understanding and making sense of the world that are derived from common experiences and received ways of responding to those experiences. For example, he details how during the Blitz, people were encouraged to ‘snap out of’ melancholic or anxious mental states and ‘get on with the job’ of clearing up after the bombs, supporting the war effort and remaining cheerful and resolute. Here, Highmore locates ‘cultural feelings’ in the particular material and emotional conditions of the Blitz, arguing that they both conditioned the atmosphere of the time and have come to dominate how we now understand a historical period. In her work on the same period, specifically the celebrations at the

Researching atmospheres  43 end of the Second World War, Sumartojo (2014) examines the historical and archival record of everyday life in wartime London, and the ways that artificial illumination (and the blackouts imposed by the Blitz) came to represent longings for normality and the end to the conflict. On VE Day, light’s affective qualities mixed with its symbolic ones, the affective intensity enhanced by projection onto London’s symbolic buildings, still standing despite the bombers’ efforts. Sumartojo uses contemporaneous newspapers, Mass ­Observation records, and government archives to unravel how it felt to be on the streets of central London on this date and what contributions to the event were made in official attempts to shape it. Such archival approaches are particularly good at grasping official efforts to ‘engineer’ atmosphere, or top-down efforts to determine how the public environment is designed to try and evoke particular feelings (Thrift 2004, Sumartojo 2014). This is because archives often focus on official sources, although more vernacular sources are certainly available in some cases. ­However, this is only ever a partial account, as people take up and co-­constitute atmospheres by participating in them, which cannot ever be fully represented through archives. While records that seek to tell something of lived experience can be difficult to obtain, the examples above show the value of employing them, or using what does remain to think about how places and events may have been experienced in the past. Such sources help us both understand past events, and also shed light on how those events shaped understandings of subsequent ones. Moreover, the very process of engaging with these gives rise to particular encounters in which the historical record and our interactions with those records as researchers might also help shape our understandings of the atmosphere we are investigating. Whereas archival research opens access to particular types of records about the past, photo or video elicitation is another route to knowing about atmospheres that have been previously experienced by asking people to describe them after the fact (Pink and Sumartojo 2017, Sumartojo and Graves 2018). Here, however, while atmosphere might be the focus of research, photographs allow people to discuss why they made each image; the material, immaterial and affective conditions in which they made it; and what meanings are held in the subject of the image and the making of it. It can also allow them to define atmosphere in ways that are important to them or that they are able to attune to. Such techniques of using material made by others allow researchers to enter into the worlds of research participants and explore them together, making meanings together, but also working towards ways of understanding immaterial, sensory or affective aspects. Here, as Lapenta (2011: 202) reminds us, ‘photographs can convey contents that words can only approximately represent, and can represent subjects that might be invisible to the researcher but visible to the interviewee.’ At its core, photo elicitation is a form of encounter, and as with the affective intensities within the archive (Cifor and Gilliland 2016; Lee 2016) the encounter between researcher, research participant and photo or video

44  Researching atmospheres that the participant has made also carries its own affective charge. In this sense, photo elicitation is a collaborative way of arriving at new understandings of the world, which may not have been possible in the absence of the configuration that the whole process of photo elicitation engendered. This is at the core of the example in Chapter 4 regarding the Camp des Milles. An important aspect of this, and one that we discuss in more length at the end of this chapter, is researcher empathy and its importance in the ethics of researching atmospheres. This is easily discernible in the case of knowing and researching in atmospheres, as we seek to enter into others’ worlds and understand something of them, but knowing about them also includes an encounter between the researcher and research participant, and/or materials that have been made about the past. Such materials constitute ‘participants’ traces through the world as a shareable experience and [create] new ways of understanding it’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2017: 44–45), and here we must treat these materials ‘as a way to encounter participants in relation to their experiential happenings and memories, rather than to observationally document a set of happenings’ (ibid: 48). This is true even if these experiences occurred many years in the past, as the record of them, and our encounter with them as researchers, still allows new knowledge to come into being that we at least in part understand as located in the perceptions and feelings of others. Knowing through atmospheres If knowing in locates the research and the researcher in the ongoing and emergent flow of atmosphere, and knowing about is a retrospective look at what it felt like that interrogates a particular instance of configuration, then knowing through is a way of using the concept of atmosphere as a route to understanding something else. This approach treats atmosphere as a holding concept or uses it to unpack related but distinct ways of understanding experience and its impact on us. An important starting point for knowing through is the politics of ­atmospheres – something we trace throughout the book and address directly in Chapter 7 – in that attempting to somehow know about atmospheres also means learning something about how things, people and space-times relate to each other and the power that flows through these relationships. ­Important here is the notion of atmosphere as lodged in the encounter. For ­example, Seigworth and Gregg (2010: 3) argue of affect that it is ­‘integral to a body’s perpetual becoming…pulled beyond its seeming surface-­boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter.’ As we began to discuss in Chapter 2, this indicates that thinking atmospherically must always imply thinking politically, because encounter is one of the chief animators of atmosphere – and in any encounter there are differentials of power. It follows that methodologies that address how atmospheres are comprised, what they mean and what they do must always attend to relationality and encounters between humans and the things,

Researching atmospheres  45 people, objects, histories, imaginaries and sensory elements that somehow touch or constitute them. This implies an ethics of researching atmospheres, and as we discuss further later, this means that atmospheres also can ripple forward in time, carrying the terms of experiencing them into the future, creating a new set of possibilities that were not knowable or possible in the same way before orienting towards atmosphere (we discuss atmosphere and futurity in ­Chapter 7). Here atmosphere offers the ‘surplus of unacted-out potential that is collectively felt’ that Massumi (2015: 57) links to emergent and uncertain affective intensities, the potential for new configurations, for a shift in thinking or perceiving that might make new futures possible. As we will show in the case studies in ­Chapters 4–6, knowing through atmosphere and the way it is configured can help us understand the implications of these configurations for how people experience the world and ascribe value and meaning to these experiences. However, and as we have said already, knowing through should not be excised from knowing about or knowing in atmospheres, with these three ways of knowing best understood as blended together as we conduct research. This is because we advocate for a way of thinking about atmosphere that recognises its grounding in particular configurations of things and in the experience of these configurations, which demands attunement to the conditions of any given site. In our own work it would have been impossible to embark on a process of attempting to understand atmosphere without ourselves attuning to both how it felt and the particular conditions of its emergence, which returns us to the earlier discussion of reflexivity. Accordingly, we conclude this chapter with an example that shows how the three ways of knowing atmosphere interrelate. In 2015, a team led by geographer Angharad Closs Stephens conducted a joint autoethnography on the ‘dispersed atmospheres’ of the ten-year anniversary of the 2005 London transport bombings. These attacks killed 52 people and injured more than 700, and the commemorative events that marked them took place at several different sites throughout London. Four researchers spread out over the locations of the four bombings and attended small ceremonies at these sites, before convening at the main event at the national memorial to the bombing victims in London’s Hyde Park. They explained how they considered the atmospheres of the event by walking, sitting, watching, writing, talking, and writing some more. This stretched over a period of some months as they left London and ‘talked via email, drew maps and exchanged them; shared photographs and academic articles,’ a process that engaged their bodies, intellects, experiences and memories of the commemorative events, as well as their recollections of and feelings about the bombings themselves (Closs Stephens et al 2017: 46). The team came to know the atmosphere of the commemorative moment in their own ways by being in it themselves, but also knew about it by discussing their separate and shared experiences, writing to each other subsequently and developing their thoughts over time. This meant working through multiple

46  Researching atmospheres space-times of atmospheres, and trying to come to terms with how their knowing in by way of their first hand experiences of the commemorative events related to the knowing about that emerged as they made notes during the fieldwork and talked about and wrote together from these notes: we have used our first-hand accounts in multiple texts, to demonstrate how we used field writing to try and reflect textures and feelings, sensory experience and affective memories without freezing those into solid things - although acknowledging the paradox that writing as a form limits the capacity to convey this. (Closs Stephens et al 2017: 46) Their aim in undertaking this project was to try and understand what ­ olitical effects the commemoration might have, that ‘drawing upon the p concepts of affect and atmosphere enabled an approach that rubs against the unifying narratives of the state’ (Closs Stephens et al 2017: 44). In other words, atmosphere opened up possibilities for attending to national identity in new ways because of its capacity to draw in the minor textures of experience as much as the larger narratives that might imbue it; put simply, they sought to know national identity through atmosphere. Many techniques for investigating the world tend to try to define and fix it in a certain space-time, but like many other aspects of our experiential world, atmosphere resists this. This calls for techniques that specifically work into the slippery quality of atmosphere, but that still locate it in the particular configurations of spatiality, temporality and mobility (as we ­argue in Chapter 2) from which it emerges, even as these change. As we have begun to outline above, knowing in, about and through atmospheres gives us a guide to how we might research it. We will develop this framework in Chapters 4–6 through a series of in-depth case studies.

Atmosphere through an empirical-theoretical dialogue So far in this chapter we have focused on how we approach atmospheres by seeking to know in, about and through them, with empirical examples to follow in the subsequent chapters. In this section we explain in more detail a chain of related principles that have guided our own research, which we have already begun to touch on and will continue to develop in this book. These are: how researching in, about and through atmosphere draws on a dialogue between theoretical and empirical lines of inquiry; the insights offered by a design anthropology approach and the related ethics of working to understand atmospheres. Theory and empirics in dialogue As we have said, in this book we advocate an approach to understanding and theorising atmosphere that is also ongoing and changing. By this we mean that

Researching atmospheres  47 while applying existing theories of atmosphere to ask questions about empirical contexts can help us in the process of investigation, existing theories do not always shape the insights that we will draw from research. In fact, as our own work has shown, the theories of atmosphere that we drew together in ­Chapter 2 are very often challenged by what we find when we do research in atmospheres. As authors this puts us in a curious position, one that academics do not always explicitly acknowledge. It means that we are proposing a particular understanding of atmosphere and using this to inform the discussion in this book, while at the same time we are proposing that this understanding might be modified and challenged once it is actually in use. It is therefore a flexible rather than definitive framework, derived from what we think we know from earlier work, moulded through our critical interrogations of existing theories of atmosphere proposed, and open to further critical development by others. This situation is the state of play for all researchers who wish to participate in the critical development of theory by way of their empirical research. It is quite a conventional way to work in some disciplines, in particular anthropology, which has a critical approach to the theories advanced by anthropologists and other scholars; these critiques are always rooted in the deep ethnographic findings that arise from anthropological fieldwork. In this sense, there is much to learn from the ethnographic-theoretical ­dialogue as it is played out in anthropology. However, our aim in this book differs from that of much anthropological research. That is, we wish to develop and work with a general theory of atmosphere that might be applied across a range of different cultural, national and substantive contexts. In other words, our work in this book is figured around an understanding of atmosphere that will be moulded and changed, but that can endure as a mode of understanding certain aspects of people’s experiences of the worlds they live in and that can lend insight across a range of settings. It follows that in working through a dialogue between empirical and theoretical insight, emergence and uncertainty sit centrally in how we approach our research (Akama et al 2018) This means that the techniques we use to look at space, time and movement, as we have begun to explain, need to be able to account somehow for the ongoing nature of the empirical world. As we will consider below, this is also where design ethnography can be useful, because it can recognise and ‘capture’ processes of knowing that build on what came before and look forward to what might be possible next. This also allows us to pick up on the politics of atmospheres as always having a contingent unpredictability – particularly for the researching through which allows us to orient ourselves towards the relational, changing and possible. Accordingly, and as we have been discussing, emergence and uncertainty are important aspects of all the examples of work we provide in Chapters 4–6. Design anthropology and atmospheres research and intervention Scholars and researchers in human geography, anthropology, history and sociology have tended to research in, about or through atmosphere in order

48  Researching atmospheres to understand human experience and activity or societal and political structures and processes. In contrast, researchers based in design and architecture disciplines have been interested in atmosphere primarily in relation to its implication for their practice, which generally involves making changes and considerations of the future. Given that atmosphere is an ongoing presence in the world, part of the politics of our lives and fundamental to our experience, we argue that it is important to bring together these concerns and interests in order to generate interdisciplinary forms of thinking, scholarship, research and design practice that attend to atmosphere. In Chapter 6 we consider this in detail and provide examples of our own work in this area. Such a move enables us to consider more closely how we might, in addition to researching, also create interventions through our work in, about and through atmosphere. This approach implies a research element in that it requires us to ask how we might conceptualise atmosphere as part of the anticipatory modes in which we live, the ethics of our futures, and the ­possibilities that we might participate in creating responsible futures and future wellbeing. However, it also has a practical and interventional mode that involves playing out some of these activities in design processes, including imagining, experimenting, prototyping, testing and undertaking further and parallel research. This enables us to understand the implications of such design interventions for making atmospheres and the potential benefits that could be accrued from the experiential environments that they implicate people in. As we said in Chapter 2, in existing research, atmospheres have been studied from two key perspectives. The first is as a scholarly research question that seeks to mobilise a theory of atmosphere to enable us to better understand everyday spatialities, usually from the perspective of human geography and sometimes based in empirical research. Second, atmospheres have fallen into the interest of architectural designers seeking to create ­c ertain atmospheres through design practice. However, there is generally little correspondence between these two areas of research and practice, the result of which is that the dialogue needed between theory and practice, in order to advance discussion about how to practically research in depth and how to intervene in atmospheres, has been underdeveloped. We discuss this further in Chapter 6. Ethics in atmospheres research If, as we propose, thinking atmospherically can be used to both understand and intervene in the world, this points to some particular ethical considerations. Much has been written about the ethics of qualitative research in the present (see for example Pink 2013), past (Crossen-White 2015) and future (Pink 2017, Pink and Salazar 2017). Much of this existing discussion is of direct relevance to researching atmospheres in that it is specifically oriented towards researching (with people) and it implies that we need to respect that

Researching atmospheres  49 we are engaging not just with the atmospheres that we feel, but with those that we imagine that others have felt, are feeling with us in research, and can imagine into futures. However, there are specific ways that researching atmospheres responds to and suggests a specific ethical agenda. This is because for research to be coherent, its different elements need to be mutually complicit with the same agenda for understanding the world, what researchers and participants do in it, and what might happen to research processes and outputs within it. In this sense we argue that doing research in atmospheres means that our ethics must be coherent with theoretical understandings of atmosphere. In the case of the arguments outlined in this book, this means that it is not only atmosphere that is emergent and continually reconfigurable in relation to the contingent circumstances of our research environment, but that the ethics that are implicit in our approach to the research are similarly so. That is, our ethics in researching atmospheres must be equally sensitive to atmospheres and how they change, and indeed, given that we research in atmospheres we need to understand our ethics are being shaped by the ways that we ‘feel’ atmospheres. For example, in the case above on research about the public commemoration of the 7/7 bombings, the researchers admittedly adopted a cautious, exploratory approach that sought to attend sensitively to the feelings that others might be having around them, their own memories and feelings about the attacks and the ways these continuously changed in the public and mobile research setting. At the same time, our ethical approaches, as part of our countenance as researchers, will also shape the way the research atmosphere ‘feels,’ in that we are inevitably thinking about and perceiving those approaches through the frame of a research endeavour. However, the sensibility of the researcher to ‘feel’ the atmosphere that they are complicit in from an ­ethical perspective is as important as being able to do so from a research perspective, and as we discuss above, the ethics of how we understand atmosphere when we are in it and when we seek to reflect about it will also shape what we come to understand through it. This, we believe, is one of the often undocumented skills that is little written about in texts on research practice and ethics. It is gained through the forms of immersion in the lives of others that we discuss throughout this book, and ­i nvolves the same empathetic modes of attention to the sensory and affective experience of others that we recommend for atmospheres research more ­generally and that is often located empirically in particular types of encounters, as will be evident in the examples to come. It involves being able to know, to sense and to ask when things might not feel all right for others, and to use our empathetic sensibilities to ­u nderstand when and where to stop, question or stand back. It also means understanding how our own presence in the field might shape the experiences and feelings of others and recognising the potential impact of our attempts to engage people to make new knowledge with us.

50  Researching atmospheres Our ethics in atmospheres research also need to attend to the temporalities of atmospheres and to the temporal mix that they become implicated in as we seek to reconstitute historical atmospheres or to imagine what they might feel like in the future. In part, this refers to the idea that atmospheres are ongoingly changing and are not fixed in the continuous present. In the context of historical research, understanding experiences in the past means accounting for social and cultural contexts that might be very different from our own, such as when we think about gendered (Walkowitz 1992) or colonial senses of space (Driver and Gilbert 1999, Sumartojo 2013), or when we use materials to draw conclusions that may reach beyond their intended purposes, or that were made without the consent of the people they represent or depict. A clear example is older archival material about people who cannot be asked to consent to its use. Here the encounter with the past is a strongly interpretive one, as the texts, images and objects we encounter have a limited ability to speak back to or correct us, which is very different than when we research ongoingly in atmosphere alongside research participants. This also refers to the temporal leaps that are implicated when we do futures research. When engaging in futures research, ethics are interesting because they involve accounting for the imagined, the not yet known and uncertainties about what these might entail. They also entail human feelings relating to future-focused concepts such as anxiety and hope, which have not only sensory and affective elements to them but also can be deeply personal and may involve forms of disclosure or fantasy. As with accounts or performances of similar feelings and occurrences that are played out in the present, these might require levels of privacy. When researching atmospheres we also need to comply where relevant with the legal dimensions expounded by and the ethical approval requirements of universities and other institutional committees and regulatory frameworks. These vary between different countries and academic disciplines, and therefore we do not offer any detailed advice relating to this. Yet atmospheres research and the theoretical and methodological frameworks we argue for here are also critical of the risk-mitigation and audit-oriented ethical approval procedures that prevail across most academic research contexts. Ethnographic research approaches such as those we outline here produce many examples that reveal the theoretical and methodological deficiencies of such frameworks, and as such also work towards a critical approach to institutional ethics (see Pels 2000, Amit 2000, Strathern 2000, Pink 2017). There is indeed a particular ethics to being attuned to one’s environment as a researcher, as Pink (2015) has also argued in the context of a sensory ethnography and in accordance with other scholars who have highlighted the ethical and moral nature of engaging sensorially with the world in which we research. Attending to atmospheres in such a way therefore enables us to go beyond institutional ethics precisely because, while it assumes and requires sharing, proximity, and forms of mutual respect that bring people together,

Researching atmospheres  51 institutionally imposed ethics often creates and supposes distance and a separating out of the researcher and participant so that the relationship between them and the outputs of that relationship might be governed through regulatory frameworks. The approach that we advocate does not ignore the formal ethics of research, however, and reminds us that it is important to attend to ethics in a systematic way, which ethical approval processes, when conducted responsibly, can support. Indeed, the work we develop involves rigorous processes of informed consent that acknowledge the changing circumstances of research and involve participants in decision-making about how the materials produced with them will be used. However, it does call on us to account reflexively and responsibly for the ethics of the circumstances in which research is produced in ways that engage the same empathetic sensibilities that are required to do research in atmospheres at all. There is no question that there are methodological challenges associated with researching atmospheres that are felt through sensorial and emotional experience, that are emergent and contingent and that are not usually made sense of in terms of cognitive interpretation. All of us have had the experience of somehow knowing atmosphere in ways that are almost inexpressible and difficult to communicate to another person, which we might find deeply moving or make us feel vulnerable in some way. However, as we said in Chapter 1, atmospheres have something to offer as a focus of research because they not only shape how we understand our worlds, but also draw us together with others and condition how we remember what has come before and imagine what might happen next. They provide a container concept for the empirical particularities of space-times and movement that we began to discuss in Chapter 2 – and as we have explained in this chapter, knowing in, about and through atmospheres is a way of orienting ourselves that shapes the specific questions we ask, who and what we ask them of, and what technologies and techniques we use to ask them. However, in order to grasp them, we propose that they can best be approached by way of research questions that do not put atmospheres themselves in the crosshairs, but that instead work to discover what must configure in order for them to be constituted, and in what ways (Pink 2015). We will show what we mean by this in the examples in the next three chapters.

References Adey, P, Brayer, L, Masson, D, Murphy, P, Simpson, P and Tixier, N (2013) Pour ­votre tranquillité’: Ambiance, atmosphere, and surveillance. Geoforum 49: 299–309. Ahmed, S (2010) Happy objects. In Gregg, M and Seigworth, G (eds) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Akama, Y, Pink, S and Sumartojo, S (2018) Uncertainty and Possibility: New ­Approaches to Future-Making in Design Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury. Amit, V (2000) The university as panopticon: Moral claims and attacks on academic freedom. In Strathern, M (ed) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability. London: Routledge.

52  Researching atmospheres Cifor, M and Gilliland, A (2016) Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: An introduction to the special issue. Archival Science 16: 1–6. Closs Stephens, A (2016) The affective atmospheres of nationalism. Cultural Geographies 23(2) 181–198. Closs Stephens, A, Hughes, S, Schofield, V, Sumartojo, S (2017) Atmospheric memories: Affect and minor politics at the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings. Emotion, Space and Society 23: 44–51. Conradson, D and Latham, S (2007) The affective possibilities of London: Antipodean transnationals and the overseas experience. Mobilities 2(2): 231–254. Crossen-White, HL (2015) Using digital archives in historical research: What are the ethical concerns for a ‘forgotten’ individual? Research Ethics 11(2): 108–119. Driver, F and Gilbert, D (1999) Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harris, M (2007) Ways of Knowing. Oxford: Berghahn. Highmore, B (2017) Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics. ­London: Routledge. Ingold, T (2008). Anthropology is not Ethnography. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. Proceedings of the British Academy 154: 69–92. Lapenta, F (2011) Some theoretical and methodological view on photo-elicitation. In Margolis, E and Pauwels, L (eds) The Sage Handbook of Visual Research ­Methods. London: Sage: 201–213. Lee, J (2016) Be/longing in the archival body: Eros and the ‘Endearing’ value of material lives. Archival Science 16(1): 33–51. Massumi, B (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity. Merriman, P and Jones, R (2017) Nations, materialities and affects. Progress in ­Human Geography 41(5): 600–617. Pels, P (2000) The Trickster’s dilemma: Ethics and the technologies of the anthropological self. In Strathern, M (ed) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in ­Accountability. London: Routledge: 135–172. Pink, S (2013) Doing Visual Ethnography, 3rd ed. London: Sage. Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Pink, S (2017) Ethics in a changing world: Embracing uncertainty, understanding futures, and making responsible interventions. In Pink, S, Fors, V and O’Dell, T (eds) Working in the Between: Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice. ­Oxford: Berghahn. Pink, S and Salazar, JF (2017) Anthropologies and futures: Setting the agenda. In Salazar, J, Pink, S, Irving, A and Sjoberg, J (eds) Future Anthropologies. Oxford: Bloomsbury: 3–22. Pink, S and Sumartojo, S (2017) The Lit World: Living with everyday urban automation. Social and Cultural Geography. DOI:10.1080/14649365.2017.1312698 Seigworth, G and Gregg, M (2010) An inventory of shimmers. In Gregg, M and ­Seigworth, G (eds) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1–25. Strathern, M (2000) Afterword: Accountability… and ethnography. In ­Strathern, M (ed) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability. London: ­Routledge: 279–304. Sumartojo, S (2013) Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness, 1900–2012: Imagining the Nation. Bern: Peter Lang.

