Andrew Crabtree

Although the capability approach has had a tremendous impact on the development debate, it has had little to say about sustainable development. As several Human Development Reports have maintained, the last twenty years' gains in human development are not sustainable. The failure to include an integrate sustainability into the Human Development Index would thus give the wrong policy message. Drawing on the works of Amartya Sen and Thomas Scanlon, this article argues that sustainable development can be seen as a process of increasing legitimate freedoms, the freedoms that others cannot reasonably reject. Thus, Sen's vision of development as freedom is amended to suggest limits to freedoms. Forms of development which are not sustainable can be reasonably rejected due, at least, to the harm and blighting entailed. Based on this, it is argued that at country level of comparison the Human Development Index should be combined with the Ecological Footprint to reflect sustainability, and that the Human Development Reports should give way to Sustainable Development Reports

This edited collection opens up new intellectual territories and articulates the ways in which academics are theorising and practicing new forms of research in ‘wild’ contexts. Many researchers are choosing to leave the familiarity of their laboratory-based settings in order to pursue in-situ studies ‘in the wild’ that can help them to better understand the implications of their work in real-world settings. This has naturally led to ethical, philosophical and practical reappraisals with regard to the taken for granted lab-based modus operandi of scientific, cultural and design-based ways of working. This evolving movement has led to a series of critical debates opening up around the nature of research in the wild, but up until now these debates have not been drawn together in a coherent way that could be useful in an academic context. The book brings together applied, methodological and theoretical perspectives relating to this subject area, and provides a platform and a source of reference material for researchers, students and academics to base their work on. Cutting across multiple disciplines relating to philosophy, sociology, ethnography, design, human–computer interaction, science, history and critical theory, this timely collection appeals to a broad range of academics in varying fields of research.

Over recent years the term ‘in the wild’ has increasingly appeared in publications within the field of Human Computer Interaction. The phrase has become synonymous with a range of approaches that focus upon carrying out research-based studies reporting on user behaviour in ‘natural’, ‘situated’ contexts, in distinction to lab-based studies. The objective of this book is to bring together a range of perspectives from a variety of researchers who have carried out studies in the wild. By bringing these together we aim to explore and demonstrate how such studies can support research in different fields and domains. In doing this we wish to help the broader research community understand some of the issues, reasoning, methods and practical matters that are involved in doing research in the wild. This edited collection is part of an ongoing and developing debate, and as such provides both a backdrop and platform that will promote further discussions in this emerging area.

This chapter outlines some key approaches towards understanding the unremarkable. It focuses first on a sociological orientation to the everyday world as key to the enterprise, and then on a variety of complimentary approaches for elaborating or surfacing the unremarkable character of everyday life. It considers the kinds of data resources that are routinely used to elaborate the unremarkable, and the relationship between data resource and analysis as a constituent element of working ‘in the wild’. We hope this will be a valuable resource for researchers and students alike.