Researching atmospheres: Concepts, configurations, and collaborations

Despite their role in shaping how places feel to people, it is difficult to understand atmospheres by taking them as given and researching them head on. This is because their material, affective, and spatial qualities are dynamic and ephemeral, do not exist independent of specific contexts, and do not precede their apprehension by people. Instead, this chapter argues that atmospheres emerge as an important aspect of experience from how things, people, ideas, and feelings configure in research settings. This requires methodologies that can attune and attend to their subtleties and agential capacities, whilst trying not to fix or freeze them for the sake of analysis. This chapter discusses how we can approach atmospheres methodologically. In doing so, the author considers the balance between recognition of their ineffable and affective qualities, which can escape precise description, and their importance as spatial, affective, and experiential categories with explanatory power. The chapter does so through three conceptual entry points: attunement, emergence, and materiality, before reflecting on the use of open-ended sensory, digital, and design ethnographic methodologies in the author’s own and others’ recent projects.