Team:Sheffield/HumanPractices/activities

Classes and discussions in STS

• Early philosophy
• Language philosophy
• Identity and sociology
• Symbolic interaction
• Science and Technology Studies

 

Wet & dry observations

Kate did twice-weekly observations of the labs and the modellers, keeping track of their activities. We had regular discussions about our lab and modelling work and developed some ideas for how we could investigate identity through these periods of observation. This is how the idea of HP devices came about.

 

Interviews

Having decided that we were going to try and identify pathogens as our scientific goal, we thought that the notion of ‘identity’ would be a good concept to pursue with our human practices project. We wanted to understand how our identities and roles as team members were formed, how our team’s collective identity came about, and how this might differ from other teams. In order to do that we did a number of things:

Kate conducted semi-structured interviews (~40 mins) with each member of the team

Several members of the scientific team did some practice with Kate and then conducted over 20 semi-structured interviews (~20 minutes) with members of teams from the UK, USA, Europe and Australia.

At Teversal Manor (see below), after the wet work was finished, we each looked over our interview with Kate and made comments on how we would change our answers now, which allowed us to reflect on how our ideas and feelings had changed over the course of the project.
We had a discussion at Teversal about what it was like to do human practices work and what our experience of conducting interviews was.

Developing the sociotechnical circuits

The team spent an afternoon per week mapping our (using our post-its and string) the activity of that week and taking photographs of each 'map' of activity. You can see some of the pictures and how these were turned into sociotechnical circuits on the outputs page.

Developing the collage device

The team also spent time outside of the formal hours of work looking for pictures for the collage device and attaching them where they thought they made most sense. The production of the collage can be seen in the pictures (see the gallery, or the outputs page) and the write-up of the collage can be found in the main report (see the outputs page).

Teversal Manor

After the wet work was done we took a weekend to reflect on and develop the outputs of our human practices work from the summer months. We travelled to the gatehouse in the grounds of the beautiful Teversal Manor House near Nottingham, UK. We spent the weekend analysing our team’s interviews and exploring similarities and differences between our responses and other teams, we had a number of lengthy discussion sessions about topics including, ‘modelling’, ‘identity’ and ‘doing human practices’. We recorded those discussions so that we could use the analysis we collaboratively developed in the conversations in our primary human practices report, and so that we could use the conversations as data for our report. Also, there was some playing of board games, cooking of food, and – for some – outdoor exercise!