Creative Methods Experimentation #3: Digital-Sensory Methods

This is part of a series of three standalone online sessions, scheduled for Thursday 12th February, Thursday 5th March and Thursday 26th March 2026.

This series of three sessions offers postgraduate researchers the opportunity to engage with leading experts who are pushing the boundaries of qualitative inquiry through creativity, innovation, and collaboration. The sessions explore how researchers are extending and reworking traditional qualitative methods, experimenting with creative methods, arts-based and research-creation practices, and developing approaches to co-production that open up new forms of knowledge and participation.

Each lecture will be structured around one or two key readings, providing a shared foundation for discussion. Participants will not only have the chance to reflect critically on the ideas and techniques presented, but will also be encouraged to experiment with selected methods in practice, testing their potential within their own areas of research. Together, the series aims to cultivate methodological versatility by combining theoretical reflection, practical experimentation, and collective dialogue.

Session 3 in the series will be hosted by Dr Laura Trafi-Prats, Reader at Manchester Metropolitan University, and will explore the potential of digital sensory methods in social research. The reading identifies the use of such methods in a project seeking to grasp the sensory experience of new school buildings. It acts as an example of how social and environmental experiences are reconfigured through digital sensing practices, and foregrounds how digital sensory methods highlight the complex relationalities between subjects, environments and technologies. It also demonstrates how sensing occurs across things, people and environments involving practices beyond the five human senses, and how sensing practices are connected to arts and practice-based methods.

The key reading for this session is:

de Freitas, E., & Trafí-Prats, L. (2024). Atmospheric data and software arts: New ways of investigating the built environment. In L. A. Mazzei & A. Y. Jackson (Eds.), Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry (pp. 51-64). Routledge.

Outcomes

• Expanding notions of sensing: Students will move from an understanding of the five human senses toward recognising sensing as a distributed, more-than-human practice;
• Experimenting with digital sensory methods: Students will be able to use everyday sensor technologies to design and test small-scale experiments, connecting these practices to their own fieldwork;
• Engaging with theoretical perspectives: Students will develop understandings of social research informed by Science and Technology Studies, enabling them to conceptualise research designs that address complex relationalities between subjects, environments, entities, and technologies;
• Reimagining research data: Students will learn to approach research data in more open and dynamic ways, recognising its liveliness and potential to generate new insights into the social.
  

Contributors

Dr Laura Trafi-Prats is a Reader in the School of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, with experience in arts-based, creative and participatory methods. Recently, she has completed an ESRC-funded study on the lived experience of young people in new school buildings. This involved digital-sensory ethnographic methods, as well as practices of speculative mapping and modelling. She is also Deputy Director of Advanced Qualitative Methods for the WRDTP.