Researching atmospheres  53 Sumartojo, S (2014) ‘Dazzling relief’: Floodlighting and national affective atmospheres on VE Day 1945. Journal of Historical Geography 45: 59–69. Sumartojo, S and Graves, M (2018) Rust and dust: Materiality and the feel of memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1359183518769110. Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017) Empathetic visuality: Go-Pros and the video trace. In Gómez-Cruz, E, Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (eds) Refiguring Techniques in ­Digital-Visual Research. London: Palgrave Pivot: 39–50. Thrift, N (2004) Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. ­G eografiska Annaler 86B (1): 57–78. Walkowitz, J (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 Space-times of atmospheres

This chapter examines atmosphere as a spatial phenomenon and in relation to this, investigates how it may be researched spatially. In the previous chapters of this book we have outlined an approach that investigates in, about and through atmospheres, and identifies a set of key concepts to do so: emergence and ongoing configuration; memory and anticipation; ­sensory and affective experience; and the importance of the dialogue between theoretical and empirical orientations. In this chapter and the next, we show how this approach works in practice by discussing several examples from our own recent research projects. This chapter and Chapter 5 approach atmospheres from two distinct but related empirical starting points, both anchored in concerns common to human geography, anthropology, architecture and design. In this chapter we concentrate on research that set out to examine atmosphere in its connection to spatiality, and in Chapter 5 we focus on studies that put movement and mobility at their centre. Moreover, and as we will show, it is not possible to research either of these without pulling in considerations of temporality and duration, so time, especially in the sense of how atmospheres might emerge, change or develop, is implicit in the case studies in both of these chapters. By presenting examples from our own original research we offer other researchers insights into the approaches and methods that might be engaged in their own projects. In doing so, as we explained in Chapter 3, we adopt three distinctive ways of knowing and thinking atmospherically, each of which have important empirical implications. Knowing in atmospheres locates us in the flow and emergence of fieldwork, often alongside others whose worlds we are seeking to understand, and also sometimes by way of our autoethnographic experiences that we want to bring into dialogue with conceptual elements. Knowing about atmospheres is retrospective, emerges from reflection, discussion and writing or editing, and involves ways of ­representing atmosphere that mean bounding and fixing it enough to be representable – a task which, although it can pull against atmosphere’s emergent and slippery qualities, is still necessary for scholarship and design outcomes. Finally, thinking through atmospheres treats them as a part of our worlds that can make possible new understandings of other aspects of

56  Space-times of atmospheres experience and subjectivity, or as a concept which, when used empirically, can help us reconfigure more conventional ways of thinking about spacetimes, movement or design. In this chapter we root atmospheres in particular space-times, a familiar approach in both human geography and architecture scholarship, as discussed in Chapter 2. This connects to scholarship on space and place in ­human geography, that treats it not as something that somehow stands distinct from or outside our experiential worlds, but as itself emergent and processual over time. Much of this builds on approaches such as Massey’s (2005: 107), which treats space as a ‘sphere of dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore undetermined) by the construction of new relations. It is always being made and always therefore, in a sense, unfinished.’ Treating place as processual, open and unfinished configurations that change over time allows us to think about changes not just to different elements, but to their relationships with each other, and to the ways in which these formations reach backwards (memory, history) and forwards (anticipation, imagination) in time. Here place is composed of ongoing moments of coalesced ‘throwntogetherness’ that is formed of encounter, negotiation, separation, a grasping together and letting loose of different elements, all shaping experiences of a distinctive ‘here-and-now.’ Ingold similarly characterises place as an open process, although he turns it inside out, proposing that ‘lives are led not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere’ ­(Ingold 2011: 148). We experience the world as traces through our ever-changing surroundings, rather than in discrete ‘containers’ of activity that have limits or boundaries. Ingold’s focus on the ‘trace’ emphasises movement, which we take up more explicitly in Chapter 5, and the way we make sense of and craft meaning in our lives as a result of embodied ­movements in, through and around our surroundings. He uses the term ‘wayfaring’ to characterise this movement, which is a process that creates paths or trails that emerge and unfurl in response to the changing conditions of our environments, with our experience a consequence of the dynamic relationship between our bodies, perceptions, thoughts and environments. We will discuss the trace in more detail in Chapter 5, where we focus on mobility and movement, but it is also important in this discussion of spacetimes because it emphasises how atmosphere emanates from connections between things and how they shift and align around and with us and with each other. While atmospheres are sensed, experienced and often understood in spatial terms, they are not limited by particular spaces – that is, they should not be thought of as bound or contained by space, or beginning and ending in clearly identifiable ways. As we have argued, their quality of emerging from ongoingly changing configurations of our worlds means they fit best conceptually with ways of thinking about place as similarly contingent. This pulls against somewhat conventional architectural ways of thinking about atmosphere as able to be designed or engendered within the confines

Space-times of atmospheres  57 of particular structures, although, as we discuss in Chapter 6, atmosphere can also help us think about design in fruitful and generative ways. The subsequent examples – a modest inner-city park, a large market site and the interior of a repurposed factory – provide three quite different scales in which atmosphere finds empirical and conceptual purchase. ­Indeed, scale is central to how we might experience, make sense of and understand ­atmosphere, as has been discussed in previous scholarship on homes (Pink et al  2015), sporting matches (Edensor 2015), city-wide commemorative events (Closs Stephens et al 2017) or the room of a crisis management simulation (Adey and Anderson 2011). At the same time, its affective sway is not necessarily tied to particular scales, and while as researchers scale is an inevitable part of how we approach our research sites, conceptually the significance of scale lies chiefly in how it relates to the specific and emergent configurations of those sites. In other words, it is not the size of a gathering or location in itself that makes something feel atmospheric, but rather, scale is part of everything else that may be configured to make a place feel a particular way. In this chapter we provide accounts of our own recent research in which spatiality played a central conceptual role, focusing on aspects that refer directly to where the research was located and how those locations were ­understood by us and by our research participants. We will show how atmospheres manifested as conceptually important for the research findings, as well as the techniques we used in order to understand and account for them as they emerged as important. We also show how the research moved between knowing in, about and through atmospheres, and what each of these orientations made possible to understand in new ways, on their own and in combination.

Encountering the space-times of atmospheres Queen Victoria Market In the first half of 2017 we began a project funded by the City of Melbourne that explicitly set out to investigate the ‘atmosphere’ of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market. The market was being considered for a physical renewal, with major design changes proposed to the historic site where trading had begun in 1878. However, some of the plans were controversial, with public concern that the renewal process could mean ‘sanitising’ the market and that something of its atmosphere could be lost. Recognising that atmosphere contributed to the intangible heritage value of the site, we worked with the Queen Victoria Market Pty Ltd and the City of Melbourne to develop a project that used documentary photography and go-along video interviews with traders, regular shoppers and tourists during their routines or visits to the market. The three-person fieldwork team (Shanti, Joanne Mihelcic and Nick Walton-Healey), immersed in the life of the market, observed the

58  Space-times of atmospheres

Figure 4.1  Fresh produce stalls at Queen Victoria Market. Photo: Nick Walton-Healey.

rhythms and routines of how people used and moved through the site. We made video traces (Pink 2007) and photographs, on our own and with our research participants, along with field notes. Sarah joined the team in the analytical and reporting phases. We video and audio-interviewed 18 people in total: workers at the market, including sellers and business owners, regular shoppers and other v­ isitors. These seven men and 11 women were aged from their 30s to their 70s, and although we did not ask people to identify their cultural background, participants were also diverse in this regard. We observed and spoke informally with many others, and Nick, a documentary photographer, made a series of photographs that represented his own experience of the market, on both trading and non-trading days, from very early in the morning to late at night; these later comprised an important part of the report that we provided to the City of Melbourne. Shanti also made video footage using a body-mounted GoPro camera to investigate her movements and activities in the market, a process that helped to ‘generate evocative and affective impressions of places’ (Vannini and Stewart 2016), and that made possible a ‘process of playback, editing, reflection and discussion that occurred after the recordings were actually made’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2017). This material was compiled into a report for the City of Melbourne that presented the key findings in terms of what people perceived, understood and valued about the site, what this meant conceptually and empirically in terms of atmosphere and what implications the material might suggest for the design

Space-times of atmospheres  59 team undertaking early work on the renewal plans. The report was released publicly in December 2017 (Sumartojo et al 2017). In combination, the approaches we used in this project allowed us to attune to the atmosphere of the site through visual and embodied means, and also enabled research participants to show us how they perceived, navigated, made sense of and valued the site. While atmosphere was the explicit focus of the study, by asking people to show us their approaches and routines in using the market, we were able to get beneath what they might describe if simply asked about atmosphere and instead make sense of it in terms of the changing configurations of places, people, objects, sensory impressions and imagination, as we have been arguing so far in this book. By going along with research participants in the market, as well as experiencing it ourselves, we were thus able to build up an in-depth perspective on what comprised and was valued about it from the inside. Working with participants to make video together, and by making our own visual materials in the market, enabled us to know the market in its atmosphere, to ‘identify empirically the contingencies that constitute ­particular atmospheres [and to] understand their qualities and affordances’ (Pink et al 2015: 354). Empirically, this was because the exercise of engaging in making photographs and go-along video brought to our attention and that of our participants our ways of using the site; how these movements and behaviours were shaped by the market’s sensory affordances; and the role of our own previous experiences, including in this market and others, in shaping why we engaged with it in the ways that we did. The project allowed us to attune to routines of movement (a topic we consider further in Chapter 5) and interrogate why people moved as they did or did things such as packing trolleys, choosing produce, selecting traders to shop from or setting up trading areas in particular ways. Inevitably, the senses played a crucial role in how atmospheres were understood from the inside, with smell, light, temperature, wind, sound, and the texture of things and surfaces underfoot or in the hand all distinctive features that we discussed as we encountered the market and made video together with research participants. Nick Walton-Healey’s documentary photographs (see Figures 1.1 and 4.1) provided another route to knowing in the atmosphere of the market, as he shot hundreds of images at all times of the day and night as he moved around the site and observed people there. Whilst they provided a powerful means to exemplify some of the themes that other research participants knew about the atmosphere of the site, as we discuss next, they also made it possible to see the market from the inside via the perspective of Nick’s expert use of his camera. In these images, while he is not actually visible, Nick is present in that he made ways of seeing aspects of the market available for consideration and reflection that had not been available before, and that were intimately linked to his own body and experiences. In this sense, photography (which all members of the research team used) allowed a route to knowing

60  Space-times of atmospheres in ­atmosphere, while the subsequent images – and the process of editing, sharing, reflecting on and discussing these amongst the team – also unfolded new ways to know about the market. In this way, knowing in atmosphere opened a route to knowing about it. By focusing on the specific configurations that contributed to what we did and how we understood and valued those activities as we encountered the site ourselves and with our research participants, we were able to probe what people meant when they referred to the market’s distinctive atmosphere and to build up a more conceptual picture based on multiple interviews. Our findings thus went to what concepts and categories people used to describe or perform the ways that they sensed or ‘felt’ the things that they valued about the market, and the material and immaterial elements that made it meaningful. Moreover, the use of video and photography afforded a chance to revisit this material multiple times and reflect on what we had sensed and experienced, and what our research participants had been able to show and explain to us about their ongoing encounters at the site, as well as how it was entangled, in some cases, with longstanding histories of use and patterns of relationships in which the market played an important role. For example, research participant Edward told us about how, in having moved to Melbourne recently, he wanted to find particular foods that he could cook and eat that he was familiar with and that reminded him of his family overseas. Coming to the market reminded him of other places where he had enjoyed shopping. While his partner, with whom he regularly shopped, found the bustling crowds sometimes overwhelming and was concerned about physically blocking others as they stopped at various stalls, Edward enjoyed the busyness of the site and the presence of others, even when it was difficult to move through the crowds. He appreciated his routine experiences at the market as a manifestation of community, which was valuable to him as a recent arrival to Melbourne, as he explained: It’s actually kind of comforting to know there’s so many people in the same area doing the same thing. There’s a sense of comfort that I get from coming here and knowing that people are around and buying ­together. It’s a cool feeling. It’s nice to know that people are out, that they’re looking for fresh good food, and we’re all together doing it. It’s like a shared experience with people, you’re a part of something. Edward’s account also shows how atmosphere, which is what we were discussing in general as we made a go-along video of his shopping trip, can act as a container for other concepts. In other words, this example precisely shows how knowing in atmosphere (as we walked, talked and made the video together) can help us understand about how atmosphere is particularly and ongoingly configured (that moving through the busy crowds at the produce stalls were part of the distinctive feel of the market), which can in turn make

Space-times of atmospheres  61 possible new conceptual understandings through atmosphere (the sense of comfort, common purpose and community that such a site can engender). Other concepts were similarly illuminated through atmosphere in this project, and in the accounts of our research participants these then looped back into how they came to know in the atmosphere of the site; in this sense, while we have presented three different ways of knowing atmosphere, in terms of the research project they intermingled, connected to and informed each other. An example is the notion of expertise, an aspect of how research participants experienced and made their way through the market that we came to understand through atmosphere. Amongst our participants, people with longstanding experience of the site regarded themselves as experts and had strong views on its material and immaterial qualities that tended to favour retaining them as they were. This is because they had built up skilled knowledge of the site over long periods and had developed their own ‘best ways’ to do things through trial and error: how to select the best products; the best spots for selling their goods; the best times of day or week to shop or set up their stalls. This valued expertise was bound up in routine ways of moving through the site, the knowledge necessary to improvise successfully within it, and the sensory elements associated with these activities. Thus movement (discussed in Chapter 5), material and immaterial aspects and the distinctive sensory affordances of the site all combined into an atmosphere that was constantly changing and required improvisations to get the best out of it – and the expertise developed over time in order to do this successfully made the market (and its distinctive atmosphere) matter more to people. This helped explain public concern about proposed changes to the market, but also provided a resource for the designers, in that the commitment and passionate engagement of traders, workers and regular shoppers and visitors were all part of the site’s atmosphere, and this expertise was enacted in the ways they moved through the site, their ways of interacting with each other and how they handled, smelt and visually assessed the goods for sale. Thus, while we were able to understand and advance the concept of expertise through an investigation of atmosphere, building for example on Grasseni’s work on ‘skilled vision’ (2004) and Seale’s (2016) work on urban markets more generally, the enactment and manifestation of this expertise was also important for how we ourselves came to move through and make sense of the market when we were researching in it, as we found our own best ways through the site and our favourite spots to buy coffee or a snack. This expertise also helped us know about the market’s atmosphere as we reflected on our changing knowledge of it and compared the experiences of those of us who spent the most and least time at the site or who were there at different times. In our report, we were then able to turn this knowledge in, about and through the atmosphere of the market into a set of design implications for consideration in the renewal process. We discuss the connection between atmosphere and design further in Chapter 6.

62  Space-times of atmospheres Transurban In 2017, funded by a grant from toll road developer Transurban, we collaborated as a team of ethnographers with sound designers, artists and acoustic engineers in the Acoustic Design for Managing Motorway Traffic Noise by Cancellation and Transformation project.1 Because this was an interdisciplinary research project, we reported on it from the different perspectives of sound design and design anthropology. Here we discuss the ethnographic strand of the project we undertook in order to gain understandings of how the participants in the research experienced and felt a series of noise transformation experiences. The research also lends itself to an analysis through an atmospheric perspective, which as we show here enables us to develop additional understandings of how the material, sensory and embodied ­elements of experience configure in order to create particular ways of f­ eeling in place. The relationship between sound and place has long been at the ­c entre of ethnographic approaches to sound. For instance, Feld and ­Basso’s Senses of Place (1996) brought together soundscape research with a sense of ­locality, and there is a strong tradition of sound walk research, which explores localities through their sounds (discussed in Pink 2015: 114). Gandy (2017: 358) reminds us that ‘The complexity of urban soundscapes exemplifies the spatial porosity of atmospheres and the uncertain distinction between what constitutes “inside” and “outside.” Sound can engender a diversity of affective states such as anxiety, excitement, or indifference.’ A theory of a­ tmosphere enables us to take this forward in a new way by offering a template through which to explore how feelings of place emerge in situ. By following our method of investigating researching in, about and through ­atmosphere, we can (for this particular project) begin to understand how ­being in an atmosphere that is already marked out as being ‘special’ or different, and which we have purposefully set up in a more experimental r­ esearch context, enables a mode of atmospheres research that is reflexive and i­ ntense. These two elements of the research – its reflexivity and ­intensity – are significant to keep in mind because they offer particular routes into knowing in, about and through atmospheres. Our 2017 project took the form of necessarily short-term, team-based research prior to and during the installation of noise transformation and cancellation technologies in a small park located next to a motorway. Our research site, Charles Evans Reserve in Cremorne, Melbourne, was already popular amongst local residents and people working in nearby offices for relaxing, walking dogs and for their children to use the playground. The triangular park was surrounded by residential housing on one side, a small road and other housing on another and on the last, the length of the park was shielded from the motorway by a long sound wall and vegetation next to it. The park was well-kept, with a pleasant, leafy aesthetic (see Figure 4.2).

Space-times of atmospheres  63

Figure 4.2  T  he noise transformation tent inside Charles Evans Reserve. Photo: Melisa Duque.

Working in a team of three ethnographers (with our colleague Melisa Duque), we recruited seven women and sixteen men as research participants in total. Using the prism of atmosphere to discuss this research project offers us a mode of considering how interventions in aspects of environments can create new spatial configurations, and how these are experienced. In this sense it enables us to consider the spatiality of atmosphere, when it is configured in a context that involves a fixed locality during a particular period of time. In the following discussion, our main focus is on the atmosphere of the park from the perspective of spatiality. However, we acknowledge that once people inhabit parks they cannot be seen as sites that exist independently of the ways that people move about in and through them. As Pink’s previous research about a community garden park in a slow city in the UK has shown (Pink 2008), people very often do not go to parks so that that they can stay still, but rather, parks are encountered as parts of routes on the way to other localities, or so that people can move around in them. Therefore this ­discussion is inevitably connected to that idea in Chapter 5, which focuses specifically on movement. The ethnographic research process we followed in this project explicitly involved undertaking research in atmosphere, which was particularly important in the sense that we were researching the experience of a temporally circumscribed environment. Indeed, the approach to doing research in atmosphere resonates with approaches in sonic anthropology whereby researchers write of ‘being in sound’ to emphasise how this experience enables researchers to gain an embodied awareness of the complexity of the

64  Space-times of atmospheres multisensory experience of place (Kohn and Chenall 2017: 40). Kohn and Chenall call for autoethnographic attention to such experiences in the context of sonic research so that we might better reflect on our experiences in order to ‘have a better sense of what is required to interrogate other p ­ eople’s bodily and sonic experiences’ (Kohn and Chenall 2017: 40). When connecting this to the process of researching atmosphere, we can understand being in sound as part of being in atmosphere, engaging sound as a route into atmosphere, where we need to attend not only to the multi-sensoriality of experience, but also to the affective and material circumstances of this experience. Through this autoethnographic exercise (see Figure 4.3), in which we both listened to the four transformations and then interviewed each other regarding our experiences of each, we were able to reflect on the feelings that emerged through this experience. Clearly, the experience itself was affective and multisensory rather than simply being sonic. For example, one of the transformations was particularly relaxing. While we had our eyes closed some of the time, at other moments the leafy park and the warm wind through the moving trees blended with the sound, which itself became mixed up with the birdsong. In short, the affective and sensory affordances of the transformed sound, the haptic experience of the environment and its visual aesthetics configured with these other elements to generate particular feelings of being that gave the sense of being in a particular atmosphere. Here, to speak of our individual experiences, the concept of atmosphere provides a container into which we can bring together these elements, and in which we can account for how we began to feel attuned to the changing environment in which we experienced four different sound transformations. It does not encompass all elements that contribute to generating the feeling of atmosphere, but to those that we could sense, record, and reflect on. The result of this exercise was to enable us to start to think about the particular elements of experience we might probe participants about further and to be able to acknowledge what it felt to be in an atmosphere that was changing

Figure 4.3  S  arah (left) and Shanti undertake autoethnographic listening as a mode of inquiry. Photos: Sarah Pink and Shanti Sumartojo.

Space-times of atmospheres  65 in ways that were led by sound design interventions. It thus prepared us to ­engage empathetically with participants and their experiences in other stages of the research. The second element of this project involved us researching with participants, trying to find out about what they felt or thought about the transformed sounds, and the feelings they associated with them. However, we could not separate this from researching in the park, because we were in the environment with them and were sharing the affordances of the emergent circumstances from which atmosphere was produced. Indeed, our experience of undertaking autoethnography with the noise transformation technologies and sounds was fundamental for our reflective approach to understanding participants’ experiences of the transformation event. During the transformation event, we undertook a form of intensive and short-term ethnography (Pink and Morgan 2013) in order to collaborate with participants to interrogate their experiences with them. As part of this process of learning about atmosphere, therefore, we explicitly acknowledged our own experiences and often drew these into the research process in order to work with participants to compare their and our experiences, thus enabling us to learn both through empathy and comparison. The participants in our research were also complicit in this in a sense, because our research was undertaken in an environment specifically created for the purposes of a noise transformation experiment in which they had offered to participate. With each participant we led two activities involving listening together in the space. The first activity involved a sound walk, whereby we walked from one end of the park to the other with the participant, taking most of this walk along the sound wall (shown in Figure 4.4) between the motorway and the park.

Figure 4.4  T  he wall enclosing the park and hiding the freeway. Photo: Melisa Duque.

