In this lecture we look at very different environments (design workshops, tasting fairs, shopping and educational settings) and participation frameworks (solitary action, two- and multiparty interaction) to investigate how sensorial inspections are produced as witnessable
social actions.
We describe how participants build inspections of unfamiliar objects; how they initiate, organize and close the inspection proper; how they deploy different senses depending on the materiality of the objects they inspect; how investigators make themselves momentarily unavailable for the surrounding interaction by engaging in a ‘private’ activity. We are interested in how the different material features of objects are consequential for the ways the inspection sequences run off and which resources are mobilized for the inspection, although the action is still recognizable as a sensorial inspection of unfamiliar objects.