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 āvibeā (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 ālost.ā 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 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 counters to customers, navigated uneven pavement or dodged through crowds, pushing shopping trolleys, steering forklifts or shepherding small children. Memory and imagination were also very important, as people 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 dayās 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.
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 4ā6.
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 inhabitā¦the core questionā¦ centres on how we might: identify empirically 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 ā successful as they might appear in enrolling people into shared ways of feeling or experiencing a place or event ā 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 ā 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 āatmospheric.ā While this is useful ā and indeed our own work has contributed to this material ā in placing atmosphere at the centre of inquiry, and by seeking to understand what āmakesā 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 peopleās 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.
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 ā 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 peopleās 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 ācausal powersā or singular agency in the world, because the capacity to change how a place āfeelsā 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 how people experience and make sense of the world atmospherically, a concern that we discuss in empirical detail in Chapters 4ā6. 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 ā 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, āfelt from inside, within, and not in analytical distanceā (Pink et al 2015: 353). Here, āatmosphere 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 madeā (Pink et al 2015: 354). This highlights the value of empirically grounded investigations that attend to āhow atmospheres are made and sensed by people in mundane everyday moments, and how they are generative of sensory, affective and empathetic forms of engagementā (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 ā in short, what they are ā 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 ā 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 ā not only 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 āurban atmosphericsā as potentially offering a way to āimagine a different way of being in the world as well as another kind of futureā or as a different way of thinking politically about the city: āthe provocation of an atmospher...