66  Space-times of atmospheres The hidden traffic was surprisingly close, and as we found when looking through a space in the wall, this proximity meant that sensorially the feel of the traffic was sometimes quite consuming while simultaneously partially shielded. Therefore, while sound was our focus, the research process opened up a way of understanding how participants felt about the atmosphere and what it was like for them to be in this atmosphere in a number of ways. To develop the sound walk, we invited participants to walk with us while we video recorded them and their discussion with us. We started the walk just outside the park and walked through to the other side. Having already experienced the motorway sound ourselves and, as in the sound transformation experience discussed previously, come to our own understandings of what it felt like to walk close to the wall, we now wanted to work with participants to understand how they felt when being close to it. In undertaking this ­activity we did not seek to understand how people normally experienced the park, since we knew that participants did not usually take a walk along the sound wall. Rather, we were interested in working with them to interpret the experience of being in the park in a way that was intensified both by the location of the exercise we asked them to participate in and by our discussion with them about the feelings that they experienced. This was likewise a constructed atmosphere, although brought together very differently than that which was used in the sound transformation listening exercise discussed subsequently. This activity, which invited participants to attend specifically to the motorway noise, led into and provided context for the second activity, which was a focused listening exercise that could be described as a form of ‘sound elicitation.’ Photo elicitation is a well-established research method in visual sociology (e.g. see Lapenta 2011) in which the general principle is to focus an interview around the viewing of photographs, using the interpretation of these photographs and stories or narratives produced around them as a mode of researching. In photo elicitation, as for our research, the comparison of researchers’ and participants’ understandings and feelings is a key element of the research process. In the research discussed here, the autoethnographic experiences mentioned previously, along with our relistening with participants, created ways for us to research at the intersection between our and their subjectivities, as we remained in atmosphere as the standpoint from which we sought to learn about other people’s experiences of atmosphere. Significantly, participants’ understandings of their experiences of the sound transformations referred to environmental and emotional states as well as recalling memories and connecting to other similar or resonating experiences, one of the aspects of atmosphere we discussed in ­Chapter  1. For example, participants described the sound of the first of the four transformations as subtle and relaxing. It was not separated from the park ­environment itself, but part of it: as one participant expressed, something that would ‘blend into the background’ which calmed him rather than

Space-times of atmospheres  67 making him feel annoyed by the traffic noise. Likewise, when listening to the second transformation, several participants emphasised its capacity to evoke spatial qualities. This involved describing it as ‘echoey,’ having the ability to change ‘the feel of the space around my body,’ and feeling enveloping. However, in the case of this particular transformation, the integration of body and environment was not necessarily seen as positive, since participants also described the associated feelings as tense, intense, uncomfortable, invasive, penetrating and even sinister. One perceived it as ‘at odds with the space,’ and another attributed to it a ‘science fiction feel.’ The third transformation (which was described as more pleasant) was also referred to spatially, as resembling a ‘natural environment’ in the form of ‘waves’ and ‘whooshing through the trees,’ and was discussed in terms of how it fitted with the surroundings. In common, these ways of articulating the experience of sound in situ refer to the processes and things that can be seen to constitute atmosphere, since they are about the sensory and affective feelings that are generated in relation to the affordances of the material, technological (digital sound transformation) and intangible environment. In participants’ points of ­reference, we can see how the feeling of the environment was perceived through the focus on sound. This shows us how sound is significant in the constitution of atmosphere, but that it is also inseparable from the other constituent elements. Researching through atmosphere, in the case of this project, led us to new insights about how people experience particular environments and why they are able to feel such things in them. During the fieldwork we developed several ethnographic hunches. One of these focused on the impression we had that participants in the research felt comfortable and familiar with much of the transformed sound and that this might be related to its origin in sounds that emerged from human, technology and environment relationships. When we undertook the analysis this idea was confirmed further and became one of the key themes we wrote about, including in the public report (Lacey et al 2017). The research process had demonstrated, as shown previously, how people felt in the environments created by the sound transformation experiences. We found that they experienced the environments positively through the more melodic transformations, which also sometimes reminded them of compositional music of different kinds. By focusing on participants’ experience of atmosphere, rather than of sound in isolation, we are able to see how a whole configuration of memories, materialities, emotions and sensory experiences of the environment come together to create transient atmospheres in which particular sentiments or feelings are generated. In this project this approach enabled us to generate key insights regarding how motorway sound might be revalued or recycled through the process of transformation. It still maintained its original familiar feel drawn from routine everyday traffic noise, thus making continuities with familiar everyday atmospheres. However, in this project it was made pleasant

68  Space-times of atmospheres rather than annoying through melodic transformations to together generate a sense of wellbeing. This project begins to show how design can work to intervene in or reconfigure atmospheres in interesting ways, and how this might help us think through atmospheres to reach new understandings of abstract concepts such as well-being (we return to the discussion of design in Chapter 6). Our next example also grapples with a purposefully designed site and will show the role atmosphere played in helping our research participants feel connected to the representations of history and identity in the site in their own personal terms.

The Camp des Milles Commemorative or memory sites are places that are often understood in atmospheric terms, with the feeling of these sites doing particular work to connect visitors to the historical narratives they represent. We can see this in how people commonly report their experiences in such places in visceral terms – with tears welling up, hairs standing up on the backs of necks, or a sense that such locations are haunted or spooky. These kinds of responses carry meaning and can work to make the experience of the site more memorable, even if specific historical details might be poorly understood. ­Visiting such places is as much about immediate intensities of experience, often shared with others, as it is about history. In her work on c­ ommemorative sites, Shanti has been using the notion of atmosphere to consider the ­particular configurations of environments, people, structures, objects, movements, activities and experiences – both in the past and anticipated  – at state-­sponsored memory sites during regular ritual events (Sumartojo 2015, 2016), and what these configurations might do. This has meant attending to how representative and discursive content entangles with everything else that people might be doing, feeling, sensing or thinking at commemorative and memory sites. Empirically, this means utilizing approaches that seek to move beyond what people might describe about atmosphere (although this is also valuable) and instead explore alongside them in atmosphere, and in the case of the project discussed here, by making new knowledge with them about their subsequent understandings of being in a particular historical space. A focus on how memory or history might contribute to or help conjure atmosphere – in this case, how a site might feel to visitors and the aspects that gave rise to those feelings – is in line with other recent work in human geography. This includes calls for attention to memory via morethan-­representational approaches (Drozdzewski et al 2016a, 2016b), with research in museums and memorials (Waterton and Dittmer 2014), commemorative ceremonies (Sumartojo 2015, 2016) and everyday settings where memory might unexpectedly linger or impose itself on our consciousness ­(Muzaini 2015). In much of this work, memory sites are understood in terms of how they feel to people and the emergent experiences people have in them as they encounter historical objects, texts or environments.

Space-times of atmospheres  69 In October 2016, with a colleague at Aix-Marseille University (AMU), Matthew Graves, Shanti undertook a research project at just such an official memory site, the Camp des Milles, located on the outskirts of the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. The Camp des Milles was a tile factory until 1939, when it began to be used as an internment camp for ‘enemy ­aliens’ during the Second World War. From June 1940, it was a holding and ­transition camp for foreign nationals and other ‘undesirables’ who were still able to leave France, but by 1942, its purpose had changed again to the deportation of Jewish people, many of whom were sent by rail to Auschwitz via Drancy. Despite the deportation of more than 2,000 people, after the war this history was voluntarily forgotten, and by 1947 the camp had returned to its earlier use as a tile factory, which continued until the early 1990s. In 2012 it was dedicated as a memorial and museum in a national ceremony led by the Prime Minister and was officially opened to the public. It is the only Second World War internment camp preserved in France, and its unique history is underlined by both official status as a national memory site and as a UNESCO Chair, in recognition of its international pedagogical significance (Camp des Milles, n.d.). This project saw us attend to how a memory site’s purposeful design can be part of attempts to create specific atmospheres (which we can then come to know about), the sites’ affective impact and thus their potential to transmit messages that affect visitors beyond the site itself – an effect that researching through atmospheres can reveal. By looking at how visitors (including ourselves) sense and understand the material and immaterial environments of memory sites, we can see that ‘we rarely remember through ideas only, but rather through our encounters with things and through embodiments and disembodiments collected in material traces and objects’ (Freeman et al 2016: 3–4). This encourages us to attune to these encounters and how we sense and feel about them, or in other words, to understand a visit to such a site in terms of knowing in atmosphere. Accordingly, in this project, ­k nowing in, about and through atmosphere all worked together. We asked a group of ten visitors – all students or lecturers at AMU – to photograph the elements that most drew their attention, paying particular attention to the digital aspects of the memorial as this study was primarily interested in the effects of the use of digital technology at commemorative and memory sites. The researchers accompanied the group, moving through the space with them, taking photographs and discussing it as we went. In order to attune to the atmosphere of the site – to research in it, in other words – Shanti took her own field notes and photographs to help her remember and understand her reactions to the site (see Figure 4.5). This material shows how Shanti attuned to the sensory aspects of the site by making photographs, but also gives a sense of how she saw the dusty, ruined aesthetic quality of the space. Figure 4.5 shows a room that each of the research participants also encountered, so this experience was important in her understanding of their accounts. In this sense, ‘autoethnography

70  Space-times of atmospheres

Figure 4.5  A room at the Camp des Milles memorial and museum. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

[was] a process and product of drawing on personal experiences, emotions, thoughts, and feelings to better understand those of others’ (Morgan and Pink 2017). It worked in two ways: first as a product – what was written or photographed in an attempt to ‘record’ and subsequently reflect on and draw meaning from a particular experience. Second, and more importantly for thinking in atmosphere, was the process of autoethnography conceived as a way of attending to and engaging thoughtfully with one’s own emerging experiences to gain insight, including into the worlds of others. In participating herself in the field visit with the research participants, and by making sense of this visit through writing and photographing, Shanti was able to set up a relationship with participants that allowed the interviews to take the form of conversations comparing and sharing their experiences. Similarly to the sound transformation example above, Shanti’s own experiences of the site supported a sense of empathy with participants that helped her come to understand their photographs and explanations of them, and also underpinned the creation of collaborative accounts of ­k nowing in the atmosphere of the Camp des Milles. A few days after the visit, Shanti interviewed everyone in the group she had accompanied. The research participants had been asked to each take about ten photographs and send these to Shanti before the interview. While they had been requested to particularly attend to digital aspects of the memorial site, they were also encouraged to photograph any elements that

Space-times of atmospheres  71 really made an impression on them, with no further restriction or instruction than this. While this meant that only a few of each participant’s photos were of digital technologies, it showed how these technologies were mixed in with the other objects, sensory impressions and texts, and the order in which people encountered different elements in the site. The discussion of the images, which was video recorded, was based around two questions: what had the participant taken a photo of, and why. Each interview took about 30 minutes, and these two questions allowed participants to explain and define the important aspects of the visit in their own terms. Video recording the interviews allowed the participants to talk to their photos, and made their rich and gestural language visible for subsequent consideration and reflection by the researchers. They were able to indicate different aspects of the photos, but also physically express some of their feelings about the things shown in the photos and communicate something of their embodied encounters with and in the site, such as the ways they engaged bodily with the displays, how they approached them or how they related to other elements that did not necessarily appear in the photographs. The exercise of photo elicitation and the academic writing that emerged from it (Sumartojo and Graves 2018) were attempts to know about atmospheres by identifying them in Shanti’s own accounts, as well as those of research participants, and in aspects of their photos. However, a process of knowing through atmospheres was also crucial here, as the attuning to the space, the making of visual and textual accounts, and the interview process all provided insight into what the atmosphere of Camp des Milles was directed at, or, in other words, what work was being done through its particular configuration of place (and its material and immaterial elements), objects, visitors, memory, technology and the anticipated conversations in the research exercise. It was evident to research participants that there was a clear message that the site’s directors and designers wanted to assert about the banality of evil and the individual duty to resist it ‘each in our own way’ – indeed, this narrative was clearly evident in the site’s displays and literature. However, what thinking through atmosphere showed was the variety of responses to the site and its quite explicit pedagogy, and the way its atmospheric configurations opened ways of encountering and absorbing this message that were not anticipated by participants but still prompted them to reflect on their personal connection to it. For example, when we discussed his panoramic image of the same room that Shanti photographed, and as discussed elsewhere (Sumartojo and Graves 2018) one participant related a story of his father’s workshop, a childhood memory evoked by a similar smell of ‘rust and dust’ at the Camp des Milles. This sensory experience made a powerful impression, combining with other factors – the discomfort that he imagined internees must have endured, a constant state of dirtiness that he found ‘hard to fathom’ – to comprise a powerful and atmospheric encounter that he continued to reflect on. Before arriving at the site, the

72  Space-times of atmospheres same participant had anticipated being annoyed by the displays and what he thought would be clichéd ways of representing history. However, through atmosphere an encounter was made possible that gave him an unanticipated means to make sense of a historical narrative and make it meaningful to him in a new way. In this project, thinking in, about and through atmospheres helped us understand some of the ways in which state-sponsored history sites might come to lodge in visitors’ imaginations, connect to their own memories and perhaps have an impact on how they understood their connections to these histories. It also gave us examples of where this might occur in ways that were not anticipated by museum curators or designers and that even came as a surprise to visitors themselves. As with the other examples in this book, this was because our approach allowed us to take in a range and variety of impressions rather than simply focusing on what people thought or how they reacted to the museum displays or historical representations. In addition, our own experiences of the site as ­researchers gave us a way to relate to and discuss our research participants’ ­i mpressions in affective, sensory and bodily terms that made for rich and ­productive encounters.

Conclusions In this chapter we have begun to give real examples from our own recent research of how atmospheres can be productive as an analytical framework for understanding how people make sense of (and ascribe meaning to) their experiences in the world. In doing so, we have started to substantiate what we discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 regarding understanding atmosphere as a set of ongoing and emergent configurations of many different elements. As we have begun to sketch out, we are arguing that while atmospheres inevitably exceed the conditions of their emergence, they still must be understood in terms of these configurations in order to make best analytical use of them, and that methodological approaches that take account of the felt specificities of these configurations are ­c rucial. Put differently, although atmospheres result from particular empirical conditions, they can be used conceptually in new ways when we think through them and can lend insight beyond their specific configurations. At the Camp des Milles, for example, atmosphere allowed us to gain new insight into how memory and identity might come together; in the park next to the motorway, new forms of well-being were made possible when designers worked to shape how a shared community facility ‘felt’ through sonic design. If in this chapter we have dwelt on specific space-times in which atmospheres were discernible and worked on our research participants and ourselves, in the next chapter, we shift the frame of our focus to mobility, asking what can be understood when we think through atmospheres on the move.

Space-times of atmospheres  73

Note 1 The project official report to Transurban is available to download at: www.trans urban.com/sustainability/innovation-grants/rmit-motorway-noise-project.

References Adey, P and Anderson, B (2011) Event and anticipation: UK Civil Contingencies and the space-times of decision. Environment and Planning A 43: 2878–2899. Camp des Milles (n.d.) www.campdesmilles.org/home2.html. Accessed 27 February 2018. Closs Stephens, A, Hughes, S, Schofield, V and Sumartojo, S (2017) Atmospheric memories: affect and minor politics at the ten-year anniversary of the London ­bombings. Emotion, Space and Society 23: 44–51. Drozdzewski, D, De Nardi, S and Waterton, E (2016a) Geographies of memory, place and identity: intersections in remembering war and conflict. Geography Compass 10(11): 447–456. Drozdzewski, D, De Nardi, S and Waterton, E (eds) (2016b) Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge. Edensor, T (2015) Producing atmospheres at the match: fan cultures, commercialisation and mood management in English football. Emotion Space and Society 15: 82–89. Feld, S and Basso, K (1996) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Freeman, L, Nienass, B and Daniell, R (2016) Memory, materiality, sensuality. Memory Studies 9(1): 3–12. Gandy, M (2017) Urban atmospheres. Cultural geographies 24(3): 353–374. DOI:10.1177/ 1474474017712995 Grasseni, C (2004) Skilled vision: an apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics. Social Anthropology 12(1): 41–55. Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Kohn, T and Chenall, R (2017) Being in sound: Reflections on recording while practicing Aikido and Shakuhachi. In Evangelos Chrysagis, E and Karampampas, P (eds) Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance Anthropologies of Sound and Movement. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 27–43. Lacey, J, Pink, S, Harvey, L, Qiu, X, Sumartojo, S, Zhao, S, Moore, S, and Duque, M ‘Acoustic design innovations for managing motorway traffic noise by ­cancellation and transformation’. Public report for Transurban Innovation Grant. www.trans urban.com/content/dam/transurban-pdfs/02/news/RMIT-Managing-­MotorwayNoise-Report.pdf. Lapenta, F (2011) Some theoretical and methodological view on photo-elicitation. In Margolis, E and Pauwels, L (eds) The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods. London: Sage. Massey, D (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Morgan, J. and S. Pink (2017). Researcher safety?: Ethnography in the interdisciplinary world of audit cultures. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. DOI:10.1177/1532708617745094

74  Space-times of atmospheres Muzaini, H (2015) On the matter of forgetting and ‘memory returns’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40: 102–112. Pink, S (2007) Walking with video. Visual Studies 22(3): 240–252. Pink, S (2008) Re-thinking contemporary activism: from community to emplaced sociality. Ethnos 73(2): 163–188. Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd edition. London: Sage. Pink, S and Morgan, J (2013) Short term ethnography: intense routes to knowing. Symbolic Interaction 36(3): 351–361. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K and Morosanu, R (2015) Researching atmospheres: video, knowing, feeling and temporality. Visual Communication 14(3): 351–369. DOI:10.1177/1470357215579580 Seale, K (2016) Markets, Places, Cities. London: Routledge. Sumartojo, S (2015) On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication 14(2): 267–288. Sumartojo, S (2016) Commemorative atmospheres: memorial sites, collective events and the experience of national identity. Transactions of the Institute of British ­G eographers 41(4): 541–553. Sumartojo, S and Graves, M (2018) Rust and dust: materiality and the feel of memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1359183518769110. Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017) Empathetic visuality: go-pros and the video trace. In Gómez-Cruz, E, Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (eds) Refiguring Techniques in ­Digital-Visual Research. London: Palgrave Pivot, 39–50. Vannini, P and Stewart, L (2016) The GoPro gaze. Cultural Geographies: 1–7. DOI:10.1177/1474474016647369. Waterton, E and Dittmer, J (2014) The museum as assemblage: bringing forth affect at the Australian War Memorial. Museum Management and Curatorship 29(2): 122–139.

5 Atmospheres on the move

Research on atmosphere has been dominated by work situated in place, as discussed in previous chapters, with specific attention to movement ­limited to a few notable exceptions (Bissell 2010; Edensor and Lorimer 2015; ­Kazig et al 2017). This chapter seeks to redress this by discussing examples oriented specifically towards movement, placing it at the centre of how atmosphere feels and is understood, and what meanings it carries for people. Movement here is a means to think in, about and through atmosphere and steps forward from the examples in Chapter 4 that were more concerned with spaces and environments that helped configure atmospheres, but that were not specifically characterized by motion. In doing so, this chapter offers a set of insights into how we might research atmosphere through and in movement, or ‘on the move,’ and what such an orientation can add to what we know about atmospheres. In ­Chapter 4 we focused on the spatiality of atmosphere, and here, although turning to mobility, we do not contradict that perspective. Rather, our interest in mobility is in understanding how like space and place (Massey 2005; Ingold 2008), we might see atmospheres as being constituted, at least in part, through the movement of persons and tangible and intangible materialities. In this sense, a focus on mobility is an essential companion to the discussion of atmosphere through theories of space. A second reason to bring to the fore the relationship between atmosphere and mobility is in order to be able to create new modes of r­ esearching and appreciating what mobility can mean, in ways that go beyond the representational facets of movement and the discourses that surround it. Movement has been identified as central to our ways of knowing and learning in and through the environments we inhabit, often in ways that remain unspoken (Harris 2007; Ingold 2011). In this sense, as we move through the world, as Ingold (2011: 154) has put it, people ‘know as they go.’ With reference to a theory of atmosphere, this means that we know through and in the atmospheres that are part of the configurations of circumstances that we pass through and participate in as we are on the move. This is evident across many everyday circumstances. For example, in 2016 we developed a research project about people’s experience of automated

76  Atmospheres on the move light as they commuted home through urban environments. We found that ‘Our participants experienced [automated light] as enveloped in affects such as frustration, pleasure, safety or resignation that drew them in through a combination of physical affordances, memories of previous journeys and changing states of mind on each encounter’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2017a). These experiences enabled people to label atmospheres, making them momentarily tangible. However, atmospheres did not cause people to feel their surroundings in particular ways; rather, their perceptions and feeling combined to allow them to name atmospheres as experienced on the move. In this sense, a person cannot take an atmosphere with them from one place to another, yet at the same time they cannot leave one behind and intact. This is because in order for atmosphere to be there, and for its status as an experiential phenomenon to continue, it needs to be both made and felt. The mobility paradigm that has emerged in human geography over the past decade ‘brings to the fore and enacts theories, methods and exemplars of research that so far have been mostly out of sight’ (Büscher et al 2011: 4). This development has been closely associated with the movement of people, for example, through migration (Sheller and Urry 2016), as well as on more localised movements through everyday worlds, including automobility, cycling, and walking, with specific work in mobile research c­ ontexts such as public transport (Bissell 2010); driving (Dawson 2017; Pink, Fors and Glöss 2017); urban cycling (Simpson 2017; Spinney 2009, 2011); self-­ tracking ­(Sumartojo et al 2016); walking (Edensor 2010; Edensor and Lorimer 2015; Pink 2007) and moving through the home (Pink and Leder Mackley 2016). A mobile perspective can improve how we understand atmosphere as a ­consequence of emerging and ongoing configurations of our experiences in the world, chiefly because the vast majority of these take place on the move. It follows that atmosphere provides a means of understanding our experiences as we make our way through our environments that relies on how we move along. Ingold (2010: S126) explains this from the point of view of the individual whose world is fundamentally constituted by way of movement: The wayfarer is a being who, in following a path of life, negotiates or improvises a passage as he goes along. In his movement as in life, his concern is to seek a way through: not to reach a specific destination or terminus but to keep on going. Though he may pause to rest, even returning repeatedly and circuitously to the same place to do so, every period of rest punctuates an ongoing movement. However, because this movement is foremost about finding a way through, rather than reaching a particular destination, new knowledge is continually made about the world as the wayfarer continues, making small decisions, adjusting his or her route or encountering things, people or conditions. ­Moreover, as these new understandings are accreted onto existing knowledge,

Atmospheres on the move  77 the journey becomes sedimented into how we know ourselves, inextricable from our environments and as ongoingly constituted in and through them. In this way, mobility and movement therefore allow us to foreground emergence and possibility and to orient ourselves to what might happen next – in other words, to adopt a future-oriented perspective (an idea we return to in Chapter 7). As Edensor (2012: 14) argues, everyday patterns of movement and activity are ‘characterized by immanent and emergent possibilities as well as repetitive rhythms.’ In terms of atmosphere, it follows that a sense of futurity and potential is an important quality of how atmospheres are perceived and constituted when we are in motion. We continue to extend this line of inquiry in the next chapter, which looks in detail at atmosphere and design, wherein design is an explicit attempt to craft or shape aspects of the future through new forms of intervention. Accordingly, this chapter works to connect the discussion in Chapter 4 on where (and when) atmospheres might emerge with how they might be intervened in (Chapter 6) by focusing specifically on their ongoingness, a characteristic most evident and discernable in studies of movement. It would therefore be a mistake to consider atmosphere as a series of ­configurations that we might simply move through, entering and exiting them as if they were bound, contained or somehow lent space a uniformity of ­affective quality or intensity. Instead, just as we have been arguing, our perspective on atmospheres allows us to see how they are ongoingly configured, and the examples in this chapter identify precisely what new insights attending to mobility can bring our understanding of these configurations. Whereas in the previous chapter we focused on how atmospheres configure in particular localities, and in doing so, asked how we might research people’s experiences of the spatiality of atmosphere, here we put human movement at the centre. This requires us to undertake research by way of methods that can move with participants. This follows a long tradition in following people as they move through their lives and worlds, as in anthropology, visual anthropology (e.g. Pink 2007, 2015) and geography (e.g. Larsen 2014; Spinney 2009). Here we also pursue our interest in how mobility is part of the experience of being in atmospheres; mobile modes of doing research about other people’s experiences of atmospheres; and what we can learn through the study of atmosphere in movement. In the next section, we present three extended examples from our own recent research that placed movement at the centre of inquiry, discussing in detail the methods we used, the materials we made with our research participants and the findings from the studies that helped us advance our thinking about atmospheres.

