Representing cycling sensescapesand sociabilities with mobile

methods

Cosmin Popan PhD candidate

Lancaster University Liveable Cities

Velomobile Methods Workshop11 May 2016, Oxford

Sensescapes as constitutive of future bicycle systems

The practice of cycling is perceived so differently through the body of its practitioners incomparison to other forms of urban mobility, particularly driving.

Yet, cycling is too often treated as indistinctive from the latter in terms of policies andprovisions.

Bicycle systems can only come to life when cycling sensescapes ceaseto be as hostile as they are now. The challenge is to think and to feelbeyond the current socio-technical arrangements.

How can the cycling sensescapes be tamed in today's unfriendly car environments?

Are sensory tolerances something that can be learnt?

How to re-imagine human senses that readily embrace the equally unappealingprospects of self-propelled, shell-less mobility?

These possibilities are systematically rejected today, but they should be reconsidered ifa bicycle system is to really take off.

Researching sensescapes

The utopian project of building sensory tolerances.

Sensory tolerances as essential affordances of future bicycle systems.

Under which conditions could embodying the bicycle be as appealing as inhabiting thecar?

Should we aim to equate one type of affordances with others?

Researching sensescapes: the fleeting and the ephemeral

What methods for the fleeting, the distributed, the multiple, thesensory, the emotional and the kinaesthetic (Law and Urry 2011)?

The need to go beyond the visual and auditory towards the more embodiednature of cycling and to reflect the kinaesthetic with its intricate and toooften dormant internal sensorium of one's body.

Methods: video and audio footage; auto-ethnography; auto-biography

Researching sensescapes: 'Seeing' with a GoPro

The visual has been historically the dominant sense, particularly within the Westernculture. The sense to build upon the rest of human sensorium.

The less mediated, almost shell-ness, nature of cycling.

Strategies: mundane exchanges of glances with others ahead; looking back over one's shoulder; looking ahead over another cyclist's shoulder; anticipating a left-turning car by checking if its front wheels change position.

The bicycle has a particular design → one sits on a bike at a higher level than the

seat of average cars, meaning better vision in the distance.

The bicycle has a particular design → cyclists need to check more oftenthe road surface for holes, bumps etc.

Bicycles have different designs → road bikes forces the cyclist on a lean forward

position, vision at a distance and peripheral vision aresignificantly reduced. Bicycles have different designs → upright city bicycles in Copenhagen or

Amsterdam afford richer visual scapes.

Technology: GoPro attached to helmet

● Point of view shot = 'sees what you see'; although not at the same level asthe eyes.

● Wide angle camera → objects at the periphery (cars) seem closer than theyactually are.

● Conspicuous; issues of privacy when researching other subjects.

Technology: GoPro attached to helmet, point of view shot

Link Youtube

Researching sensescapes: 'Hearing' with headset microphones

Sound brings dangers to the attention in the way the eyes do not→ I can look to fine tune the adequate response: steering, braking or accelerating

I can tell the next move of the driver behind me → a rising pitch of engine =the car is going to overtake; steady, low engine note = a car is 'tracking' me, waitingfor the good opportunity pass.

The cyclist-bicycle hybrid generates its own 'acoustic territory', a'topography of auditory life' (LaBelle 2010), almost inaudible from the louder enginenotes. This territory is harder to represent even with fine attuned technologies.

The rhythm of cycling emerges from both body and machine, their symbiosis

generates an enveloping sound membrane, the result of a resounding

body voicing the effort through audible heartbeats and alertbreathing, and of a machine engaged in circular movement, its scratchytires, the snoring chain, the clicking freewheel. The sound, butalso the feel of the bike, is an integrated sense of the state of the bike.

Technology: Headset microphones and voice recorder app on smartphone

● 'Real-time video diary'.

● Complements the microphone of the GoPro which is more exposed to background

noise; headset microphone is protected by a scarf around the neck.

● Records my description of what I perceive beyond visual scapes, but also

the 'voice' of the body: heavy breathing, coughing etc.

● Vocabulary remains limited; plus the wholeness of sensescapes difficultto describe aptly within such short instances.

Technology: Headset microphones and voice recorder app on smartphone

Link Youtube

Researching sensescapes: Auto-ethnography and being through movement Bringing balance (equilibrioception), movement (proprioception) and pain (nocioception) to the fore through auto-ethnography.

Other senses than the visual and the hearing work in close symbiosis in perceptionthrough 'perceptual system' (Gibson 1979).

Perception is a mode of being through movement (Merleau-Ponty 1958).

It's cold today, I have put some gloves on, also a cap. As I just took the bicyclefrom the shed, I'm standing still for some brief moments, the bicycle on my right

side, my left hand on the handlebars, my right hand restingon the saddle. I contemplate my next movements, left foot on the pedal, both

hands now on the handlebars, gently pushing the bike forward togain that initial momentum, the forefingers mildly caressing the springybrake levers, a precaution I always take, the right foot elegantly describing a

hemicycle in the air as it gets over the seat and instinctively finds theother pedal. Yet, I'm standing still, not a single move, looking ahead, listeningto the humming city I'm about to embrace. I smell nothing yet, my ears and nose

are just a bit cold, maybe I feel the leg muscles contracting as theyanticipate the effort ahead. (Field notes from 2 bicycle rides in London, on 19January 2015 and 6 March 2015)

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Researching sensescapes: Auto-biography and building sensory tolerances

The existence and function of sensory tolerances are as much important as are the longand painstaking processes whereby they become embodied.

