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The increasing application of science and technology, while having reduced uncertainties and threats to mankind (like impacts of natural disasters), has also created new uncertainties in terms of risks and ethics. Environmental risks from new technological innovations and ethical questions raised by developments in genetics are the defining uncertainties associated with technology in our risk society. Also the current socio-economic order is a knowledge-driven one. This ‘knowledge-based’ society also implies that it is a discourse driven order, with language playing a more critical role in contemporary socio-economic changes than it has in the past. Policy makers around the world, in response to these new challenges to technological innovations thrown up by this risk society, have started moving away from expert-based governance of science and technology and towards governance based on transparency, public dialogue and democratic engagement. It is within this context that this research analyses, using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective, the largest ever public engagement exercise conducted in the UK – the 2003 ‘GM Nation?’ public debate on the possible commercialisation of genetically modified crops in the UK. The primary aim of conducting this piece of research is to have a better and deeper understanding of the process of engaging the public in policy-making on technological issues. This includes analysing the aspiration to normative democratic ideals of public-engagement exercises and the role of the public in technological transition. The aspect of relations of power and domination between participants in public engagement exercises has been largely neglected in the empirical literature and this research aims at exploring these aspects in detail through the use of CDA as a research method. The findings of this research point to the ideological influence of the discourse of the market or, more generally, the neoliberal discourse in the contemporary socio-economic environment in the UK. This research concludes that the agriculture regime in the UK continues to operate under the selection pressure of the economic discourse despite the emergence of niche counter discourses of sustainability in recent years.

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This thesis is an exploratory study of contemporary British mantelpiece displays. Located within anthropological/sociological literatures of the meaning of home, identity and material culture, it opens up the 'focal point' of the domestic interior to scrutiny. This familiar 'homely' space is a strangely invisible presence within the house. Ethnographically-informed interviews reveal its role in the ordering and categorisation of domestic time, space and objects; also family and gender relations. By transforming this taken-for-granted space into matter out of place, ongoing practices of memory, family and home are interpreted as internalised cultural categorisations. The perspective of gift theory reveals frictions between traditional practice and current conflations of self and taste, home and family, in a mass of proliferating materials. Focusing on the mythopoetic gendering of the gift and the house, I show how the mantelpiece is a structuring structure in an order of artefacts including the house and displayed objects. There is a 'gap' in-between the tangible, visual and audible properties of mantelpiece displays which can show the immortal ordinary society of premodern mythopoesis and ordering of power relations. The syncresis of home, memory, family and women is past-oriented and exclusionary, compressing and disguising 'being' - domestication of the body - as 'knowing'. The study employs multi-modal collection methods, such as postal questionnaires, in- depth qualitative interviews, visual data including a longitudinal autophotographic project, Mass-Observation Archive material and architectural histories. Data are analysed from differing perspectives, including narrative/biographic accounts, emergent themes, innovative visual interpretation and historiography/archaeology. Presentation of findings addresses the 'crisis of representation' by using text, photographs and sketches in a bound thesis, a CD-Rom and a website. Using sociological imagination thus problematises everyday processes of 'doing' both social membership and social enquiry. In conclusion, I suggest future multi-dimensional enquiry into the 'gaps' in social/architectural fabric.

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This thesis is concerned with understanding and describing the factors that influence the use of technology in public spaces. Adoption and use of technological systems over the past few decades has grown considerably. With increased use the role of technology now pervades nearly every aspect of social interaction. Systems are now used more and more in public areas however it appears a somewhat ignored and little understood area of research within the human computer interaction (HCI) literature. Therefore new methods of assessment are required. Investigating human interaction with technologies in public places provides a new way to conceptualise and study interaction and in particular relate findings to new technologies. Existing methods and guidelines related to the use of technology fail to consider socio-environmental factors. New methods of assessment should allow the examination of how socio-environmental and usability factors influence use of technology in public areas. To assess how socio-environmental factors influence the use of technology in public spaces nine studies were undertaken using convergent methodologies. This has allowed a detailed examination and exploration of how socio-environmental factors influence the use. These investigations have led to the development of a questionnaire that is a valid, reliable psychometric tool and the Technology Acceptance Models for Public Space Technologies (TAMPS) that measures use of technology in public areas. Rather than focus purely on accessibility and usability factors this thesis has enabled the integration of those and socio-environmental influences. The results suggest success in evaluating or facilitating adoption and use of ubiquitous and mobile devices acknowledging how social and environmental factors influence use is crucial. The HCI community, designers and service providers need to integrate findings from this thesis in future system design which will lead to technologies that are efficient, effective and satisfying to use.

The manner in which our ancestors and ancestor species negotiated their physical and social environments has had consequences for how we engage with artefacts today. Like language, the ability to attribute significance and meaning to artefacts is evolved and consists of a suite of interconnected adaptations. A model is articulated which, it is claimed, accommodates all the possible ways in which humans attribute significance and meaning to artefacts. It consists of two halves. Each element is considered in turn and accounts of their evolutionary origins are constructed. This sequence moves from the oldest to the most recently evolved: thus the first half - the sensory-kinetic-affective mode - includes ancient, reflexive, sensory (including the physical and kinetic) and perceptual responses originating in our ancestor species’ negotiation of their organic and inorganic environment; and the affective responses such as technical and aesthetic pleasures arising from such responses. The second half – the symbolic-narrative mode - embraces the attribution of symbolic or narrative meanings to artefacts which, I propose, prefigured, or co-evolved with the emergence of language and, like language, is an expression of symbolic thought. I argue that where symbolic meaning is intentionally ascribed to an artefact, some account will be taken of the data delivered by the sensory-kinetic-affective mode, such that those intending the meaning will often seek consonance between that data and the meaning intended, in order to strengthen the power of the artefact to act as an agent of social mediation. A central role is ascribed to a sensibility towards style, as the mechanism by which the two halves are united. This sensibility is highly attuned to physical characteristics, with the objective of intuiting something of the character, make-up and therefore, likely future behaviour of the maker, owner, or other with whom the artefact is associated. I call this resultant data tacit social intelligence. It is argued that practices which evolved during the 100,000 years or so in which Homo sapiens created artefacts by hand, using simple tools, despite the changed circumstances of manufacture, economics, technology and social and political organisation, have persisted into historical times and remain active today. In particular, artefacts continue physically to represent accumulations of behaviour. Thus, in creating or choosing to be associated with an artefact, we are conscious that others will interrogate it for signs of the behavioural values we are seen to esteem.