Encountering atmospheres on the move Self-tracking and cycle commuting In early 2015, along with Deborah Lupton and Christine Heyes LaBond, both from the University of Canberra, we conducted a study of the use

78  Atmospheres on the move of self-tracking devices by cycle commuters in Melbourne and Canberra, ­Australia. We wanted to investigate how people created, understood and made use of the self-tracking data they produced during their rides; how this related to their understandings of their own exertion, distances and speeds; and how they managed aspects such as sharing it with others online, or coped with the loss or corruption of data (see Lupton et al 2017; Pink et al 2017a, 2017b; Sumartojo et al 2016). The study gave us a way to think about space and ways of apprehending it as datafied, but also about movement itself through space as datafied. ­However, an additional implication was that these elements configured in ways that could be identified as atmospheric, and that these atmospheres, experienced both on the move and as a result of movement, gave us a way to think about the meanings of data and its relationship to spatiality. In other words, the materials that our research participants produced themselves and in their discussions with us drew together distance, speed and location understood as both quantified and experiential, sensory and affective in multiple and dynamic ways. Movement was integral to how people’s environments were ongoingly configured, and both the manner and the means by which they moved drew in many of the elements through which atmospheres arise: practices (tracing regular routes; routines of preparation, departure and ­arrival; regular reasons to choose whether to cycle or not on a given day); infrastructures (roads, maps, cycle lanes); technologies (bikes, smartphones, GPS trackers, heart monitors); and remembered and anticipated experiences of riding. As with the examples in Chapter 4, these configurations changed constantly and were accompanied by affects that emerged as a result of their relationships with each other, to the degree that research participants came to understand their routes as being characterised by different atmospheres that they moved through, with various elements coming together in familiar ways that offered particular feelings during and about their rides. The methodology we used combined video footage the participants recorded with helmet or bike-mounted action cameras, our video interviews with them as we watched and discussed this footage together and their explanations to us of their online data. In our portion of the study, we were less interested in the actual data about their rides that participants had produced, and more in how it felt, how it related to particular spatial aspects of their rides such as milestones, and how knowledge of the creation of such data (and the potential to later share it with a wider community of riders) might change what they did and how they felt about their rides. We gave each participant a small, helmet-mounted GoPro action camera and asked them to record a typical commute, including their routine preparations to ride and what they did when they arrived at their destination. After viewing and editing the footage ourselves into shorter versions, we then interviewed them about their footage. Where feasible, we interviewed them at home so that they could show us the location of their routines at the beginning and end of their commutes and re-enact them as much as possible. By asking

Atmospheres on the move  79 them to show us what they did at these moments, rather than just describe it, we were able to discuss in detail the sensory, material and immaterial aspects of their experiences that might otherwise have slipped beneath their notice. Video footage made with or by research participants has great utility in focusing on movement, and the GoPros allowed us to move along with participants and discuss their journeys with them as we watched them together on the screen. Even before this stage of the research, however, our own process of watching back and editing the footage before the interview allowed us to enter the worlds of the participants, to know something of what it was to be like in their atmospheres, a process of ‘empathetic visuality’ that we have discussed elsewhere (Sumartojo and Pink 2017b). It was also a means to come to know about the atmospheres of their rides as we discussed the footage with them in interview. This encounter with movement, which was made possible by the use of video, and the associated conversation about it, thereby helped us know both in and about atmosphere. As we discuss in detail elsewhere, Brian’s footage provides an example (Sumartojo et al 2016). He explained his experience of his regular ride home from work in lively and gestural terms (see Figure 5.1), communicating how it felt (sensorially and emotionally) to move up and over bridges, along paths and around pedestrians and other riders. He clapped his hands, snapped his fingers, plucked at his shirt and puffed air in his cheeks to express bursts of speed, smooth movements, breathlessness or becoming too warm. Different sections of his ride were expressed by different movements and had different intensities and meanings; in other words, a range of different atmospheres emerged regularly as he moved along the trace of his commute, constantly making small adjustments and decisions but with sufficient foreknowledge of the route to be able to anticipate how the feel of it might imminently change. Larsen (2014: 62) remarks on the ‘work that is required of mobile bodies,’ describing how ‘embodied mobile engagement means that cyclists feel (rather than see or measure) the contours of places.’ This could also be expressed as cyclists knowing in the atmospheres of their regular routes – ­including how their moving, working bodies feel and are thereby constituting parts of those dynamic ways of knowing and feeling. Indeed, as we reported about Brian’s account, the gestures he employed told us about the mobile and bodily terms in which he understood and chose to communicate how his ride felt affectively, ‘such as the whooshing excitement of going as fast as possible, which he expressed with a sound and facial expression rather than words.’ As we described, our video-based technique allowed us to consider ‘how the different sections of the ride were both embodied and affective… [Brian’s] datafied rides were bound up with emergent affects as he traced new paths through familiar but changing environments and bodily, climatic and road conditions’ (Sumartojo et al 2016: 36). Brian gave us an example of what it felt like to be in the atmospheres that coalesced during

80  Atmospheres on the move

Figure 5.1  Brian gestures as he describes the sensation of speed when cycling down a hill. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

his ride as he described them by way of the video footage he had made, the self-tracking data he regularly recorded, his bodily recollections of moving and how he felt at particular points along the way. Bianca offered another perspective. She was a serious amateur athlete who regularly competed in road races and treated her daily 70-km commute as a form of training. To manage the tedium she felt during her rides she had devised ways of making the isolation and physical challenges more ­manageable – in other words, she anticipated and accepted the potential emotional and physical discomfort of her commute and had configured various digital technologies to ameliorate this. For example, she often conducted phone calls with colleagues overseas as she rode, checked her emails via her smartphone (attached to her handlebars) and a wrist-mounted Fitbit and checked traffic and weather conditions using the voice-activation function on her smartphone. Another set of configurations involved the weather, wind and other road users, which were each slightly different with every ride, even though her route did not vary. Although she perceived her rides as routine to the point of tedium, she also recognised that they constantly changed. Nevertheless, to keep herself motivated, she had developed a series of mental ‘gates’ that partitioned her long ride into smaller sections over which she could muster a sense of achievement: I’ve got milestones all the way, so I know when I’m five k, ten k, I know certain places, like the clock tower, I know exactly how far I have to go … I know gates too, so I know exactly how fast or slow I should be to make a certain time, so I can predict when I’ll get to work by the gates I’ve hit.

Atmospheres on the move  81 Even if routine, these gates were moments of intensity, spatial anchors of atmospheres through which Bianca understood the metrics of her ride (such as speed, distance travelled and distance to go), and thereby her fitness and any improvement or diminution in her strength and physical condition. As she explained, ‘I know that if I look down and I’ve done 15 min [at a particular set of traffic lights on the way home] I know I’m going to be at home in x amount of time.’ At particular stages she would telephone her husband at home to tell him how long until she arrived, thus imbuing certain points in her route with a feeling of anticipation. Thus ‘the affective aspect of passing each of these milestones was integral to how she understood and encountered the “datafied” space she was traversing, which was also constituted by the creation and measurement via digital devices of her distance, speed and power output’ (Sumartojo et al 2016: 38). Bianca understood her commute both in the changing feel of the atmospheres she perceived herself to be moving through and in thinking about those atmospheres came to understand the quality of her ride. Moreover, data and the digital technologies co-constituted these atmospheres on the move, ‘not just for measuring and recording things like heart rate, distance and speed, but also in terms of boredom, achievement, anticipation and mental exhaustion that are inextricable from those data and the spaces they traverse’ (Sumartojo et al 2016: 38). In both these examples, the video footage we asked participants to make also allowed us to see the world as moving around them from their perspectives and how this movement brought things into configuration in changing ways. Simpson (2017: 443) similarly discusses the ‘specific momentary combinations of bodies and materialities’ that comprise atmospheres for cycling commuters sharing mixed-used footpaths and roads with cars, pedestrians and other cyclists. These moments of things relating to each other generated feelings that were distinctive to specific places along participants’ regular routes of movement. In this sense, framing this study as being about atmosphere tells us something new about self-tracking: that people understand and feel things about it that are constituted not just of data and its creation (which never sits outside other things such as people’s surrounding environments, relationships, and practices), but also that it carries affective charges that are not only configured with but are also understood in terms of the movements that give rise to it. In other words, thinking through atmosphere allowed us to open up new perspectives on movement, and in the case of this study, data and self-tracking. Care and wellbeing in hospital In the previous example, thinking atmospherically bolstered our approach to new insights into self-tracking and datafied space. In other contexts, entering in atmosphere, and subsequently thinking about it as part of a research team and with our participants, also opened new insights. This was the case as we

82  Atmospheres on the move employed the conceptual pairing of movement and atmospheres to help us understand values of care and well-being in a busy public hospital setting. From 2016–2018, we were part of a team that conducted an ethnographic ­investigation into the relationship between design and well-being in an ­Australian regional hospital’s psychiatric inpatient units. We set out to u ­ nderstand how users of the units – patients, visitors and staff – experienced the wards. This meant focusing on how material and immaterial configurations came together in particular ways for different people, how they navigated and improvised within these environments, and how they perceived, understood and valued them. At the core of our approach was close attention to the sensory perceptions of the units and how these related to the values that emerged as important in the study – namely, feelings of homeliness, care and safety. This project built on existing work concerning how atmospheres of care can be constituted in healthcare settings. For example, within sociology Martin et al (2015) provide a useful overview of the role that the built environment can play in reinforcing relationships of power and identity that are often at play in hospitals and other sites of medical care. They propose that hospital buildings comprise ‘architectural expression of medical values and healthcare practices’ (Martin et al 2015: 1011) that situate encounters in these sites in particular social and structural terms. We take a different angle of approach, however, in that when we attended to the experiences of people in the hospital setting, we sought to explore how the built environment felt to people – or how it could be understood atmospherically – and the implications for designing to best support feelings of well-being for everyone. Accordingly, building on principles of sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and seeking to go along with people, we asked participants to show us their environments, discuss with us what they valued and how they felt about various aspects, and demonstrate to us their routines within them. We filmed these encounters, or, where participants preferred, recorded audio and took photographs (as directed by participants) to accompany the audio. We also made notes and took photographs of our own experiences in the wards, which included attending to the transitions of entering and leaving and how we experienced their sensory, affective, material and mobile aspects. This go-along approach inevitably meant moving and talking with participants as they made their way around the wards or moved in and out of them from other areas of the hospital or outside. As we discussed their use of the site, participants also showed us how they moved within rooms, kitchens, storage cupboards and common areas, so that a picture soon emerged of the hospital as a site in which care was perceived as occurring ‘on the move.’ This meant that different forms of well-being were also constituted in (and by) movement of different types and at different spatial scales. Not only did people move in and through the inpatient units themselves, but the wards were also part of a bigger spatial context that stretched beyond the psychiatric areas to the larger hospital, the local community, and into the wider regional district served by the hospital.

Atmospheres on the move  83 Moreover, these different spatialities carried different affective charges and could be conceptualised as configured atmospherically in a range of ways. For example, in the inpatient facilities that Psychiatric Services occupied in 2016, when the first phase of our study was conducted, transferring patients between different areas of the hospital, such as from the emergency department (where patients might initially be admitted to one of the ­Inpatient Units), could include a short walk through car parks and service areas, with the accompanying possibility that a patient might abscond. The attention of staff escorting patients along this exterior route was heightened during the short trip between interior spaces of different hospital buildings that felt more secure to them, and a sense of relief accompanied the entry to the locked ward – which was a contrast to how they imagined patients felt in ­entering this same space, one that afforded them much less autonomy (but potentially more safety) that the world outside the ward. Thus the feelings that staff experienced and what they imagined patients experiencing were quite distinct and changed as they moved in and out of the buildings themselves. Another aspect of movement that emerged as important was how care was enacted and configured on the move by way of the trolleys that were associated with cleaning, eating and the distribution of medicines within the inpatient units (see Figure 5.2). For example, we discovered that trolleys were an element that had to be present in order for atmospheres of care to coalesce in the particular environments of the older persons’ ward, because the patients in that ward were themselves less able to move around and go to the things they needed, like food, medicine or medical equipment such as pulse monitors. In other words, trolleys were crucial in configuring care in the older persons’ psychiatric inpatient unit, and also gave us as researchers

Figure 5.2  The cleaning trolley was a valued ‘friend’ (left), and the catering trolley enabled the enactment of care through the careful and personalised plating and provision of meals. Photos: Shanti Sumartojo.

84  Atmospheres on the move a way to think atmospherically about what care felt like, what had to configure in order for this feeling to emerge and accordingly, some of the ways in which it might be supported. The use of different types of trolleys for different purposes was a noticeable aspect of care on the wards. These technologies were not only part of different aspects of care for the patients and for the ward environment, such as cleaning or catering, but staff expressed their use of them directly in terms of how they helped demonstrate and enact care for patients and themselves. In this sense, trolleys helped constitute in different ways atmospheres that were understood as safe, respectful or homely. For example, for Jenny, cleaning the common areas and patient rooms in the older persons’ ward was not only a hygienic necessity, but also an important form of caring for patients. She understood this work as central to making sure that people in the ward (including herself) were protected from infection, and that it smelled pleasant and appeared looked-after – so care was also associated with safety and hygiene apprehended sensorially. Her work meant moving through the ward every day in quite routine ways, cleaning in a particular order but still improvising as needed, and her ­trolley was vital in doing this work. Every morning, she customised her cleaning trolley with the cleaning products and other things she needed for her daily shifts, and how she adjusted this each morning depended on the type of tasks she anticipated. For example, if she knew that a patient would be discharged, this meant that their newly vacated room might need a deeper clean and so she would select stronger bleach or different deodorising drops. Her capacity to move back and forth to the storage cupboard and whether she might need to leave the trolley locked and briefly unattended on the ward were also daily considerations. Jenny’s movements within and through the inpatient unit and the trolley that accompanied her not only represented, but actually enabled her to constitute, an atmosphere of care on the move. As researchers, we accompanied Jenny on some of her routines, such as preparing the trolley in the morning and deep cleaning a room, to gain insight into how her activities co-constituted an atmosphere of care from the inside. But thinking atmospherically also helped us link what she was doing to a larger atmosphere of care in the ward, and how this was responsive to changing needs of patients, different staff members coming on and off shift and other daily contingencies. This atmosphere of care included how Jenny and others took care of themselves and colleagues, helping themselves to feel safe as they moved around the facility. Jenny, for example, helped herself to feel safe by way of the trolley, which not only accompanied her, but she also sometimes used if she felt physically uncertain in an occasionally volatile environment. As she explained, I just love the whole trolley, I love the security, I can lock it up…the trolley’s awesome…It’s a good protection [if anyone is coming towards her

Atmospheres on the move  85 aggressively]…I can use that, just gently push between the patient and myself and just move away from the situation…it actually can be a good friend… The trolley was therefore a mobile object with particular physical ­affordances – material robustness, manoeuvrability, carrying capacity – that signalled and constituted care for Jenny, and that she used and understood on the move. But more than that, because many patients on this particular ward were not very mobile themselves due to age-related infirmity, trolleys were actually central to how an atmosphere of care could emerge because staff had to go to patients, rather than the other way around. This was most clearly exemplified in the catering trolley that Debbie used to provide patients with their midday and evening meals. This trolley incorporated an oven, plate warmer and heated serving area, and she wheeled it to and from the kitchen and the main ward area twice a day. ­Debbie knew each patient’s preferences, including whether they needed their food chopped or minced, how much they had eaten earlier, whether a larger portion might be welcome, and whether they preferred, for example, rice or potatoes. She also had a very considered approach to plating the food, and she explained that she would hope any relative of hers in a similar institution would receive the same thoughtful care, as she arranged scoops of food aesthetically and carefully drizzled gravy on each portion. For Debbie, this was a caring and careful attempt to make otherwise unappealing food more appetising and  encourage patients to eat properly (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3  A plated ‘minced meal,’ with scoops of food arranged carefully and drizzled with enticing gravy. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

86  Atmospheres on the move But beyond this, the mobile affordances of the catering trolley opened up ways of expressing, enacting and constituting an atmosphere of care that was respected by other staff members who delivered the carefully plated food to individual patients at Debbie’s instruction. Being able to move to patients, the daily rhythms of food delivery, the careful plating of meals and the collection and removal of dishes by staff was a banal but important aspect of being in an atmosphere of care on the move. Furthermore, as with Jenny, Debbie had a sense of pride and care in the mobile equipment she used, knew its idiosyncrasies and could accommodate and manage them and spoke about the sensory and emotional feelings she encountered along her daily routes through the wards and in her engagements with patients. As with the cleaning trolley, this was important for staff identity and well-being and the value they placed in their work as caregivers. In additional to knowing in atmosphere by moving along with Jenny and Debbie, by thinking about atmosphere, we as researchers were able to see that movement and the trolleys were important. This in turn led to ­practice-based design work in later, related projects that created prototypes for new trolleys that could support and extend this feeling. Moreover, by thinking through atmosphere, our overall understanding of care was able to expand to take in movement more explicitly and to speak back to other work that tends to conceptualise care as emplaced but without necessarily considering its mobile aspects. Thinking about care on the move by way of atmosphere also helped us identify and contribute to design interventions that placed movement at the centre – we discuss this further in the next chapter. It also emphasised how atmospheres can be quite routine, mundane and bound up in an object as humble as a cleaning trolley. We discuss the banal qualities of atmospheres further in the final example of this chapter. Moving through the home In many recent projects, human movement through the home has been a core focus for understanding the experience of home and the ways in which people generate improvisatory ways of ‘feeling right’ in them. This has led to a focus on atmosphere, as the merit of focusing on atmosphere as an ethnographic and analytical concept is that by bringing it to the foreground of the analysis we can ­investigate how specific elements of home - such as light, heating or sound - are used and improvised with. (Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017: 55) For example, this includes discussions of the relationship between lighting and atmosphere in homes (Bille 2015; Pink, Leder Mackley and Morosanu 2015; Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017), and media and atmosphere in homes

Atmospheres on the move  87 (Pink, Leder Mackley and Morosanu 2015; Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017). There is also a wider utility to researching and analysing homes and the lives that intersect with them according to our principles of researching in, about and through atmospheres, in that such an approach enables us to gain a deep appreciation of home that brings together the affective, material, social and technological dimensions of everyday life, as is demonstrated in the examples discussed here. Moreover, in the studies cited here, there has been an appreciation of how elements of atmospheres emerge from the affordances of relatively static technologies or other materialities, while others are generated by the movement of people and things. Researching atmospheres in homes therefore requires us to attend to both spatiality and movement – this is similar to the discussion in Chapter 4 of the spatiality of a park that could also be understood by way of people’s movement in and through it. Pink and the research teams she has collaborated with have researched in homes through a number of projects in UK, Spain, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil. Here we should note that while we acknowledge that the concept of home is not necessarily always equated with a house or apartment (see Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017; Rapport and Dawson 1998), in the work we discuss here, we are specifically concerned with homes of this kind. In all of these projects, movement through the home has been used as a research method, in acknowledgment of how it is an integral aspect of how people go about undertaking and accomplishing their mundane everyday domestic routines. This research has been undertaken in the context of home care (Pink 2004), laundry processes (Pink and Astari 2015; Pink and Postill 2016), energy demand reduction (Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017) and screenless futures (Pink, Gomes et al 2017). By focusing empirically on the question of how people go about feeling ‘right’ both emotionally and sensorially in their homes, and what resources they need to have in order to do so, some of this research has been used to critically respond to existing theories of atmosphere by arguing that atmospheres are ongoing and mundane, rather than limited to affective intensities only (Pink et al 2015, 2016). If we see atmosphere as constituted through an ongoingly shifting configuration of different things and processes that are generative of ways of feeling, then we can understand human movement through the home as involving moving through and with changing atmospheres, as people pass through the material, sensory and social configurations of the environment. Indeed, people often deliberately intervene in producing these changes, for instance, by putting on music, switching on a light or a TV or other appliance, lighting a candle when moving into or through a room or by cleaning or repairing the material or sensory environment. Some of these interventions, particularly those that are deliberate, might be related to more dramatic events, such as decorating a room for a birthday party or other celebration. However, some of the most significant elements of making or configuring atmosphere as one moves through the home occur as part of very mundane routines. For example, these might be moments such as those described by

88  Atmospheres on the move Pink, Gomes et al (2017) based on their research in Brazilian homes, where the TV is left on in the ‘background.’ As Pink and Leder Mackley (2013) discuss, the digital presence of technologies that are on ‘standby’ mode are part of the environment of home. Through a focus on how participants in their research used electric lights when moving through the home on their ways to bed, Pink and Leder Mackley (2016) have demonstrated how the atmosphere of the ‘night time home’ was constituted in particular ways by the participants in their research, as they followed habitual routines of using light as part of their movements but not necessarily simply as a means through which to visually scrutinize their surroundings. Part of the atmosphere of home is also constituted through its relationship to the weather and other things external to a house or flat; for e­ xample, a participant in one project discussed the drafts of air that might come through a badly insulated door. Likewise, in our research about motorway noise transformation discussed in Chapter 4, participants discussed with us how their experience of home was impacted by the noise of moving traffic, and in one case, of people outside their home. One participant described how, while the traffic noise was a slight annoyance, he did not really notice it in contrast to the sound of the rowing club practising on the nearby river, which was very noisy early in the morning because of the coaches shouting at the rowers from the riverbank. Therefore, when seeking to understand how atmospheres are made in homes, we need to account not just for human movement and activity indoors, but also for the movement of things and persons outside, including traffic, human sounds and flows of air. In other words, as flows of things in movement configure to make place and space, they are also felt by the people with whom they configure to contribute to the constitution of experiential atmospheres. Atmospheres in homes are not only part of mundane everyday life, but also happen within the context of intimate lives and relationships. They may be experienced alone, or with just one or two others; that is, they occur in everyday circumstances that tend to be hidden from others, and therefore would not usually be obvious to or observable by researchers. This raises the question of how to research the atmospheres of home. Elsewhere Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017 in their book Making Homes, detail a series of research methods that have been specifically developed for researching the home through ethnography and design. Here we focus specifically on mobile methods and how they enable us to better understand our three modes of researching in, about and through homes. Much of what people do in homes involves movement. This is not to say that people do not sit in their homes – for instance, they eat, watch TV and of course lie down to sleep for a large proportion of the time they are there. Our point however is that everyday routines of movement and activity are often what keep everyday life in the home ticking along. Routines of movement are usually pivotal moments of transition, renewal and maintenance in everyday life in the home; they include going to bed and getting up in the morning, cleaning and tidying and

Atmospheres on the move  89 other forms of material care similar to the cleaning and provision of food described in the hospital example earlier. These activities are essential elements of the constitution of the atmospheres of home and of the ways these atmospheres are felt and experienced. The challenge for the researcher concerns how to get into these atmospheres with others to learn in, about and through them. When we begin to research atmospheres (of movement) in other people’s homes we are likely to take with us our own culturally specific, gendered, and generally biographical experiences and assumptions about home. In this sense, doing research in atmospheres means that we need, as researchers, to consider how particular configurations make us feel, so that we can be reflexive about our own feelings about other people’s homes. Because home is, as noted previously, such an intimate environment, the sensory affordances of other people’s homes can sometimes be overwhelming or bewildering – we can encounter temperatures, smells, levels of humidity, sounds or visual designs that we do not initially know exactly how to i­ nterpret. As social work scholar Harry Ferguson puts it, It helps us to articulate how when home visiting professionals do not step into neutral spaces but places pervaded by complex meanings and atmospheres. Some atmospheres are experienced consciously and ­physically, through smells, noise and touch that “hit you in the face.” (Ferguson 2009: 476) Part of the work of the ethnographer is to seek to put these elements ­together with the affective elements of other people’s engagements with them, which can therefore make them comprehensible. It is this that enables us to understand what atmospheres are and what they can mean by being in them. One way to come to understand such atmospheres is to ask ourselves how they are constituted– that is, what routines of movement and activity must happen in order to make them come about, and what these activities mean to people. In doing so we can attend to our own experiences of atmosphere while also seeking to comprehend how these feel to others. To unpick these processes, we need research methods that can follow people and things in movement. As we have been describing in this chapter, there are various ways to achieve this, including researchers accompanying people as they move; taking notes, remembering or video or audio recording as they do so; and asking participants to use technologies to record their experiences of moving through the home themselves. ­ ackley In their research into energy demand in homes, Pink and Leder M developed methods that have been used to analyse atmospheres by being in atmospheres with participants: by following and video recording the participants as they traced familiar routes through their homes in order to research about their experiences. This method has been discussed extensively elsewhere (e.g. Pink, Leder Mackley et al 2017) so we do not repeat

90  Atmospheres on the move the discussion here. However, we note that as a technology for research, the handheld video camera offers a useful route into researching atmospheres for two reasons: firstly, because it enables us to move through an atmosphere, video recording as we go through and collecting aspects of the changing configurations of atmosphere that are experienced (albeit differently) by ourselves as researchers and by participants; and secondly, because it creates a record that we can use to discuss the ­feelings – sensory and emotional – and the materiality of the situation with the participant later. This enables us to use a visual and aural record to invoke the participant’s memories of the experience and thereby learn more about atmospheres as they are specifically configured. A second way to research in atmospheres and about participants’ experiences is to ask them to video or otherwise record aspects of their lives as they move through their homes. In their research about the use of screen-based technologies in Brazilian homes, Pink et al (2017) used a combination of both researcher and participant-recorded GoPro videos, which enabled them to learn about the detail of the ways in which people engaged with and configured the material, technological and experiential elements of their everyday home environments in order to accomplish everyday tasks. The GoPro videos, followed by interviews, created a different but equally valuable mode of moving through the home with the participant, and of creating empathetic research engagements with the atmospheres of other people’s homes. The final point is about researching through atmospheres in homes. ­Ferguson has shown how atmosphere can be a key concept for understanding the capacity of social workers to be able to carry out their roles on family home visits, particular in difficult situations. As he puts it, when there is no overt hostility, stage-management or manipulation of the worker going on, the resistances are much less tangible; they are in the air, the atmosphere. Unconscious communication occurs where the message ‘don’t move’ and ‘don’t ask’ to see, listen to, walk with or touch the child is projected into the worker by abusive and/or fearful carers. There is then something in the atmosphere of homes where child maltreatment goes on and the emotions and relationships they embody which often stops professionals from feeling able to move more freely in them. (Ferguson 2009: 475). Indeed, as Pink et al (2015) have found, atmosphere provided a useful frame through which to understand how sensory and affective feelings of home are produced in movement as they carried out research encounters in homes. As such, combined with Ferguson’s observations, it is not only that the atmospheres that we research and seek to understand might be impacted by movement, but also that movement can play an important role in the making of the atmosphere of the research itself. Importantly, this then reflects or connects with the atmosphere of the home or other locality in question.