Enskilment or 'understanding in practice' (Ingold 2000) - useful to bridge theexisting gap between learning through representations and actual doing.

I was desperately trying to catch the eyes of the driver in the car parked on the side ofthe road as I was cycling towards him … As I realised it is in fact unlikely he wouldacknowledge my imminent arrival, I tried to swerve a bit to the right, not too much thoughas I would have gotten straight in the way of other incoming cars on the other lane. Thedoor opened slowly and widely, the next thing I remember is laying on the tarmac … I hitthe door with the left side of the handlebars, was instantly sent 'sailing' over the bars, didsome sort of a turn in the air and landed on my back. I luckily escaped with minor ribcontusions and a vivid memory of the incident that is haunting me ever since. This wasone of the not too many bicycle accidents I had and, even though it occurred ten years

ago, it still is the most traumatizing. Never again do I take a 'parked car'to be a mere 'parked car' any more and make sure I leaveenough clearance if some careless driver rushes out of hiscar without much consideration for others around. (Notesreflecting on a previous cycling experience, from 2006)

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Methods for cycling sensescapes Mobile technologies as method: Effective when accounting exclusively for the visual and the auditory

Less effective when deeper senses are explored: balance, movement, pain.

Self-reflexivity as method: Effective to explore the non-representational (Thrift 2007)

Effective to explore the tacit embodied knowledge acquired in many years of cycling

Sociabilities as constitutive of future bicycle systems

Sociability is defined as the play form of association (Simmel 1910).

Mobile sociabilities describe the types of quality interactions taking placebetween cyclists riding together in a particular formation.

Emotions and affects rise and surge between bodies moving together:

Bodies extend out into more-than-personal bonds and associations as people move witheach other. Emotions and affects feed back as they leap between people tying themeven closer together. […] Rather than communicating symbolically or discursively, beingmobile together in time is 'crucial in both establishing and enhancing a sense ofcollective purpose and a common understanding' producing feelings of 'well being'(Brennan 2004).

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Velomobile sociabilities

Swarm sociabilities

describe the all too common practices of rule breaking and bending in Amsterdam as'swarm behaviour', with cyclists 'adopting and sharing new rules of conduct incommunication with each other'. (Te Brömmelstroet et al. 2014).

Velomobile sociabilities

Conversation sociabilities

are once again more visible in bike friendly cities; the side-by-side cycling withanother person 'gives the most affordable co-presence, but (…) requires co-ridersto maintain the same pace over the terrain' (McIlvenny 2014).

Velomobile sociabilities

Carnivalesque sociabilities

Critical Mass events that are reversing the interaction order of urban mobilitiesthrough carnivalesque sociabilities; the carnival celebrates 'temporary liberationfrom the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension ofall hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions' (Bakhtin 1965).

Velomobile sociabilities

Club ride sociabilities

The mobile interaction order

Mobilizing Goffman's concept of 'interaction order' (1982) for the study of

group cycling.

The 'interaction order' describes how social life can be understood when looking at thetrivial instances where people have face-to-face encounters, which are conducted byfollowing a set of enabling conventions.

The interaction order has been mobilised more recently to explore co-presence beyond the static confinements imagined by Goffman (Jensen 2010, 2013,Conley 2012).

Through an analysis of the mobile interaction order maintained by several groups of

cyclists, encountered in London, Amsterdam and the British countryside, I identify aset of team and individual tactics that are deployed to keepthe interactants safe, to increase the efficiency of the group,to sustain its mobility or to build further confidence to cycleon the road.

Researching sociabilities: Methods as 'face-work'

'Face-work' are 'actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistentwith face' and which serve 'to counteract “incidents” – that is, events whose effectivesymbolic implications threaten face' (Goffman 1967:8)

Researching sociabilities: Face-work in a 'chain-gang formation'. requires very specific position within the mobile group; limits the mobility options; the researcher is 'stuck in formation'; his face-work = changing positions in the group to avoid upsetting the interaction; physical capabilities as well as the skills to ride in formation are extremely important.

Researching sociabilities: Face-work in an 'accordion formation' position in the group is less constraining the researcher can swing between the front, the middle and the

end of the formation two successive actions: the expansion and the compression. The expansion is

caused by inclination of the terrain, physical capabilities, volume of traffic or weather.The compression is done through brief stops, the use of mobile phones when ridersget lost or lunch breaks to allow recovery.

Methods for cycling sociabilities

Video footage as method: To represent the dynamics of group cycling

Effective once cycling group skills and capabilities are acquired.

'Face-work' as method: Researching sociabilities by learning to ride in 'chain gang' and 'accordion'

formations.

Participant observation = researcher is effectively engaged in sustaining interactionorder

Thank you!

@CosminPopanwww.cosminpopan.co