Materialtone in Urban STS and Multimodal Ethnography
Materialtone began as an appendix experiment in my PhD, but it has grown into a way of doing urban STS by other means. Infrastructures have been described as the material forms that make circulation possible—“the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked,” as Brian Larkin puts it (Larkin 2013, 327). They are not passive backgrounds but environments that shape perception, desire, and politics.
Materialtone takes this insight seriously at the level of color and texture. It asks: what happens if we treat the yellow of a ramp, the turquoise of a boundary line, or the grey-brown of a dirty floor as entry points into questions of accessibility, coordination, maintenance, and neglect? Instead of using images to illustrate arguments made elsewhere, Materialtone tries to let the cards themselves function as urban STS devices.
From color palette to infrastructure device
The project borrows its basic form from Pantone: a rectangular swatch, a code, a name. But the production of each card follows a deliberate protocol:
- walking and noticing a fragment (step, stain, bollard, line),
- photographing and cropping that fragment,
- sampling a dominant color (HEX/RGB),
- naming the tone with a situated label (“Numbered bollard,” “TKTS stairs lines,” “Dirty floor 6”),
- pairing the swatch with a close-up image and often a QR link to field notes.
This chain is not just a design workflow; it is a multimodal method, a sequence of translations that turns a messy urban situation into a portable, comparable object—a specimen that can circulate across notebooks, classrooms, exhibitions, and online posts.
In this sense, Materialtone resonates with design anthropology, where ethnographers and designers co-develop concrete devices—prototypes, maps, diagrams—to explore how social and material arrangements might work differently (Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013). Such devices are not mere outputs but tools for inquiry that reconfigure relations between theory and practice. Materialtone is one of these tools.
It also aligns with Sarah Pink’s account of sensory ethnography as the careful design of “configurations” that combine walking, sensing, recording, and representing, where media choices are inseparable from how place is known (Pink 2015). Materialtone is precisely such a configuration: a way of knowing cities through chromatic fragments.
Four ways of reading a card
In its current phase, the project is structured around four lenses that connect it to broader STS and multimodal debates.
1. Colors as standards and scripts
Urban colors—safety yellows, access blues, emergency reds—are never neutral. They are part of systems of classification and standardization that quietly shape social interaction. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star show how categories and standards “torque” lives, sorting people and things into consequential positions (Bowker and Star 1999).
A Materialtone card freezes these chromatic instructions: the yellow of a mobile cable ramp scripting caution; the red of TKTS stairs scripting spectacle, queuing, and controlled ascent. Reading cards this way aligns the project with STS work on standards: each swatch becomes a prompt to ask who set the standard, which behaviors it scripts, and how people comply with or subvert those scripts.
2. Surfaces as interfaces between bodies and infrastructures
Bollards, steps, painted lines, and stains are interfaces where bodies meet systems. Their textures manage traction, friction, and risk. Paying attention to how a surface feels under foot, wheel, or cane places Materialtone in conversation with sensory and infrastructural ethnography, which treat surfaces, sounds, and atmospheres as central to how urban infrastructures are experienced (Larkin 2013; Pink 2015).
Here, each card becomes a micro-diagram of embodied contact: a way of asking which bodies are anticipated, which are excluded, and how infrastructures are felt rather than merely seen.
3. Standardized color as a technology of coordination
A specific shade of turquoise or grey does coordination work: it links suppliers, city agencies, contractors, and maintenance crews, ensuring that new parts match old ones and that everyone can “read” the infrastructure in the same way. Materialtone foregrounds this dimension by isolating tones as specimens; swatches become hooks for investigating supply chains, municipal codes, and budgeting decisions that usually remain backstage.
This connects the project to STS analyses of standards and classification as tools that organize large technical and bureaucratic systems—what Bowker and Star call “infrastructural inversion,” the move that makes hidden arrangements visible (Bowker and Star 1999).
Some segments of a Materialtone card.
4. Decay, dirt, and repair as diagnostic
Faded lines, worn coatings, patched repairs, and dirty floors are not failures of the project; they are its diagnostic core. They materialize maintenance, neglect, and improvisation. Shannon Mattern’s essay “Maintenance and Care” insists that acts of repair and upkeep are central to urban life, yet are often rendered invisible or devalued (Mattern 2018).
Materialtone’s “dirty floors” and “bollards with garbage” echo this perspective: they are color fields where maintenance labor, informal use, and infrastructural fatigue leave visible traces. Reading cards through this lens turns the palette into a map of where care is invested—and where it is withheld.
Experimental and multimodal ethnography: broth and seasoning
Conceptually, Materialtone is grounded in urban STS: infrastructures, standards, maintenance, and classification provide the broth. Methodologically, it relies on multimodal ethnography as its seasoning: walking, photographing, cropping, sampling pixels, designing swatches, attaching QR codes.
This places the project alongside experiments in media and mapping that seek to visualize the layered materialities of networked cities. In Deep Mapping the Media City, Shannon Mattern proposes deep mapping as a multisensory, archaeological approach to media infrastructures, combining diagrams, maps, and fieldwork to trace how networks are embedded in urban space (Mattern 2015). Materialtone extends this tradition into the chromatic and textural domain: instead of mapping cables or signal flows, it builds a palette of infrastructural fragments.
At the same time, Materialtone shares with design anthropology the conviction that methods can—and should—take the form of concrete artifacts that people can handle, rearrange, and argue around (Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013). Cards can be shuffled into comparative palettes, pinned on walls, or used as prompts in workshops and teaching, turning color into a shared object of inquiry.
Why Materialtone matters for STS and multimodal work
Putting Materialtone into conversation with these debates means claiming something modest but specific:
- that color and texture are infrastructural, not decorative;
- that standardized tones can be treated as ethnographic evidence of coordination and regulation;
- that dirty, faded, and improvised surfaces are archives of maintenance and neglect;
- and that small visual devices—like these cards—can be a serious method, not just an illustration.
Suppose STS has shown that standards, labor, and stories hold infrastructures together. In that case, Materialtone adds that they are also held together chromatically and texturally—and that learning to read those palettes is one more way to inhabit, research, and perhaps reimagine the urban.
References
- Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Gunn, Wendy, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, eds. 2013. Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury.
- Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.
- Mattern, Shannon. 2015. Deep Mapping the Media City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Mattern, Shannon. 2018. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal, November.
- Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. London: SAGE Publications.