Atmospheres on the move  91

Conclusions In this chapter, we have discussed a range of situations in which attending specifically to movement has helped us think in, about and through atmosphere. If we can conceive of ourselves as always in the flow of atmospheres already in motion, constantly shifting and contingent, and available to us if we chose or are compelled to attune to them, then this is especially evident in situations where movement is a central analytical focus. There are two reasons for this: first, because we can see how atmospheres are made in part by the sensation or awareness of movement, as in the earlier example regarding cycle commuting; and second, because many of our everyday activities in the world are undertaken on the move. As we have argued in this chapter and the previous one, atmospheres’ ongoing and emergent ­c onfigurations can be discerned and can generate very different analytical outcomes depending on whether we orient ourselves towards their space-times, as in Chapter 4, or understand them as part of worlds that are on the move, as we have discussed in this chapter. When we adopt this latter position, it demands that we meet the empirical challenges of investigating atmospheres with approaches that are themselves mobile, and, for example, that seek to go along with our own and others’ experiences in motion. In other words, it is crucial that we move in and with atmospheres in order to be able to think about and through them. The three examples in this chapter have showed how we have done this in various ways. Another crucial aspect of thinking about atmosphere on the move is the anticipatory mode that precedes but also gives meaning to that movement. In other words, if we incrementally come to learn and know as we go through the world, then we also imagine what might happen next, how we can prepare for it, how will we cope or react to it, and how it could change us. For instance, in the hospital example from earlier in the chapter, Jenny the cleaner showed us how she stocked her trolley every morning based on what she anticipated she would encounter that day on the ward, including any special deep cleaning tasks or jobs that she would do perhaps once a week. Thus, in imagining her key activities and movements for the day, she helped to constitute the atmosphere on the ward as she anticipated it. This shows how movement has an inevitable future orientation, always containing the seed of what we imagine might come next. But it also suggests the importance of considering futurity when we think about atmospheres, a topic that we grapple with in the final two chapters of this book. We begin in Chapter 6 by turning to design and atmospheres, building on the discussion so far by focusing on how thinking atmospherically can open a route to intervention in the world. In the final chapter, we extend this to directly consider atmospheres and futurity, and what might be made possible politically in, about and through atmospheres.

92  Atmospheres on the move

References Bille, M (2015) Lighting up cosy atmospheres in Denmark. Emotion, Space and ­Society 15: 56–63. Bissell, D (2010) Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 270–289. Büscher, M, Urry, J and Witchger, K (eds) (2011) Mobile Methods. London: Routledge. Dawson, A (2017) Driven to sanity: an ethnographic critique of the senses in ­automobilities. TAJA. 28(1): 3–20. Edensor, T (2010) Walking in rhythms: place, regulation, style and the flow of experience. Visual Studies 25(1): 69–79. Edensor, T (2012) Illuminated atmospheres: anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30: 1103–1122. Edensor, T and Lorimer, H (2015) ‘Landscapism’ at the Speed of Light: darkness and illumination in motion. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 97(1): 1–16. Ferguson, H (2009) Performing child protection: home visiting, movement and the struggle to reach the abused child. Child & Family Social Work 14: 471–480. DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00630.x Harris, M (ed) (2007) Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning. Oxford: Berghahn. Ingold, T (2008) Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning A 40: 1796–181. Ingold, T (2010). Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, ­k nowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, Supplement s1: S121–S139. Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. ­Oxford: Routledge. Kazig, R, Masson, D and Thomas, R (2017) Atmospheres and mobility: An introduction. Mobile Culture Studies: The Journal 3: 7–20. Larsen, J (2014) (Auto)ethnography and cycling. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17(1): 59–71. Lupton, D, Pink, S, Heyes Labond, C and Sumartojo, S (2017) Digital traces in context: personal data contexts, data sense and self-tracking cycling. International Journal of Communication 11: 647–665. Martin, D, Nettleton, S, Buse, C, Prior, L and Twigg, J (2015) Architecture and health care: a place for sociology. Sociology of Health and Illness 37: 1007–1022. DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.12284 Massey, D (2005) For space. London: Sage. Pink, S (2004) Home Truths. Oxford: Berg. Pink, S (2007) Walking with video. Visual Studies 22(3): 240–252. Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Pink, S and Astari, N (2015) Laundry Lives. Documentary Film. www.laundrylives. com. Accessed 11 June 2018. Pink, S and Postill, J (2016) Student migration and domestic improvisation: understanding transient migration though the experience of everyday laundry Transitions 1(1).

Atmospheres on the move  93 Pink, S and Leder Mackley, K (2013) Saturated and situated: rethinking media in everyday life. Media, Culture and Society 35(6): 677–691. DOI:10.1177/ 0163443713491298 Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K and Morosanu, R (2015) Researching in atmospheres: video and the ‘feel’ of the mundane. Visual Communication 14(3): 351–369. Pink, S, Fors, V and Glöss, M (2017) Automated futures and the mobile present: incar video ethnographies. Ethnography. DOI:10.1177/1466138117735621 Pink, S, Sumartojo, S, Lupton, D and Heyes LaBond C (2017a) Mundane data: the routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living. Big Data and ­Society. DOI:10.1177/2053951717700924. Pink, S, Sumartojo, S, Lupton, D and Heyes LaBond, C (2017b) Empathetic ­technologies: Digital materiality and video ethnography. Visual Studies 32(4): 371–381. Pink, S, Gomes, A, Santiago Caminha, C, Porto C de Souza, A and Zilse, R (2017) ‘Design ethnography for screenless interaction style: hands-on and no-hands in early morning routines’ IHC 2017, October 23–27, 2017, Joinville, Brazil © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503–6377–8/17/10. DOI:10.1145/3160504.3160524 Pink, S and Leder Mackley, K (2016) Moving, making and atmosphere: Routines of home as sites for mundane improvisation. Mobilities 11(2): 171–187. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K, Morosanu, R, Mitchell, V and Bhamra, T (2017) ­Making Homes: ethnographies and designs. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Rapport, N and Dawson, A (eds) (1998) Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Sheller, M and Urry, J (2016) Mobilizing the new mobilities paradigm. Applied ­Mobilities 1(1): 10–25. Simpson, P (2017) A sense of the cycling environment: Felt experiences of infrastructure and atmospheres. Environment and Planning A 49(2): 426–447. Spinney, J (2009) Cycling the city: Movement, meaning and method. Geography Compass 3(2): 817–835. Spinney, J (2011) A chance to catch a breath: Using mobile video ethnography in cycling research. Mobilities 6(2): 161–182. Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017a) Moving through the Lit World: The emergent experience of urban paths. Space and Culture. DOI:10.1177/1206331217741079 Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017b) Empathetic visuality: Go-pros and the video trace. In Gómez-Cruz, E, Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (eds) Refiguring Techniques in ­Digital-Visual Research. London: Palgrave Pivot, 39–50. Sumartojo, S, Pink, S, Lupton, D and Heyes LaBond, C (2016) The affective intensities of datafied space. Emotion, Space and Society 21: 33–40.

6 Design and intervention

In this chapter we focus on the question of how design practice and intervention might become involved in making the circumstances through which atmospheres emerge. Whereas in earlier chapters we have focused on the experience and constitution of atmosphere in everyday contexts, here we shift our attention to account for designerly interventions, which might be through, for example, architecture and building design; object or service design; public art; photography, film or other media; or sound, light and tactile elements of design. They may also be at different scales, from the intimate register of garments or small objects to rooms, buildings, precincts or cities. Such interventions are conventionally concerned with more formal and expert design processes. In developing this, we explore how designers and artists have made interventions that seek to shift the ways it can feel to be in specific localities, processes or situations, and the relevance of this for the making of atmospheres. By doing so we also highlight two key points. First, atmospheres themselves cannot be designed; rather, the role of design is to create interventions that make possible the circumstances through which particular types of atmosphere might emerge, but alone it cannot predetermine or predict exactly what these atmospheres will be experientially. Second, design is never a complete process, in that the ongoing adjustments that people make to improve their surroundings or routines (even in ways that only they might notice or think significant) are equally relevant in both making designed objects, services or other things active in the world and in the making of atmospheres. Therefore, as we see it, interventions that create the circumstances through which atmospheres are produced involve both intentional and designerly modes of making and the improvisatory forms of making that happen in the everyday. They also involve a series of other contingent elements that will be specific to each situation. In such variation they might draw in people in different combinations, from individuals to large groups. In making this point we are not suggesting that designers, architects, artists and other creative practitioners should not develop a practice that seeks to participate in making atmospheres. Indeed, we argue for a design intentionality that engages with atmosphere as a fundamental category through

96  Design and intervention which to understand affect, sensory experience and human ways of feeling in the world. However, we emphasise that the terms upon which such a practice is carried out should be considered in such a way that accounts for the indeterminate, ongoingly changing and contingent nature of atmosphere. The examples of experiential atmospheres we have discussed in earlier chapters have often been the outcomes of interventions that include designed objects, services or events. However, in the social sciences and humanities, it is often not the intervention itself that becomes the key point of debate and argument so much as the human experiences and activities associated with it. Recent examples that do exemplify how and where design is part of the making of atmosphere include: in the context of a public event, Edensor’s (2015) discussion of the attempt to design the atmosphere of a football match, and the dismay with which fans responded to these efforts; and Bille’s (2015) work, which shows how atmosphere is also made through everyday habits, such as adjusting the lighting at home to create feelings of comfort, welcome and a Nordic sense of cosiness. Thinking and researching in, about and through atmospheres can enable us to discern where we might intervene to change how our worlds feel. As we have noted in the previous chapters, atmosphere is something that can configure without us consciously thinking about it or trying to manipulate it – or put differently, becoming aware of atmosphere is a matter of attuning to it, rather than it being there or not. It follows that if atmosphere is always potentially present, then our encounters with it often occur through processes of intervention. For example, in some contexts people intervene to alter or create atmosphere on an everyday basis. Such examples can be found in everyday life in the home. This includes the small domestic routines of turning lights on and off, opening or closing curtains, adjusting television volume levels, lighting candles or tidying up the kitchen, all of which can be thought of as ways that people intervene in their home surroundings to make them ‘feel right’ (Pink and Leder Mackley 2016) that we discussed in Chapter 5. These everyday ways of improvising to intervene in the ways in which atmospheres ongoingly emerge in everyday life are important to the way people live in their mundane worlds, but are often invisible to others. The research discussed in Chapter 4 from the Melbourne market site also revealed usually invisible design in the ways that shoppers ongoingly worked on their routines. For example, participants who were regular shoppers described the many small adjustments that determined which trader they visited first, how they packed their trolley and what they decided to buy. This was a process of constantly redesigning routines that they thought of as relatively fixed, but that were in constant emergence in the atmosphere of the market and that also contributed to the constitution of that atmosphere. In other instances, people might intentionally seek to manipulate the atmosphere and ways of feeling in it that others will experience. One example of this is at events of collective celebrations, where official or organised bodies – such as governments – determine schedules, provide infrastructure, choose

Design and intervention  97 music and displays, install multimedia screens or invite vendors to participate (Gómez Cruz and Sumartojo 2018). However, other cases can involve the making of atmospheres as a form of deception or intimidation, as in the case of when social workers may feel uncomfortable on home visits (Ferguson 2009). Still others may be related to public security, through the use of visible surveillance technologies, uniformed personnel or prominent signage, all underpinned by state regulation (Adey et al 2013). In this case, some individuals (travellers or workers) are meant to be reassured or encouraged to feel safe, while others (potential terrorists) are reminded of the power of the state and the ways in which it can detect, resist and punish certain forms of violent activity. Here we see forms of making atmospheres that are purposefully designed by powerful actors, with the intent of shaping the feel of particular environments and encouraging norms of behaviour within them. In this chapter, acknowledging that atmospheres are made when the ­accidental or intentional actions of people across a wide range of everyday situations configure with other things and processes, we now turn our attention to the question of how atmospheres might be created through a more designerly intention, often through the practice of professional designers, curators, architects, musicians or artists. In doing so, we build on the work of the last two chapters to argue that the work of the designer can never have as its outcome a complete, finished atmosphere, and that for atmospheres to be realised at all they need to be incorporated into the activities of people who engage with them. An atmosphere is only rendered meaningful, or is only defined as an atmosphere at all, when it can be used and configured with people (Anderson 2009). Our concern is how designerly intent can be fruitfully combined with this already existing and ongoing process of ­atmosphere making that is integral to the way life is lived, as we have been discussing. Indeed, the impossibility of atmosphere being completed or finished by designers emphasises a strong link between official or professional design on the one hand, and vernacular or ‘everyday’ design on the other. Both require ongoing encounter, attunement and engagement on the part of people to have an effect in the world, and both change and flow by way of their constituting activities. The connection between design and arts practice and atmosphere has been implicit throughout the previous chapters, but here we extend it through discussions of our work, and our design anthropological collaborations with designers and artists. Indeed, the desire to generate a mode of feeling is at the core of much design practice and has been represented through a series of waves in design, such as the movement towards emotional design (­Hekkert and Mcdonagh 2003) and the focus on phenomenology in the third wave in human-computer-interaction design research (see Bødker 2006, 2015). It is also represented in a series of our own projects that focused on generating forms of well-being in collaboration with sound designers (as we discussed in Chapter 4) and in hospital design (Chapter 5). In this chapter, we engage the conceptual and methodological structure of knowing in, about

98  Design and intervention and through atmosphere to offer particular ways of thinking about how atmosphere might be researched, imagined and created through design. We explore how the relationship between design and atmosphere is articulated, and discuss how we might go about understanding this theoretically, methodologically and in practice. As we show, practice-based and interventional approaches can open new ways to understand how atmospheres are configured, and how the ways they are experienced are affected. Design interventions bring the idea of working in, about and through ­atmosphere together particularly well precisely because this structure is based in and responds to the specific, empirical real-world conditions that we have been arguing atmospheres emerge from. If, as we posit, atmosphere is emergent rather than predetermined, contingent rather than fixed, and a source of potential and possibility rather than certainty, then good design shares similar orientations. This includes, as we discuss in the next and ­final chapter, a sense of futurity and possibility that resides in not knowing exactly what will happen next, remaining open to attuning to the circumstances in which we find ourselves as we make our way through the world while engaging with the potential we associate with the material, social and relational conditions with which we have to work. These conditions do not determine atmospheres, but they do contribute to the contexts from which they coalesce. This also occurs within design processes and collaborations as much as it does in the final articulations that designers might make – and indeed, such processes or ways of designing carry within them the seeds of particular types of outcomes. For example, in her discussion of ma, a ­Japanese concept that refers to ‘in-between space,’ Akama argues that it can support respectful and considered interaction between designers and non-­ designers with specific concerns to address, even though it requires ‘attuning into slippery, un-namable tones and expressions that can only be sensed through our feelings and bodily encounters in relation to other people, materials and entities’ (Akama 2015: 262). Ma as a purposeful part of a design process contributes to outcomes that by design invite people to engage with each other in a thoughtful and collaborative mode that makes room for reflection. This is a form of designing atmosphere that carries a particular mood or feeling from the design process forward into the ongoing use and development of the things that result from that process.

Conceptualising atmospheric interventions The deliberate interventions that people make to create atmospheres, and particularly, the question of how designerly and artistic intent is implicated in the making of atmospheres, each raise a particular question for researchers from the social sciences and humanities. They ask how we might engage with design interventions as researchers in order not only to understand how creative practice and intervention are implicated in the making of atmospheres, but also to be able to participate in these processes as researchers –

Design and intervention  99 critically, and to inform and benefit from the ways in which atmospheres are designed and experienced. On the one hand, this means implicating ourselves in design processes, but as we have emphasised earlier, it does not mean leaving behind the understandings developed in the previous ­chapters, since to understand design and art as both practice and process we also need to account for how designed and made objects, services and other things are experienced by the people who encounter them, in their homes, buildings, public spaces, galleries and other exhibition and installation contexts. That is to say, the atmospheres that relate to such places and things can only be comprehended through a consideration of how their qualities and affordances are experienced in situated ways, which has been the focus of the previous chapters of this book. It follows, as we have been arguing, that approaches to understanding atmospheres and what they do must attend to the particular conditions of their emergence. This section reflects on processes where designers and artists seek to make a place or locality feel different, and for people to feel different when they are in it, by making material, digital or social interventions in that locality. This is not to suggest that atmospheres can be somehow controlled or manipulated in predictable ways, or that they somehow exist outside of our experience or of us as co-constituting participants in them. As we have repeatedly argued, however, attention to the situated, empirical conditions of the emergence or apprehension of atmospheres allows us to consider in detail how these affordances might be worked with or into, and what the effects of this might be. As we will discuss in the final chapter, this opens up atmosphere’s potential as a way to think about politics, possibility and the future, and to recognise the value of thinking atmospherically. Accordingly, to explore this we examine how notions of the designers’ or architects’ imagination of not-yet-existing atmospheres can be understood in this process, what imagining an experience or atmosphere that does not yet exist involves, and the question of how this plays out in creative practice. In doing so we also point to the need for a shift away from the practice of making atmospheres (or making the material or other structures that will help to configure them) for people, towards the practice of making atmospheres with people. That is, drawing on the insights of the earlier chapters, we suggest models for designing atmosphere that are iterative and collaborative in that they bring together designers, people who may encounter possible future atmospheres and other stakeholders in shared processes. Design anthropologists Anusas and Harkness (2016) have suggested that anthropologists should do research not about but with design, echoing Ingold’s (2008) argument discussed in Chapter 3, that we should do research with, not about, participants in our research projects. In doing this, we as researchers need to develop an empathetic mode of seeking to understand the position of the designer, and to work with them in ways that do not necessarily prioritise our own disciplinary perspectives but attend also to theirs. Indeed, with any collaborative, transdisciplinary research we must to some

100  Design and intervention degree seek to move beyond the limits of our own academic traditions. This means connecting with what the architect Pallasmaa (2014: 84) calls the ‘empathetic imagination’ of the designer, who imagines with a particular human and ethical dimension but goes further by creating a close relationship between researcher, designer and the people for whom a design is intended. We have been involved in several projects, as we discuss in the next section, where designers have created processes, objects and experiential phenomena that are intended to make people feel a particular way in a particular space-time, including the example in Chapter 4 of the motorway noise project in which we collaborated with sound designers, artists and engineers. While the work of atmospheres researchers in collaboration with designers is still nascent, these projects offer us new insights into how things, spaces or processes might be designed towards configuring atmospheres in particular ways, remaining theoretically and methodologically ­coherent with the approach we have advocated in earlier chapters of this book. This involves the design process as well as and designerly intent, in which the atmosphere of the designed thing is either explicitly and deliberately or implicitly part of the design imagination. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities have identified these aspects of design and architecture practice: for ­example, ­Degen et al (2017) discuss the means and tools by which architects ­i magine how the buildings or precincts they design might ‘feel.’ The architect ­Pallasmaa indeed regards such imagination as part of the process of architectural design, proposing that ‘a talented designer is… capable of entering an imaginary room in his or her imagination and sensing the atmosphere and tuned-ness of the space’ (2014: 84). He suggests that to be able to accomplish this, however, is a special skill, in that for the architect [t]his imagination of atmospheres is probably the most demanding task of imagination. It is similar to the composer’s skill in imagining an entire musical work, or the writer’s task of imagining the characters, spaces and events of a complete novel and creating a literary score for an atmosphere. (2014: 84) While the skilled practice of the architect or designer is of course fundamental to the way that they would imagine atmosphere, when we turn our attention back to the examples discussed in the previous chapters, it is clear that for the designerly imagination of an atmosphere to become an experiential atmosphere it must be met with and inevitably modified by the participation of its users. Indeed, as the research discussed in the previous chapters has demonstrated, atmospheres are ongoingly emergent and contingent. This approach complicates the claim that an atmosphere might be designed in such a way that is complete and that could predetermine the experiences that will be associated with it, because atmospheres are contingent and always exceed our control. Instead, our research into how people experience

Design and intervention  101 the atmospheres of localities implies that designers might create, for example, a sound or light installation, building or photograph, which becomes implicated as part of an atmosphere when configured with other things and taken up in the experience of people who encounter it. Here it is not atmosphere that is being designed, but a set of possibilities and potential. Moreover, if we similarly understand design as not ending with a finished, complete object, service or other thing, then it is relevant to account for how a designed thing becomes part of emergent configurations of life, and how it subsequently shapes and is shaped by other things with which it configures. Considered in relation to object design, the notion of the biographies of designed things suggests how they are refined in ongoing processes of use and configuration with other things. This concern has underpinned anthropological approaches since the 1980s, through, for example, the interest in ‘The Social Life of Things’ (Appadurai 1986), theories of appropriation (Miller 1988) and the concept of ‘exaptation’ (Ingold 1997). The implication of this is that even if a thing is designed to produce a particular atmosphere that was imagined by the designer, artist or architect, the thing itself and its capacity to do so might be modified over time. Furthermore, the atmospheres that might coalesce around particular designed artefacts are understood and attuned to in different ways by different people. Researchers have pointed out that atmospheres are not experienced uniformly, as several can co-exist spatially without affecting each other and because participants’ subjectivities play their part in framing, conditioning and defining atmospheres in quite different ways from other participants (Sumartojo 2015). Anderson and Ash (2015: 48) extend these ‘multiple standpoints’ to include non-human things, contending that this may ‘allow us to avoid an impulse to begin and end accounts of atmosphere with the human.’ More recent work that challenges the boundaries of object design makes the relationship between the design of objects and feelings more explicit. For example, interior designer Chris Cottrell has described the design process as a set of ‘untidy and unpredictable happenings within the making-­ thinking-feeling of creative spatial practice, characterized as a designing with and within a cloudy, indeterminate, atmospheric condition’ (Cottrell 2016a: 52). Cottrell explored the ‘in-betweenness’ of how materials and people configure via a series of installations and experiments in which he sought ‘to push materials from solid and stable states into diffuse configurations’ (2016a: 53). These chiefly involved air, often understood through the trope of breathing, which enabled him to focus on how atmospheres might be felt and even incorporated into our bodies or buildings. For example, in one experiment he constructed a translucent, pressurised and inflatable bubble, which attached to a lift in a university building and slightly inflated and deflated when the lift doors opened and closed. This invited people who encountered it to attune to how the structure itself could be understood to be ‘breathing’ (Cottrell 2016b), and showed how people helped constitute the atmosphere of the building as they entered, exited and moved around it.

102  Design and intervention In the remainder of this chapter, we draw on examples of our own research in collaboration with designers and artists. Here we have worked with others to investigate atmospheres by seeking to engender or configure them in new ways. This builds on the ethnographic approaches we have described so far in this book, but is also informed by our collective and close attention to experience, reflexivity about our own roles in the research process and our concern for going alongside others as they make sense of their worlds.

Encountering atmospheres in art and design Atmosphere is a core concern of many creative works that seek to alter how we perceive the world, from the scale of the individual sensing body to the urban precinct to the global concerns of the Anthropocene. Artist James Turrell’s longstanding practice, for example, puts how we sense and perceive our surroundings at the centre of his work, which he interrogates through his manipulation of light, shade and colour, inviting us to attune to these elements in focused ways (Adcock 1990). Indeed, creative practice that works with light and illumination provides many examples of the importance of atmosphere for making art in public space (Edensor 2017, Edensor and ­Sumartojo 2018), and the cases we consider in this section all include the creative use of light, often in combination with other material and immaterial elements. They are all examples of how collaborations between researchers and artists can lead to new insights and ways to think in, about and through atmospheres. contain yourself A project explicitly about atmosphere, contain yourself was a shortterm ­collaborative installation created by four artists and researchers in ­Melbourne in early 2015 (Sumartojo et al 2017). contain yourself worked in and through atmosphere, and as we will discuss, helped us understand how atmospheres are ongoingly configured and some of what they might make possible when we are invited to attune to and engage with them. The four makers, of whom Shanti was one, purposefully set out to try to discern and respond to some of what made the installation’s site feel as it did by entering into its atmosphere. This was done through a process of working with sound, vibration and light, as well as via a series of video-recorded reflections on what we were experiencing and how we were coming to understand atmosphere by being in it. At the same time, the project also provided a way to think about atmosphere because, as we will discuss, our making of creative responses together demanded that we consider specifics of how our interventions would configure with what was already there and make something new as a result. Finally, we thought through atmosphere to understand something about sociality and conviviality in shared public space during the launch and live performance that concluded the project.

Design and intervention  103 contain yourself began as an experimental response to a particular site: two shipping containers on the bank of the Maribyrnong River that looked toward a Port of Melbourne container yard (see Figure 6.1). The containers were made available to us by the artist Dagmara Gieysztor, who had been sponsored by the City of Maribyrnong via an artist-in-residence program to create works at the site. To make contain yourself, Shanti worked together with artists and fellow researchers Jordan Lacey, Fiona Hillary and Eliot Palmer to install a site-responsive ‘sketch’ using pre-recorded and live sound, vibration and light via neon tubes and projected photographs. The installation was created over three days and was launched to the public on the third evening with two hours of live-mixed sound and vibration and light installations that changed in glow, intensity and saturation as the sun set and the surrounding light conditions changed. As we described elsewhere: [the project] meant immersing ourselves in the site, attuning to its sensory aspects, and working with each other through our different creative practices and chosen technologies to arrive at a one-night site-specific installation. Here, creative practice provided a means to get to grips with a specific location, to feel and attend to its affective and sensory properties, and augment some of those material and immaterial qualities through technological intervention. (Sumartojo et al 2017)

Figure 6.1   The site of contain yourself, overlooking the Maribyrnong River in Footscray, Melbourne. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

104  Design and intervention contain yourself thus began with and was based on a process of attunement as we spent time in the site and considered what form our responses might take– in this sense, we had to come to know in the atmosphere of the industrial riverside location. We listened, looked and felt, using photography, video, sound recording and note-taking as practices that compelled us as much to closely consider the site as to create some of the materials which we would later use in the installation. Importantly, the making of visual, textual and audio materials was itself a means by which we could come to know about the unique sensory characteristics of the site and encounter it as atmospheric. For example, Shanti took multiple photographs of the small material details of the pavement, grasses, paint and water proximate to the containers, a visual process that drew her eye and forced her to look at and frame aspects that she might otherwise not have noticed. This was a process of ‘knowing from the inside’ (Ingold 2013: 111), and by thinking atmospherically, Shanti was able to feel her way into the site by way of minor textures that she only began to notice when she started photographing. In addition to photographs, and along with the other researchers, Shanti also video-recorded her early impressions. In this excerpt she described her early impressions of how it felt in and around the shipping containers: The things I really notice about the site are…it’s not a particularly sheltered site so you really feel the weather coming in. There’s lots of different sounds, lots of motion…the container port over the way is a really fascinating thing to watch as these massive machines built only for the purpose of moving containers around do that work…it’s just very active. I thought of it as this sort of quiet spot down by the river when we first got it, but the more time I spend here the more active and dynamic the site feels to me. The final articulation of the project was two containers with tubes of neon of various hues affixed to their interior and exterior surfaces in arrangements that mimicked the contours of the surrounding river, trees, rooflines and roads. In the culminating public event, speakers mounted on the tops of the containers transmitted a mix of live and pre-recorded sound, including the hum of the containers themselves, which had been set vibrating by transducers attached to their metal walls. Visitors were able to step inside one of the containers and gaze out across the river towards the illuminated container yards, while also apprehending the sensation of the vibrating structure, hearing the mix of industrial, unearthly sounds and immersing themselves in the glow of neon (Figure  6.2). As people stood in and around the installation, chatting, walking, looking at, listening to and feeling it, we asked them to write their impressions in an anonymous visitors’ book. Doing so meant consciously attuning

Design and intervention  105 to the work and locating it in very specific sensory experiences, as we described: the drone and clink of the sound work, the soft glow of the neon, the hum of the vibrations. These aspects are also expressed as working together to make contain yourself ‘feel’ particular ways: mellow, comfortable, or ‘alive’. Thus, purposeful noticing allow sensing and feeling to be linked and expressed in very specific terms. (Sumartojo et al 2017) This recalls Böhme’s characterisation of ‘tuned’ atmospheres, those ‘generated by light and sound [which] are no longer something perceived at a distance, but something within which one is enclosed’ (2013: 4–5). Although we do not agree with the idea that atmospheres might have boundaries in the way that ‘enclosure’ suggests, in this case people were actually able to enter the installation and stand or sit there for as long as they wished. contain yourself was therefore an example of thinking in atmosphere by attuning to it and manipulating sound, light and vibration in response to a goal of augmenting or deepening the particular sensations that we as makers could discern. However, it also meant thinking about atmosphere as the specific sounds and shapes in the site; the temperature and weather over the three days and evenings we worked there; the location, on a river opposite a

Figure 6.2  Visitors to the fully installed contain yourself at night. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

106  Design and intervention container yard and next to a working freight train line; and the energy and inspiration shared amongst the four collaborators. In other words, the material and immaterial responses we crafted were particular and site-specific ones that were intended to heighten how the place felt to us, rather than to shift it to feel radically different. Put differently, we sought to work into the existing configurations at the site and contribute to them, rather than disrupt them. In this sense, contain yourself was as much a form of advention – or a coming alongside and adding to – as it was an intervention. contain yourself also worked through atmosphere to draw our visitors together and to ask them to dwell in the site in richer or more reflective ways. Their responses, recorded in the visitors’ book, give a sense of their reactions to the installation (Sumartojo et al 2017: 11–12): Sounds like an industrial space DRONE, TINK, CLONK. Another train going someplace leaving traces of its energy, activity. Space industrial the river the rooves. Cables. People quietly reflecting on what we hear and see. Atmosphere or ambience where does it reside or where is it created? Feeling comfortable not contained. There’s a permanent state of anticipation in the air – everyone is giddy, silly, bubbly. A sense of togetherness, sharing a really lovely warm evening together. The neon lights colourful and bright, casting a glow onto the ground, the people in the container – there’s something peaceful about that. This container being below the railway bridge is ­awesome – you hear the distant train rumbling, but is that a recording actually? That’s a bit disorienting in a cool kinda way. It really feels like the air is charged with a soft electricity and even though it’s now night time, everyone looks like they’re mellow, chilling out. Niiiice. These examples, while anecdotal and impressionistic, work to demonstrate the location of the atmosphere of the site in particular sensory aspects and specific configurations of things, people, feelings and associations, jumbled together and blended from different elements. It also shows what atmosphere can do, which is to heighten experience and awareness of one’s surroundings. The indeterminacy of the pre-recorded train sounds, for example, was blurred together with the possibility that actual trains might be moving somewhere nearby but out of sight, prompting visitors to come to apprehend the site in new ways. In other words, atmosphere gave us a way to approach the site via creative practice, and to think about how we wanted to intervene and what some of the effects of those interventions could be. contain yourself also allowed us to think through what such an intervention might make possible in terms of bigger questions of sociality and conviviality. While the site was relatively busy, our intervention transformed it, if only temporarily, into a social spot for the few dozen people who came to see it on the final evening. The visitors’ accounts give a sense of the relaxation

Design and intervention  107 and fun that at least some people enjoyed, and how this was associated with the glow, hum and drone of the combined light and sound works. Here, we were able to think through atmosphere about public space and conviviality, both by intervening in it and by reflecting on the nature of the effect of that intervention. Projection art Atmosphere was at the heart of how contain yourself was conceptualised as a project from its beginning. In contrast, in the two examples in this section the starting point was light and illumination manifested in project-based art installations. Light is central to how we perceive and make sense of our surroundings, and Bille and Sørensen (2007: 274) discuss the ‘agency of light,’ meaning its capacity to ‘alter human experiences of space, and to define sensations of intimacy and exclusion. This network between the light, the person or thing shapes the atmosphere, whereby material and social relationships are created or manifested.’ In terms of the project we discuss next, the relationships also reached back in time and drew in memory, an aspect of atmosphere that we discussed in Chapter 1. In 2013, Shanti co-produced a projection installation on a university campus in Australia led by Sarah Barns and Michael Killalea from Esem Projects (Barns and Sumartojo 2015). This work used digitally manipulated archival imagery from the Australian National University and the Australian Screen and Sound Archive, projecting it onto the exterior walls of university buildings in six distinct sites on campus. The team sought to highlight the archival material in a new way, but also to work with the intangible qualities of light in conjunction with the specific materialities of the campus structures to investigate in and about the atmospheres of the works’ setting. Our approach to was to use light as a means to reimagine the subtle relationship between the history and memory represented in the images with the buildings themselves, making ‘the surface on which projection occurred…a key materiality, comprised of buildings and surfaces with their own architectural identities and presences’ (Barns and Sumartojo 2015: 194). This meant selecting the sites through a process of attention and attunement that included walking around the extensive grounds of the campus, looking at the different buildings and assessing their feasibility in terms of ambient light conditions, electricity supply and projector placement. But it also meant feeling our way into the atmosphere of each location, and attempting to work in it through the illuminated and enlarged artworks. For example, we described what we sought to achieve with one installation, depicted in Figure 6.3 (Barns and Sumartojo 2015: 193): Trees was a meditative piece on a quiet, out-of-the-way site intended to reflect on the part that the natural world plays in nurturing the life of

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Figure 6.3  Trees by Michael Killalea, one of the six installations of thinking spaces. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

the mind. Here, tree forms, rendered somewhat abstract by their color, the use of close-up and decontextualized from the rest of the image in the wider frame, were used to try and invoke a feeling of calm contemplation. That they moved silently against a natural background of different tree shapes added to the gentle sense of dislocation. The work thus included a process of knowing in and about the atmosphere of each installation site as we attuned to its material and immaterial properties and sought to advene in these with projection works. However, we also sought to understand something through the atmospheres that configured in the project. This concerned how the past, as represented in the archival record, might be recomposed in configuration with personal and institutional memory by way of the built environment. Projection art was also the focus of a subsequent project that Shanti conducted with geographer Tim Edensor in Melbourne in 2017 (see Edensor and Sumartojo 2018). The Gertrude Street Projection Festival has been held since 2007 in an inner-city Melbourne neighbourhood, with a growing number of artists at different career stages showing their works. In 2017, the curatorial framework was ‘unfurling futures,’ and the participants who were selected installed works of a wide range of sizes that interacted with the built environment in a variety of intriguing ways.

Design and intervention  109

Figure 6.4  Yandell Walton’s artwork Submerged installed at the 2017 Gertrude Street Projection Festival. Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.

For example, Yandell Walton’s work Submerged depicted a video of a woman floating in water, filmed from below, projected into the top window of a shopfront on a busy corner. The work commented on climate change, referencing rising sea levels as a gauge of human influence on planetary systems (Figure 6.4). It also worked atmospherically, however, as its subtle back-illumination mixed with the existing lights of the street signs, nearby shops, passing cars and trams and other ambient light. Submerged was thus part of the ‘lit world’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2017) that comprised the illuminated conditions through which we moved, and shaped how we perceived and made sense of the urban setting of the work. It was also an important immaterial and sensory element that configured into the distinctive atmospheres of the festival. In this project, Shanti and Tim visited the festival several times, together, with others and individually, discussing, photographing and engaging with the works alongside the many other people who were there at the same time. This walking, talking, sensing, noticing and photographing was a form of attuning to the atmosphere, being and moving in it and reflecting on our experiences as we went. We also interviewed several of the artists involved in the festival to find out about their work, how they had developed it, what different elements they had included, what they intended with it and how they felt it was received and experienced. These interviews, and the photographs

110  Design and intervention we made of the artists with their works, told us something about the atmosphere of the festival, particularly as it configured around particular installations. As we reported: Small crowds huddled around, drawing more curious onlookers, and generated discussion about the mechanics of the piece and what it might signify. This further underlines how the festival was co-produced by affective engagements of visitors with the projections, who contributed to the unfolding atmosphere, which fluxed according to weather, time of day and quantity of pedestrians and vehicles. (Edensor and Sumartojo 2018: 15) The overall goal, however, in doing this project was not so much describing the atmosphere (although knowing about it was important) as it was to understand what effect it had on how people perceived Gertrude Street itself. We characterised this effect as both deepening a sense of place, because of the way it cohered the street, while simultaneously defamiliarising a well-known city precinct for visitors. Here, we used atmosphere to think through place to understand the way alterations to the built environment, in this case the installation of temporary projected artworks, affected how we know and understand these environments, which in turn is important for how we understand whole neighbourhoods (see also Edensor 2017).

Technology design for atmosphere In the preceding chapters, the question of the relationship between atmosphere and environment has formed a key strand in our discussions. In ­Chapter 4, in our discussion of how people experienced atmosphere in relation to sound transformation and traffic noise, we described an environment in which technologies participated in the digital, material and affective atmospheres that we were researching in. That is, they can be regarded as involving a mode of digital-materiality, whereby the digital and material cannot easily be separated out as being two distinct or different things (Pink et al 2016a). As that example suggests, technologies of many kinds are continually present in everyday life circumstances, and therefore technology design plays a key role in creating experiential possibilities in everyday life and as part of public events. Indeed, the project upon which our discussion of the design and experience of sound transformation technologies is based was a collaborative one between design anthropologists and sound artists and designers, which from the social science perspective sought to better understand how people experienced the atmosphere that sound transformation technologies and road sound participated in. In contrast to assuming that a particular atmosphere could be designed, we focused on how sound design became differently

Design and intervention  111 implicated in the ways atmosphere was perceived. However, there are many examples in which the work of designers and the social science analysis of how people use and experience design have been separate. In this context, scholars from various disciplines have sought to define the relationship between humans and technologies and the ways in which we are affected by their design. In human geography in particular, there has been an interest in the affective elements of technology design and how these might participate in the generation of atmosphere, which form a background to our discussions here. For example, James Ash has discussed how game designers anticipate the future affective experiences that users will have with computer games (Ash 2012a, b) and has shown how the design of video games can create the possibility for the generation of particular atmospheres during play – he cites an example of how, because a game had a high level of contingency designed into it, an atmosphere of intensity was created amongst players (Ash 2013). Yet as Ash has argued more recently, the effects of technologies cannot be controlled by their design, since ‘while humans can design material thresholds into objects to attempt to control the kinds of affects that are generated, technical objects always have the potential to exceed the intentions of their design’ (Ash 2015: 87). Ash’s emphasis on technological agency in the production of human affect reminds us to consider how technologies have become active elements in the processes through which environments are constituted, and that technology design is consequently always implicated in the generation of atmosphere, even when indirectly, and not even necessarily in line with the intent of the designer her or himself. However, in addition to this, and as argued elsewhere (Pink and Fors 2017), to understand more fully how feelings are generated in relation to technology we need to focus beyond the question of the human-technology relationship. Pink and Fors call for ‘attention beyond the material qualities of the digital/ virtual and the effects of human–technology interaction, and towards their often less visible or less obvious co-constituents,’ therefore arguing that it is ‘through engaging with this deeper situatedness that we can further understand the contingent and emergent ways of being in the world related to technology design and use’ (2017: 386). New technologies are also providing intriguing approaches to thinking atmospherically about design from a design practice perspective. For example, industrial designer Chuan Khoo’s project ‘interface objects’ (Khoo, n.d.) is comprised of small switches, toggles and sliders that ‘augment’ their surroundings and invite people to interact with them (see Figure 6.5). These encounters are recorded as data, but we are never sure exactly what the data is or what it might ultimately be used for. Khoo does provide some sense of the presence of this data, because it is ‘sonified as a series of subtle echoes and notes that ring through the living space through hidden speakers… the installation constantly repeats the murmur and presence of life in the space’ (Khoo, n.d.). This is where the technology makes itself discernible

112  Design and intervention

Figure 6.5  O  ne of designer Chuan Khoo’s intriguing ‘interface objects.’ Photo: Chuan Khoo.

atmospherically, as it creates ambiguous sounds from unknown sources that are a response to an encounter with an equally mysterious device. In terms of atmosphere, these enigmatic objects work to attune us to our surroundings, including to the potential that data is part of a largely invisible but continual infrastructure, resource and presence that configures as part of our everyday experience. Design practice such as this places the human subject at the centre and proposes new ways that we might research how people experience things by making new forms of interaction possible. This mode of design practice does not so much design atmospheres as recognise that they are configured in encounters between people and their surroundings, and as such, it participates in making certain experiences of atmosphere possible. In manipulating objects, sensations and environments, designers such as Khoo (as well as Cottrell, whom we discussed earlier in this chapter) ask people to attune to the possibilities their designed objects or installations create for sensing the environment differently, thereby shifting the potential and practical realities through which atmospheres can be felt and sensed. Put differently, they seek to create new possibilities by playing with what needs to configure for people to discern atmospheres. This is important because it points to ways that thinking in, about and through atmospheres can help support interventions that are ethical, inclusive, or convivial.

Design and intervention  113 Following from this, we propose that in order to understand how technology design is implicated in the generation of the ongoingly shifting atmospheres of our everyday worlds, we need to consider: how modes of feeling are part of our experiences of using technologies; that the design of technology makes these feelings possible, but does not predetermine what they will be; and how these relationships with technologies are part of wider configurations of things and processes that also include other materialities, digital and other technological infrastructures, the weather, socialities, and much more. This argument is coherent with the design anthropological proposal that technologies create possibilities, rather than close down solutions (Pink et al 2018), and we propose that such a design anthropology approach takes us closer to understanding how and why particular configurations of feeling and atmospheres emerge through our relationships with the materialities of everyday technologies. As demonstrated by the projects mentioned already in this section, there is an emerging body of design research in which technology design can be seen to become involved in the constitution of particular feelings and ­atmospheres. As this demonstrates, there are opportunities to work towards a technology design practice that is explicitly engaged with the theoretical and ethnographic accounts of atmosphere. An example of how the relationship between researching atmosphere and designing to make atmosphere possible might be played out is demonstrated on the Energy and Digital Living website (www.energyanddigitalliving.com). This case has been discussed in other publications (e.g. Pink et al 2016b, Pink et al 2017) and therefore we do not discuss its detail here. However, its key points are worth reiterating briefly since they provide a useful introduction to how ethnographers and designers’ shared interests in atmospheres might combine to create interventions. Reflecting on the design anthropological research that she led as part of an interdisciplinary research project focusing on energy demand reduction (Pink et al 2017), Sarah has discussed how sensory ethnography research (Pink 2015) was able to make apparent the atmospheres of home that were normally ‘invisible’ to researchers. The ethnography team collaborated directly with the project’s design team, with whom they shared some research activities. Part of the project’s brief was to create a series of digital design interventions that would respond to the anthropological, design and engineering research and would help people to reduce their energy demand. Here the question of how participants went about making their homes ‘feel right’, or in other words, how they participated with technologies, other materialities, sound and so on to create an atmosphere of home that they felt comfortable with, offered the researchers a potential way to think about design. That is, it invited the question of how to design a digital intervention for energy demand reduction that would enable people to use less energy while still achieving their objective of their home feeling all right. This meant

114  Design and intervention considering how to design an intervention that would open up possibilities for comfortable atmospheres (and which in this sense can be contrasted to the intense atmospheres that Ash reports as being generated by video game design). In response, the designers created a series of prototypes, two of which focused on the question of making the home ‘feel right’ and, as such, with attention to the atmospheres of home (Pink et al 2017: 132–136). This example is a particular iteration of how a design anthropological collaboration can seek to bring together ethnographic research and design practice. Keeping in mind the possible relationships between ethnographic and design approaches to atmosphere that this earlier project had highlighted, in 2016 we developed a collaboration with one of RMIT University’s industrial design studios, led by Malte Wagenfeld. In 2015 we had undertaken another research project in Melbourne which sought to understand how commuters, using a range of different modes of transport, experienced automated light in the city. In developing the project we were interested in questions relating to how people engaged with and experienced this early form of automation (Pink and Sumartojo 2017), and in doing so we were concerned with the atmospheres of their commutes (Sumartojo and Pink 2017). While we found that in existing research in the field of urban lighting design had demonstrated how automated lighting participated in the constitution and experience of urban atmospheres (Ebbensgaard 2015, Shaw 2014, Slater et al 2015), rather than following people around cities to understand the experience of lighting design, there was a focus on how it was experienced and designed in particular localities and sometimes addressed locality-based problems. In contrast, we found that participants in our research tended to experience automated lighting as they moved through the city. Moreover, participants improvised with the way that they used existing lighting that was present during their commutes, as they dwelt in and moved in atmospheres. As such, lighting technologies themselves and the ways that people engaged with them combined with environmental, social and other elements of their surroundings to generate modes of feeling, and, as such, to contribute to the constitution of shifting urban atmospheres. Drawing on the same theoretical and empirical interests that informed our research project – movement through cities, sensory and affective experience and atmosphere – we presented our ideas to a group of design studio students as a brief that invited those who were interested to respond by creating design proposals for urban lighting. In particular, we presented the ethnographic methodology of doing research in movement to them and emphasised the idea of understanding the lit city as an environment that we move through. We returned twice to the design studio, first at the stage when the students had carried out the first phase of their projects, which in the case of those responding to our brief meant investigating the experience of light in the city. Here it became clear that the students, like our research participants, had generated new modes of awareness about how automated urban lights of

Design and intervention  115 many different kinds participated in their journeys through the city. Lighting took many different forms. Sometimes it was directly experienced, such as in the many different types of large and small lights found on the exterior and interior of different modes of public transport or private vehicles, or in the form of street lights and traffic lights. In other cases, light was reflected on water, on wet roads or refracted through rain to create a situation that could be sensed as a particular type of atmosphere. As Nick, one of the students, put it: It was a bit wet one day in the same sort of area, and the street lights reflecting off the road is quite interesting, um, you get these sort of ominous scenes when you walk into the road, and you like see the reflections of cars in the puddles… the wet cars have like a completely different personality when you’re walking past them in a certain street light… it’s almost like it was a completely different material to what they are made out of. As Nick continued, the video he had recorded showed us how lights from the street had become accidentally projected into the interior of his home in such a way that inspired him to discuss further the affective, but not necessarily representational, states he associated with this. As he told us, ‘these sorts of things are often looked over, by many people, but they have an interesting effect on the mood, which I haven’t quite pinpointed as yet.’ The series of photographs, videos and descriptions presented through the student work therefore stood as visual representations of environments in which lighting in its multiple forms, usually taken for granted, could be seen participating and worked to reveal something about atmosphere. By using our mobile ethnographic techniques to bringing to the fore these types of illumination, the students’ work showed how automated lighting came into play in the city in ways that changed as they moved through it. The students’ research subsequently led them to the development of design propositions that were underpinned by acknowledgment of how lighting participates in constituting the atmospheres that we move through. The work that we viewed on our final visit to the studio was impressive in its attention to the question of how people would move through the city and in its agenda to create ways of feeling associated with commuting, revealing the possibilities for designers to engage, for example, with lighting as a mode of generating an atmosphere of safety during darkness. In this way, knowing about atmosphere (in the materials the students created during the research phase of the studio) became a means to think through atmosphere to arrive at specific design propositions. In this section, we have shown how technologies continually participate in the ways everyday atmospheres are constituted. Technology design likewise inevitably participates in the making of atmospheres, albeit in an indirect way. Understanding this context and the ways in which technology design

116  Design and intervention can participate in these processes opens up the possibilities for researchers to contemplate the implications of their findings for design practice, as well as when it might be relevant to seek to collaborate with designers. It simultaneously creates the opportunity for designers to take a considered approach to the implications of their work for the generation of atmosphere, and likewise to think about how ethnographic understandings will deepen their practice and the possibilities it might create. As the previous discussion has shown, attention to atmosphere in technology design does not enable the design of atmospheres. Rather, it involves accounting for the possibility that technologies will be implicated in the making of atmospheres and acknowledges that they will be part of the circumstances through which atmospheres emerge. Such an acknowledgment enables us to see technology design as an intervention in atmosphere without attributing deterministic qualities to the technology.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have brought together the insights of the previous chapters concerning how we might encounter and understand atmosphere with the question of how design and arts practice-based interventions might intervene in the making of the circumstances through which atmospheres configure and emerge. As we have emphasised, there is no simple formula for designing atmosphere, and indeed, our theoretical and ethnographic findings suggest that the notion of atmosphere design inevitably holds a false promise. However, there is, as we have proposed, a way forward, through which the theory of atmosphere we proposed in Chapter 2 can be brought together with ethnographic, arts and design practice to consider how interventions towards creating the conditions through which atmospheres can be afforded and experienced might be developed.

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Design and intervention  117 Appadurai, A (ed) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ash, J (2012a) Technology, technicity and emerging practices of temporal sensitivity in videogames. Environment and Planning A 44(1): 187–203. Ash, J (2012b) Attention, videogames and the retentional economies of affective amplification. Theory, Culture & Society 29(6): 3–26. Ash, J (2013) Technologies of captivation: Videogames and the attunement of affect. Body & Society 19: 27–51. Ash, J (2015) Technology and affect: Towards a theory of inorganically organised objects. Emotion, Space and Society 14: 84–90. Barns, S and Sumartojo, S (2015) When one idea led to another: Re-inscribing and recombining thinking spaces using night-time projections at the Australian National University. The Senses and Society 10(2): 1–21. Bille, M (2015) Lighting up cosy atmospheres in Denmark. Emotion, Space and Society 15: 56–63. Bille, M and Sørensen, T (2007) An anthropology of luminosity: The agency of light. Journal of Material Culture 12: 263–284. Bødker, S (2006) When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. Proc. of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Changing Roles. ACM, New York, 2006, 1–8. DOI:10.1145/1182475.1182476 Bødker, S (2015) Third-wave HCI, 10 years later-participation and sharing. Interactions 22(5): 24–31. DOI:10.1145/2804405 Böhme, G (2013) The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres. Ambiances. http://ambiances.revues.org/315. Accessed 5 June 2015. Cottrell, C (2016a) Atmospheric-making. Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22(1): 52–63. Cottrell, C (2016b) Agencies of air. International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design IV: 71–77. Degen, M, Melhuish, C and Rose, G (2017) Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisation practices and the experience economy. Journal of Consumer Culture 17(1): 3–24. Ebbensgaard, C (2015) Illuminights: A sensory study of illuminated urban environments in Copenhagen. Space and Culture 18: 112–131. Edensor, T (2015) Producing atmospheres at the match: Fan cultures, commercialization and mood management in English football. Emotion Space and Society 15: 82–89. Edensor, T (2017) From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edensor, T and Sumartojo, S (2018) Reconfiguring familiar worlds with light projection: The Gertrude Street Projection Festival, 2017. GeoHumanities. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2018.1446760. Ferguson, H (2009) Performing child protection: home visiting, movement and the struggle to reach the abused child. Child & Family Social Work 14: 471–480. DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00630.x Gómez Cruz, E and Sumartojo, S (2018) Mobile screens and the public event: Practices of screen use at the Anzac Day Dawn Service. Continuum. DOI:10.1080/103 04312.2017.1422112 Hekkert, P and Mcdonagh, D (2003) Design and emotion. The Design Journal 6(2): 1–3. DOI:10.2752/146069203789355453

118  Design and intervention Ingold, T (1997) Eight themes in the anthropology of technology. Social Analysis 41(1): 106–138. Ingold, T (2008). Anthropology is not Ethnography. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. Proceedings of the British Academy 154: 69–92. Ingold, T (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Khoo, C (n.d.) Interface objects. https://chuank.com/research/interface-objects/. Accessed 1 March 2018. Miller, D (1988) Appropriating the state on the council estate. Man 23(2): 353–372, new series. DOI:10.2307/2802810. Pallasmaa, J (2014) Empathic imagination: formal and experiential projection. Architectural Design 84(5): 80–85. Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Pink, S, Ardevol, E and Lanzeni, D (2016a) Digital materiality: Configuring a field of anthropology/design? In Pink, S, Ardevol, E and Lanzeni, D (eds) Digital Materialities: Anthropology and Design. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Pink, S and Fors, V (2017) Being in a mediated world: Self-tracking and the mind-body-­ environment. Cultural Geographies 24(3): 375–388. DOI:10.1177/1474474016684127 Pink, S, Fors, V and Glöss, M (2017) Automated futures and the mobile present: Incar video ethnographies. Ethnography. DOI:10.1177/1466138117735621 Pink, S, Fors, V and Glöss, M (2018) The contingent futures of the mobile present: Beyond automation as innovation. Mobilities. DOI:10.1080/17450101.2018.1436672 Pink, S and Leder Mackley, K (2016) Moving, making and atmosphere: Routines of home as sites for mundane improvisation. Mobilities 11(2): 171–187. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K, Mitchell, V, Wilson, G and Bhamra, T (2016b) Refiguring digital interventions for energy demand reduction: Designing for life in the digital material home. In Pink, S, Ardevol, E and Lanzeni, D (eds) Digital Materialities: Anthropology and Design. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Pink, S, Leder Mackley, K, Morosanu, R, Mitchell, V and Bhamra, T (2017) Making Homes: Ethnographies and Designs. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Pink, S and Sumartojo, S (2017) The lit world: Living with everyday urban automation. Social and Cultural Geography. DOI:10.1080/14649365.2017.1312698 Shaw, R (2014) Streetlighting in England and Wales: New technologies and uncertainty in the assemblage of streetlighting infrastructure. Environment and Planning A 46: 2228–2242. Slater, D, Sloane, M and Entwistle, J (2015) Configuring light: Staging the social. www.configuringlight.org/. Accessed 1 March 2018. Sumartojo, S (2015) On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication 14(2): 267–288. Sumartojo, S, Lacey, J and Hillary, F (2017) Contain yourself: Technology, the city and atmospheric intervention. Media International Australia 165(1): 90–102. DOI:10.1177/1329878X17726888 Sumartojo, S and Pink, S (2017) Moving through the lit world: The emergent atmospheres of urban paths. Space and Culture. DOI:10.1177/1206331217741079

7 A new agenda for thinking atmospherically

In this book, we have moved from existing approaches and methodologies of investigating atmospheres through multiple examples of how we have used the concept in our own research. We have shown how thinking in, about and through atmospheres provides useful analytical guideposts for not only how we might understand atmospheres themselves, but also what else they might bring into view about the world. Our examples have included both ethnographic and practice-based projects and collaborations. We have outlined how atmosphere is an established and productive concept within the field of design, in terms of designing towards particular atmospheres, as well as how it sits at the core of design practice’s attunement to the materiality, relationality and sensorial experience that configure in the emergence of atmosphere. Throughout, we have argued that atmospheres must be anchored in the specific and contingent circumstances from which they emanate, and that this demands methodological approaches that ­attend closely to these conditions and their ongoing emergence. Thus our understanding of atmospheres as we have presented it emerges: as we situate ourselves in them (via forms of attunement); as we design in ways that we hope will make them possible, thinking about them (by way of reflection and identification of the elements that must configure for them to be identifiable); and as we advance our understanding through them, using them to understand other concepts. We have also argued that atmosphere allows us to think about and intervene in the world in new ways. While its indeterminacy and changeability make it a curious and ambiguous conceptual frame, atmosphere is able to open up new ways to both understand and make change. This is precisely because atmosphere’s dynamism is fundamentally a form of potential, its relational contingencies always impossible to capture and its vagueness resistant to definition. Atmosphere is precarious in the sense that it demonstrates the potential for small or large change at any moment; it can carry a charge of emotional and affective intensity that might momentarily overwhelm or seduce. Even in mundane or boring everyday circumstances, thinking ­atmospherically offers the frame to discern shifts in mood or disposition that can alter how a given situation feels and what it might mean for people.

120  A new agenda for thinking atmospherically In this way, atmosphere offers an orientation to encounter that is never fully defined or completed and therefore remains open to unknown turns or sudden developments. This relates to the notion that affect is ongoing and unpredictable and cannot be understood as somehow apart from what any of us are actually doing and the worlds that we are already a part of (­Massumi 2015). As we have emphasised, if we recognise that atmosphere always already exists, then the challenge is to attune to it, find the terms to best describe it and understand what work it is doing. In this chapter we propose an agenda for addressing what some of this work may be, particularly in response to existing scholarship in human ­geography. We are particularly concerned with how thinking atmospherically can shed light on politics and its affective charge, and the implications of this for imagining possible futures; or, put differently, what thinking ­atmospherically might make possible as we consider what we want to happen next. As we have argued, atmosphere can work conceptually to draw together many of the elements that make up how we understand our mental, emotional and material worlds in their ongoing configurations. But here we move beyond this to make some more general points about atmospheres that go to the heart of why we believe they are useful analytically and what they make possible to think about in new ways – in other words why, despite their ambiguity, they are a valuable way to think about things. We now shift to a more speculative mode, since our discussion cannot rest on specific empirical examples of work that we or others have already done. Rather, we seek to push forward conceptually and bring into focus what atmospheres make possible, and therefore why they remain both a useful analytical frame and a potential path to action.

Atmosphere and politics In Chapter 6, we discussed how atmosphere inevitably exceeds attempts to design it, and that despite many attempts to do so, designers can only ever make the things, processes or environments that are a part of how atmospheres configure in our experience. This pulls somewhat against Thrift’s (2004: 68) observation that affect can be engineered at public events through ‘design, lighting, event management logistics, music, performance.’ There is no question that atmosphere has long been understood as a manifestation, tool and process of power, particularly within human geography. Indeed, it is easy to identify ‘the multiple ways in which spaces of all kinds are managed so as to produce a particular feel, mood or ambience’ (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015: 253). From shopping malls (Rose et al 2010, Hudson 2015) to political events (Hagen and Ostergren 2006) to public spaces (Allen 2006, Adey et al 2013), atmosphere has often been the explicit focus of research seeking to understand how those in power work atmospherically to promulgate messages or control activity. Accordingly, our first point contributes to this by considering what atmosphere makes possible politically, and we discuss this along three broad

A new agenda for thinking atmospherically  121 lines. The first is how atmosphere coheres groups in particular space-times. As we have said, if atmosphere already always exists, then attunement is the way in which it comes to be defined in particular terms and does particular work. This builds on political geographer Angharad Closs Stephens’ (2015) approach to how collectivities are brought into being by way of atmosphere, rather than preceding it. She shows how advertisements define the nation in terms of insiders and outsiders via ‘happy feelings’ that preclude disagreement with these categories (2015: 10). We build on this by arguing that this occurs via an invitation to attune that is made to a group through forms of address that implicitly define that group: for example, with material targeted at the national level that tells audiences how that nation is defined and that brings groups of people temporarily into affective proximity to each other. For example, mass gatherings – ­political rallies, sporting events or ­festivals – are experienced atmospherically as shared, with the implication that these make collectivities that include and exclude people. In Closs Stephen’s (2015) example of the 2012 London Olympic Games, national broadcasting of events, presenters’ delight at UK athletes’ success and advertisements in train stations and other public places about ‘how to be a fan’ all contributed to a nationwide atmosphere of excitement and happiness that drew people together in explicitly national terms. Atmosphere here works to make a version of the nation that, while not explicitly about politics, nevertheless attaches positive or celebratory moods to events or things defined as national. Historically, atmosphere has certainly been purposefully designed and deployed to these ends. To see an example, we need only look at the Nuremberg rallies from 1930s Germany, with their carefully orchestrated use of torches and spotlights to create spectacular illuminated effects at mass gatherings (Hagen and Ostergren 2006). On VE Day in London in May 1945, officials similarly used floodlights to dazzle the crowds and enliven the celebrations. The lights picked out well-known buildings that had survived German bombing and thereby represented the resilience and survival of the British people. People reported feeling giddy and excited at the sudden display of light, especially given the years of wartime blackout that preceded it (Sumartojo 2014). These examples, however, because they focus on state-organised displays, can miss showing the more banal elements that also shape how people experienced these events, such as individual grief over those missing, wounded or killed during war, or the small acts of inattention or non-participation at mass rallies. Indeed, Edensor and Sumartojo describe how apprehension of especially stimulating, fearful, enticing and convivial atmospheres may depend upon familiarity or openness to encountering realms at variance to the usual, common sense experience of the world… Accordingly, particular atmospheric intensities can privilege certain participants who are already attuned… (2015: 257)

122  A new agenda for thinking atmospherically This is another way of describing how atmosphere can work to shape the boundaries of the groups they help cohere. When these experiences are not comfortable, familiar or apposite or do not tap into narratives or histories that are known to us, they work to exclude, to subtly communicate non-­ belonging to those not enrolled in them. In other words, we must have the sensory or discursive resources to be able to attune to atmospheres that ­others have attempted to design. If we do not, or if we choose not to, then we are outside the group that such attempts are intended to address. This leads to our second point: that marshalling atmosphere to define groups in terms of common feeling is unpredictable and can be, paradoxically, both more and less persuasive. On the one hand, it is common to have the experience of being swept up in feelings that we associate with particular places or events. These are not limited to exciting or unusual feelings, but can be in banal or everyday settings such as homes, trains or shopping malls (Thibaud 2011). In such places, designers purposefully seek to enrol us in atmospheres that encourage us to feel safe, calm or stimulated to specific ends, such as complying with public security regimes or buying things. However, as we have stressed throughout this book, atmospheres are slippery and unpredictable and can exceed or elude their intended aims. This is because the ‘subjects,’ which we and many others agree are absolutely co-constituting of atmospheres’ configurations, make them less tractable, pointing to ‘the key roles of subjects in co-producing atmospheres in various ways.’ To this end, designers depend upon their acceptance of the feel of an atmosphere, but can never be sure whether a crowd or group will charge the atmosphere with unwanted or unexpected tones or play the roles envisaged. (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015: 252) This complicates accounts of atmosphere such as that of Böhme (2013: 3), who suggests they are ‘something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power’. It follows that, as we have been suggesting, atmosphere is not understood or made sense of uniformly. The implication of this in terms of politics is that while they can appear all-encompassing or immersive, there will always be moments when they do not take hold, in which we resist, ignore or undermine them. This leads to our third point: that even within these apparently powerful fields of common understanding, diversity of experience at the individual level remains. At the same time as they might envelop people in particular moods, atmospheres also allow us to define the space-times of our experiences in our own terms – and while in many cases they privilege established discourses or forms of power, they cannot completely control them. Even when it might appear to be the case, they do not enrol us unwittingly, nor can they force us to feel particular ways, as ‘the ways in which designed atmospheres close down or open up meanings and practices to improvisation, contestation, interactivity and experimentation vary widely’ (Edensor

A new agenda for thinking atmospherically  123 and Sumartojo 2015: 253). Their very contingency and slipperiness preclude this. Their potential – a theme that has run throughout this book – means they carry the possibility of unsettling official discourse and can afford people autonomy in encounters with political force. They can refigure how we understand compliance with official regimes of political power. In other words, because they are located in relation and configuration, thinking in, about and through atmosphere can help us see complexity and even resistance that may not be obvious when we trace other lines of approach. For example, they can help us see individual resistance – even if in the minor form of inattention, distraction or scepticism – to apparently monolithic manifestations of political power that may appear atmospherically overwhelming when viewed from outside. Thus, thinking in atmosphere can help us identify what it feels like to be part of an audience for political campaigns that seek to create or exploit fear, humour, awe or excitement in binding us together and calling for action or decision. It can also help us understand how individuals, including ourselves, might fail to be moved by them in the ways clearly intended by their designers, and how this failure can comprise an act of resistance or exclusion. Thinking about them helps us see the elements of these atmospheres and the tools used to help us attune to them, such as advertising or broadcasting; sensory triggers in sound, light, or the gathering of bodies; or the textures and forms of objects and buildings. These are all part of the sensorium that constitutes our relationship with the state and with others that it seeks to define as within its collective, and as we discussed in Chapter 6, this helps shed light on where we might intervene in or divert atmospheres. Finally, thinking through atmosphere shows us what these experiences do politically – draw us together, for example, around the excitement of the Olympic Games, but also divert attention from the displacement of local communities as a result of building new elite sporting facilities. They might also subtly define collectivities through the terms in which particular atmospheres appeal to them or make them feel comfortable, such as public patriotic singing, flag ceremonies or military displays. Overall, thinking atmospherically about collectivity and power opens up not only new routes to insight about political inclusion and exclusion, but also to the points where these might be changed or developed, and the best ways to do this. This connects to our discussion in Chapter 6 regarding atmosphere and design. In this sense, atmosphere is also about what we might create for the future, and it is this relationship with the future that we focus on in the last section of this book.

Atmosphere and futures As we discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, how time is treated is an important element of atmosphere, and is also how it carries resonance for people after the event. Tim Edensor (2012) has discussed how anticipation was an

124  A new agenda for thinking atmospherically important part of how people understood and enjoyed a regular public festival in his study of the Blackpool illuminations. He describes how visitors’ recollections of previous visits were important in shaping the affective encounters on subsequent visits, including through fond memories of former displays and comparisons with current ones. He showed how anticipation was crucial in comprising how the event felt to people, because they were primed to experience it in particular ways based on how they had experienced it before. Thinking through atmospheres is productive here because they are readily achronological. That is, despite being absolutely dependent on very particular configurations of space-times – and the people, movements, sensations and discourses that animate them – they also reach backwards and forwards in time. They are multi-temporal, drawing on history and memory, for example, to help make sense of and inflect how we experience the present. This occurs in two distinct ways. The first concerns how we communicate to the future. A ready example of this is how events that might be considered ‘traditional’ turn to the past for legitimacy and deploy it as a sensory and representational resource for political projects in the present. Commemorative events provide clear examples, with their emphasis on the repetition of music, gestures or texts or at regular moments in the day or year to encourage solemn, reflective or respectful moods (Sumartojo 2015, 2016). This is presented not only as drawing inspiration from the past, but directly connecting participants to it as they imagine similar ceremonies in previous years and see themselves as linked to other people who participated before them. However, such events are also implicitly, and importantly, about the future. This is because in reinforcing these traditions by repeating them, organisers and participants seek to ensure they are transmitted forward in time (Connerton 1989). They consolidate and entrench the narratives they want to endure across time through not only their well-known words and iconic images, but also through how they imagine these encourage us to feel as we repeat them together – in other words, through their atmospheres. The future shimmers in the imagination at such events, as participants emphasise not only what they want people after them to remember, but also that these things should be remembered in terms of particular moods and feelings. It is a way of talking to the future and telling imagined others what we think is important and what we want them to think is important. In this sense, thinking through atmosphere helps us apprehend how ideas and feelings might be shared across time and the terms and configurations of those ideas and feelings. The messages we want to communicate to the future are therefore not simply about the narratives that are important to us now, but also how we feel about them and how those feelings are configured atmospherically in particular material, sensory and collective terms. Our second point about futurity concerns uncertainty about the future. As in the example above about the Blackpool illuminations, atmosphere is how we experience anticipation, aspiration and even anxiety about what

A new agenda for thinking atmospherically  125 might come next. For example, in our project at the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne, the highly valued messiness of the sights, sounds, smells and activities in the Market was made poignant or unattractive (depending on what people thought of these aspects to begin with) by the idea that it might change as a result of a refurbishment of the site. The way regular users experienced the precinct was thus tinted with feelings of excitement, aspiration or anxiety about change, depending on whether they thought the Market was on the cusp of being improved or damaged. Because the site was in a moment of transition, atmosphere here was inescapably imbued with a sense of the future and how it was imagined. In a different way, Adey and Anderson (2011) also attend to an anticipatory mode in their account of planning and practising for civil emergencies via scenario-based exercises in the UK. They focus on how people seek to arrive at the ‘right’ decisions in the face of rapid change and the atmospheres of concentration and uncertainty that carry intense and volatile affective charges. They posit that decisions made in training scenarios for emergency response are ‘a constant battle to manage the potentiality of the emergency as well as the unfolding of response’ (Adey and Anderson 2011: 2883). Here, what might happen is unknown because of the unpredictable and dispersed ways that decisions might affect each other and the inherent uncertainty of the fast-changing emergency situation itself. Indeed, one of the first tasks is to define the nature of the task: ‘Faced with the contingency of events, the first decision must be to make the event legible – to decide what it is’ (Adey and Anderson 2011: 2891). They describe the tension as decisions are made, how ‘players certainly flail and fail’ (ibid: 2895) in the anticipatory atmosphere that suffuses the exercise rooms. Here, the futurity of atmosphere hinges on the impossibility of prediction, but participants attempt nevertheless to limit the scope of what might unfold. As above, this requires players to draw on their knowledge of what has happened before and to rely on protocols, guidelines and regulations to lead their decision-making. ­Nevertheless, the incommensurability of the unpredictable nature of the emergency with the structures of protocol and law that can never completely govern contributes to nervous, anxious atmospheres animated by unfolding events. What thinking atmospherically helps us to do here is see how first, atmospheres are configured in terms of attention to ‘what happens next,’ but that they are also important for how people feel their way into ­decisionmaking and therefore help to actually shape what happens next. It follows that when we bring this together with our arguments about design in Chapter 6, we can see how designing the elements that configure in atmosphere means not only designing for the immediate future (or ‘what happens next’) but also for a more distant one, as our decisions take hold in unpredictable ways that we cannot control over time. If communicating with those we imagine in the future is part of what we are trying to do through atmosphere, then how we do that is a form of intervention. We discussed this in terms of design process and outcomes in the previous chapter,

126  A new agenda for thinking atmospherically but here we want to link it to ways of thinking about futurity. Atmosphere provides a route to not only thinking about the future, but intervening in it as well. This is because it shapes conditions in which uncertainty can be generative (Akama et al 2018). Since anticipatory modes are inherently about the unknown, the atmospheres in and through which these modes are exercised and their outcomes manifested help to shape how we relate to the future. This is akin to what Anderson (2010: 778) calls the ‘style’ of relating to the future, that is, the ‘statements through which “the future” as an abstract category is disclosed and related to’ that both talk about the future and ‘self-authenticate those relations.’ Therefore, the affective, material, sensorial and relational contexts in which these statements are conceptualised and made – the moods that both contribute to their generation and suffuse them – not only shape the statements themselves, but also how they are used to make sense of the future, opening up or precluding possibilities. An everyday example might be the sense of hope and concern that imbues a visit to the bank to set up an account for a growing child, with money on which a particular type of future is thought to rest as it accrues over time, flowing from and into the way the space of the bank is designed to reassure and stabilise anxieties. This might mean that our sense of confidence in the bank manager’s advice could see us choose to invest in these funds in particular ways or choose an account with different terms. The point here is that atmospheres in the present shape how we understand and make decisions about a future that is essentially unknowable, but that we nevertheless have strong feelings about and a strong emotional investment in. Put simply, when we design for things to feel a certain way, we are thinking about the future, and atmosphere offers a way to intervene and design for possibility. Atmospheres connect to how we want to make our environments in particular ways, in that ‘a desired future may act as a spur to action in the present’ (Anderson 2010: 778). This has often been described in terms of control, coercion or seduction (Thrift 2004), but we depart from this by suggesting that we can instead recognise atmospheres as a concept that can be used to help understand making change in the world, not by seeking to direct the future or mitigate what we imagine might happen, but because it can help us discern fields of possibility and potential. By understanding what has to configure for atmospheres to emerge and be perceived, we can also understand how we might intervene in those elements to help shape ‘what happens next.’ Furthermore, atmospheres offer a way to ‘experiment with alternatives to linear conceptualisations of temporality’ (Anderson and Adey 2012: 1530). They have the past and future folded into them and course through how we organise ourselves in the present, most evidently in sites and events where we try to anticipate the needs or desires of those who will come after us – or indeed, our own experiences to come. For example, in the case of the Melbourne market we have discussed throughout this book, the past was imagined in the old structures and alleys of the site, the ways the vendors

A new agenda for thinking atmospherically  127 advertised and sold their products and the routines that regular shoppers had developed over time to get the best products for the best price. The past was accreted into all these ways of doing things in the market and was explicitly understood as important to people doing them, legitimised in part because of their histories. At the same time, the possibility of a refurbishment of the market shifted the mood to be simultaneously more defensive about the value of the past and fed up with frustrating inefficiencies of the site as a redesign became imaginable. The proposed changes opened up a new possible future with uncertain implications, but what is important here is the way the past and future that folded into the market were directly expressed in terms of its atmosphere, what comprised it, how it was valued and the multiform implications of unknowable change. Accordingly, rather than atmosphere being thought of as a mode of control – for example, via feelings of safety meant to be produced by an assemblage of things (CCTV cameras), regulations (criminal law), bodies (armed guards) and built environments (barriers at train stations) (Adey et al 2013) – we propose another approach. As we have been arguing, atmosphere exceeds this, always retaining the possibility of configurations that are different, unpredicted and possibly unknown. It remains open, even when it appears monolithic, precisely because it is taken up in experience, which is never completely defined or finished. For this reason, while it may be ‘engineered’ (Thrift 2004) via spaces that are ‘tuned’ (Böhme 2013), atmosphere will always escape control. At the same time, its location in relationality and how this is configured helps us see where intervention and change might be possible. Because atmosphere is about how things configure, and how we experience and make sense of these configurations, approaching these empirically shows us where change might be made most powerfully. In all these examples, we seek to shape the future by making change or maintaining ways of doing things – we talk to the future by being in atmosphere, by participating in it and reinforcing, subverting or perhaps not even noticing it, thereby diminishing its impact and resonance. Additionally, thinking explicitly about atmosphere – as we plan ceremonies, make architectural drawings, conceive scenarios or legislate regulatory protocols  – represents an attempt to shape the future by shaping the feelings, moods and sensory experiences that will emerge in it because we are attempting to determine the elements that will help define those experiences. So, for example, the construction of a public memorial not only decides what those who come after us should remember (British Bomber Command in the Second World War), but also the aspects of it that are most important (the men who crewed the planes and died or were wounded in action) and how we should feel about this (impressed, humbled and grateful). Of course, what people who come after us will actually make of these figures is unknowable, but the construction of such public structures will at least communicate what aspects were once considered significant, even if that significance has faded.

128  A new agenda for thinking atmospherically Finally, thinking through atmosphere helps us see how the future acts on how we feel and make decisions in the present, as we anticipate, aspire to, fear or resist the futures we see as potentially arising from our current material and experiential circumstances.

What might thinking atmospherically make possible? Thinking atmospherically as a way to intervene in the future – especially if we use this to try and move towards more ethical and just ways of relating to each other – is where atmosphere’s radical potential lies. This is one reason why it is worth researching atmospheres, including through design and practice-based approaches: because it frames experience as always carrying potential, and thus opens the possibility for resistance, non-compliance or subversion of established ways of doing or thinking about things that have privileged different people in often unequal ways. It reminds us that forms of political action that rest on mood and feeling are not only valid, but powerful and persuasive, but that at the same time, attempts to control these forms of action can never be complete. This is a counter to the repeated turn to atmosphere as a way to shape or manipulate how people feel, such as political rallies, different kinds of spaces geared towards consumption, or shared spaces, buildings or urban sites of many different types. Of course, this is not limited to shared or public spaces, but extends to our homes, workplaces and other personal locations that we might encounter alone or alongside others. There are long-standing areas of design and architecture that see the creation of mood as a core goal, even if they are not so much creating feelings as they are determining materials, proportions, light or air flow, for example that designers imagine people will experience in particular ways. We do not intend in this book to contest that design in this regard can affect how we feel, but rather to show how atmosphere opens potential because it is personal and experiential and precisely because it relies on being perceived and taken up in individual experience. What we have been arguing through the examples in this book is that ethnographic and ­practice-based approaches to researching this are fruitful because of their careful attention to the detail of how our surroundings are configured, and how we experience, perceive and make sense of them. Furthermore, when we ask people how they feel, go along with them in their worlds or, indeed, immerse ourselves in the environments that we as researchers are trying to understand, we are able to go further than what is imagined during design, planning, regulatory or other processes that seek to control what happens next. This book acts as an extended argument for why atmospheres matter and why we should attend to them, and in this chapter we want to indicate potential next steps in researching them. We have posited that they are present in different ways should we attune to them, and that their specific elements are

A new agenda for thinking atmospherically  129 configured ongoingly as we ‘know as we go’ through the world. In fact, they are actually a part of how we know things, but because they are emergent and dynamic, they are not known in the sense of something fixed and established, but rather are known as a way of feeling and inhabiting the world, as a way of making sense of our surroundings and choosing the best way to move or dwell in them. It follows, as we argue above, that these feelings and moods are important in comprising how we feel we belong in the world. Put differently, they are powerful in shaping who is recognised and felt as included and excluded. Atmospheres therefore offer us a route to thinking about how to reconfigure some of the things that contribute to such feelings, and as a result can help us move towards more inclusive or equitable futures. As such, they deserve our ongoing attention.

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Index

Acoustic Design for Managing Motorway Traffic Noise 62 aesthetics 22–3, 62, 64, 69, 85 affective aspects 5–6, 17, 24, 41, 43, 64, 72, 78–9, 82, 87, 103, 111, 115, 126; atmospheres 17, 31, 110, 116; intensities 23, 43, 45, 87, 119 affective experience 8, 17, 27, 30, 49, 55, 114, 129 affordances 3, 5, 13, 19, 27, 59, 65, 67, 87, 99 agenda 49, 52, 115, 120 air 20–1, 28, 79, 88, 90, 101, 106 air flow 128 Aix-Marseille University (AMU) 69 anthropology 5, 8, 12, 16, 23, 41, 47, 55, 77 anticipation 5, 7, 9, 24, 38, 55–6, 81, 106, 123–4 anticipatory modes 24, 48, 91, 125–6 anxiety 1, 23, 25, 50, 62, 124–5 architects 20–1, 95, 97, 99–101 architecture 12, 20–1, 30, 41, 48, 55–6, 95, 128 artists 62, 95, 97, 99–103, 108–10 arts 26, 97, 116 atmosphere/atmospheres; definition 16; design 20, 116; dynamism 119; experience 8–10; in emergence 29–31; knowing 11–12, 35–8, 41–6; and mobility 25–9, 75; researchers 100; theories of 5, 18, 47, 87; see also spatiality; temporality atmospheric attunements 9, 17 atmospheric conditions 39, 101 atmospheric configurations 39, 71 atmospheric interventions 98–102 atmospheric methods 31, 116 atmospheric qualities 20–1, 37 attune 3, 18, 25, 29, 40–3, 59, 69, 91, 101–2, 112, 120–3, 128

attunement 4, 8–9, 11, 97, 104, 107, 119, 121 audio 11, 42, 58, 82, 89, 104 Australia 24, 78, 87, 107; see also Melbourne Australian National University 107 Australian Screen and Sound Archive 107 autoethnography 26, 39–40, 55, 64, 66 automated light 76, 114 autonomy 83, 123 back-illumination 109 banality 86, 121–2 bikes 13, 78 bombings 45, 49 Brazil 87 broadcasting 121, 123 Camp des Milles (memorial and museum) 68–72 capacity 5, 13, 18, 46, 67, 84–5, 90, 101, 107 care 10, 81–6 CCTV cameras 127 celebrations 42, 87, 96, 121 ceremony 9, 24–5, 68–9, 123–4 Charles Evans Reserve site 62–3 children 25, 62 choreographs 21–2 city 1, 7, 20, 57–8, 63, 69, 103, 114–15 cleaning trolley 83–4, 86 climate change 109 collaborations 11, 13, 97–8, 100, 102, 114, 119 collectivities 11, 36, 38–40, 121, 123 commemorative events 24, 45–6, 57, 124 commemorative sites 68 commuters 78, 114 commuting 7, 26, 115; see also cycle commuting

132 Index complexity 26, 62–63, 123 contain yourself site 39, 102–7 containers 56, 60, 64, 103–4, 106 contingencies 3, 6, 28, 30, 36–7, 40, 59, 111, 123, 125 creation 11–12, 21–2, 70, 78, 81, 128 creative practice 98–9, 102–3, 106 creative practitioners 1, 95 crowds 2, 23, 60, 121–2 cycle commuting 38, 77–81, 91 decisions 79, 123, 125–6, 128–9 design 3–5, 12–13, 15, 19–20, 31, 55–8, 68–9, 77, 91, 95–120, 122–3, 125–6, 128; anthropology approach 25, 47–8, 51, 62, 113, 129; art and 102–10; atmospheric intervention 98–102; practice 15–16, 39, 48, 95, 97, 112, 114, 116; processes 11, 13, 48, 98–101, 125; role of technology 110–16 designers 1, 3, 10, 13, 19, 21–2, 61, 71–72, 95, 97–102, 110–16, 120, 122–3, 128 emotion 2, 18, 23, 31, 42, 52 empirical-theoretical dialogue 46–7 engineers 62, 100 environments 15–19, 26–8, 35, 37–8, 40, 56, 63–5, 67–8, 75–7, 82, 87–8, 108, 110–12, 114–15, 126–8 ephemerality 1, 27, 5, 40 ethics 46, 48–52; researching atmospheres 44–5 ethnographers 62–3, 89, 113 ethnographic 15, 86, 114, 116, 119, 128 ethnography 12, 52, 88 event management logistics 120 events 2–4, 6, 9, 23–5, 30, 39–40, 43, 45, 87, 96, 100, 121–26, 129 experiential world 8, 46 festival 9, 109–10, 121 food 60, 83, 85, 89; minced meal 85 France 69 futurity 4, 10, 13, 19, 45, 77, 91, 98, 124–6 game designers 111 geographers 8 Germany 121 Gertrude Street Projection Festival 108–9 gestures 41, 71, 79, 124

historical research 50, 52 homes 27–8, 40, 76, 78–9, 81, 99, 113, 12, 128; human movement 86–90 hospital 91, 97; care and wellbeing 81–6 human geography 5, 12, 15–16, 23, 25, 28, 41, 47–8, 52, 55–6, 68, 76, 111, 120 humanities 15, 26, 28, 37, 96, 98, 100 human-technology relationship 111 illumination 102, 107, 115 images 7, 41, 43, 50, 59–60, 71, 107–8 imaginaries 17, 20–1, 36, 45 imagination 2, 5, 11, 20–2, 37, 56, 59, 72, 99–100, 124 immersion 20, 49 industrial design studios 114 infrastructures 42, 78, 96, 112–13 installations 9, 24, 62, 101, 102–7, 110–12 intensities 6–7, 18, 40, 62, 68, 77, 79, 81, 103, 111 interface objects (Khoo’s project) 111–12 interventions 16, 19, 29, 35–6, 38, 47–8, 63, 77, 87, 91, 95, 125, 127 interviews 40–1, 60, 66, 70–1, 79, 90, 109 journeys 15, 27–8, 38, 77, 79, 115 judgements 21, 23 kitchens 82, 85, 96 knowledge 3, 22, 38–9, 61, 78, 125 lighting 28, 86–87, 96, 115, 120 localities 20, 28, 62–3, 90, 95, 99, 101 locations 6, 21, 40, 45, 57, 66, 68, 78, 103, 105–7, 127 London 43, 45, 121; Olympic Games 42, 121 ma, Japanese concept 98 manifestation 60–61, 120 market 1–2, 18, 40, 57–61, 96, 125, 127; see also Queen Victoria Market materialities 13, 28, 30–31, 42, 52, 67, 81, 87, 90, 107, 113, 119 materials 4–6, 11–12, 20–1, 41–4, 50–2, 58, 60–2, 69, 77–9, 87, 98–9, 101–4, 106–8, 110, 128 meals 83, 86; see also food media 86, 95 Melbourne 1–2, 16, 57–8, 60, 62, 78, 96, 102–3, 108, 114, 125–6

Index  133 memorials 68–9; national 45; public 127; sites 68–70 methodologies 25, 29, 31, 41, 44, 78, 119 mobile 79, 82, 85–6, 91 mobility 19, 25–7, 46, 55–6, 72, 75, 77 modes 11, 24, 28, 35–36, 47, 62–4, 66, 88, 90, 95, 97, 110, 112–15, 126–7 moods 17, 20–1, 29, 52, 115, 119–20, 124, 126–9 motorway 62, 65, 72 movement 12–13, 21, 23, 25–9, 55–6, 58–9, 61, 63, 75–79, 81–3, 86, 114 narratives 19–20, 46, 66, 68, 122, 124 national day 24 national identity 42, 46, 68 neighbourhoods 22, 25–6, 31, 108, 110 Nuremberg rallies 121 objects 17, 24–25, 28–9, 31, 45, 50–1, 59, 68–9, 71, 86, 95, 99–101, 111, 123 orientations 5, 10–12, 19–20, 31, 35–6, 57, 75, 91, 98, 120 park 62–3, 65–6, 72, 83, 87 participants 4, 6–7, 11–13, 39–40, 51, 58–9, 61–2, 65–7, 70–2, 76–9, 81–82, 88–90, 101, 113, 124–5 patients 82–6 perceptions 8–9, 28–9, 44, 56, 76 perspectives 9, 48, 59, 62–3, 75, 77, 80–1 photographs 11, 43, 58–9, 66, 69–71, 82, 101, 104, 109, 115 photography 41, 59–60, 95, 104 politics 4, 6, 15, 19, 22, 29, 44, 47–8, 52, 99, 120–2, 129 power 5, 7, 9, 13, 19, 25, 31, 44, 59, 71, 81–2, 97, 120, 122–2, 127–9 practice-based approaches 128 precincts 2, 95, 100, 102, 125 professionals 1, 89–90, 97 projection art 106–10 projects 11, 13, 37–9, 55, 57, 59, 61–3, 65, 67–9, 72, 86–8, 100, 102–4, 107–10, 113 public spaces 22, 26, 99, 102, 107, 120, 128–9 qualitative research 38, 48 Queen Victoria Market 1–2, 57–8, 125 recollections 10, 24, 45, 80, 124 records 42–4, 64, 70, 78, 89–90 reflexive 10, 38, 40, 62, 89

reflexivity 11, 36–40, 45, 62, 102; collectivity and 11, 36, 38, 40 relation 10–11, 18, 28, 35–7, 42, 44, 48–9, 55, 67, 98, 101, 110–11, 123, 126 relationality 44, 119, 127 representations 11, 17–18, 35, 68 research 8–10, 12–13, 15–16, 25–26, 35–40, 42–44, 46–51, 55, 57, 62–63, 65–69, 75–77, 87–90, 99–100, 114–15; design anthropology 47–8; ethics 48–51 researching atmospheres 1, 8, 13, 24, 35, 64, 90, 113, 128 research participants 9, 11, 28, 37–8, 41, 43–4, 50, 57–61, 63, 68–72, 77–9, 114 research processes 11, 35, 38, 40, 49, 65–7, 102 research projects 1, 10, 29, 55, 61, 63, 69, 75, 99, 114 research sites 18, 39, 57, 62; see also specific sites resistance 1, 5, 25, 90, 123, 128 resonances 40, 123, 127 resources 7, 10, 61, 87, 112 responses 56, 68, 71, 104–6, 112, 114, 120, 125 rhythms 17, 24, 30, 58 rides 38, 78–81 roads 78, 81, 104, 115 room 30, 57, 69–71, 82, 84, 87, 95, 98 routes 28, 36, 43–4, 59–60, 63–4, 76, 78–81, 89–91, 126, 129 routines 2, 7, 9, 22, 28, 57–60, 78, 80–2, 84, 86, 95–6, 127 safety 19, 76, 82–4, 115, 127 scholarship 8, 29, 48, 55–6 sea levels 109 Second World War 9, 42–3, 69, 127 self-tracking 38, 76–81; see also cycle commuting sensations 6, 12, 15, 17–18, 20, 22, 30, 39, 80, 91, 104, 107, 112, 124 sense 7–11, 21–2, 29–30, 38–41, 49, 55–7, 59–65, 68–70, 72, 75–7, 80–81, 83–84, 106–7, 109–11, 122–9 sensory affordances 59, 64, 89 sensory elements 5, 9, 45, 61, 109 sensory experience 5, 8, 46, 71, 96 services 95–6, 99, 101 shoppers 1, 96; regular 57–8, 61, 96, 127 shopping malls 120, 122 shops 25, 59, 61, 109 Singapore 129

134 Index sites 1–2, 4, 6, 19–20, 28, 40, 45, 57–61, 63, 68–72, 82, 103–7, 125–7; see also specific sites sociality 102, 106 social practice theory 25–6 social sciences 8, 15, 25, 28, 37, 96, 98, 100 socio-technical transitions theory 25 sound 20, 23, 59, 62, 64–7, 79, 86, 88–9, 95, 101–2, 104–6, 113, 123, 125; transformations 64, 66–7, 110; wall 65–6 space 8–9, 13, 17–22, 26, 31, 56, 65–67, 69, 75, 78, 100, 106–7, 116–18, 126–9 space-time 36–7, 46, 55–72; see also Camp des Milles; Charles Evans Reserve site; Queen Victoria Market Spain 87 spatiality 12, 19–20, 22, 29, 31, 39, 46, 55, 57, 63, 75, 77–8, 83, 87 staff 82–86 stakeholders 99 stalls 2, 58, 60–1 state-sponsored history sites 72 students 1, 69, 114–15; design studio 114 Submerged (Walton’s artwork) 109 subjectivities 5, 17, 36, 56, 66, 101 suffuses 125–6 surroundings 3–4, 6, 8–9, 13, 16, 25, 29, 40, 42, 88, 102, 106–7, 111–12, 114, 128–29 surveillance 7, 51, 116, 129 team-based research 39, 62 technologies 12, 17, 26, 35, 42, 51–2, 67, 71, 78, 84, 88–90, 103, 110–11, 113, 115–18; design 110–11, 113, 115–16

temperature 59, 105 temporalities 6, 12–13, 19, 22, 24, 26–30, 46, 50, 55, 126 terrorist attack 25 traders 57, 61, 96 traditions 10, 124 traffic 66, 80, 88 traffic lights 81, 115 traffic noise 67, 88, 110 trains 7, 13, 27–8, 106, 122 train stations 121, 127 transformations 30, 64, 66–7 transitions 82, 88, 125 Transurban 62 Trees (thinking spaces’ installations) 107–8 trolleys 83–6, 91, 96 uncertainty 15, 25, 29, 36–8, 40, 47, 50–1, 124–26, 129 UNESCO Chair 69 university 29–30, 101, 107 University of Canberra 77 urban environments 7, 20, 31, 61–2, 76, 102, 109, 114, 128 utility 79, 87 vagueness 18, 119 video 41, 43, 58–60, 66, 71, 79, 89–90, 104, 109, 115 video games 111, 114 visitors 19, 58, 61, 68–9, 71–2, 82, 104–6, 110, 124 wellbeing 48, 68, 81 workers 58, 61, 90, 97; social 90, 97