This article explores the organization of instructional corrections in pre-clinical dental education. The students are practising manual skills using a simulator and tutors are inspecting and evaluating their progress. Simulators and simulation are critical to the organization of contemporary healthcare training, and the academic literature that explores forms of simulation in healthcare tends to consider the ‘fidelity’ (or ‘realism’) of systems and the extent to which they match the clinical situations that they are designed to mimic. In contrast, this article considers how tutors and students explicitly attend to matters of realism in the course of instructional sequences. We highlight the ways in which tutors routinely invoke ‘real life’ in instructional corrections and we discuss how these sequences reveal the work that tutors undertake to compensate for the ‘chronic insufficiency’ of the simulator. We show how tutors emphasize the reasoned character of manual bodily skills, reasons linked to the complexities and contingencies of clinical practice. To explore these issues and concerns, the article draws on the analysis of audio-visual data of everyday instruction.

This paper examines 'the routine shop' as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the 'work' involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, 'seen but unnoticed' methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members' methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.

This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe-the connected shower-and implications for the development of 'living services' or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer 'insight' and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the 'insight' living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services.

We explore transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and roboticists across a portfolio of artworks. Brendan Walker's Broncomatic was a breath controlled mechanical rodeo bull ride. Blast Theory's Cat Royale deployed a robot arm to play with a family of three cats for twelve days. Different Bodies is a prototype improvised dance performance in which dancers with disabilities physically manipulate two mirrored robot arms. We reflect on these to explore how artists shape robotics research through the two key strategies of improvisation and provocation. Artists are skilled at improvising extended robot experiences that surface opportunities for technology-focused design, but which also require researchers to improvise their research processes. Artists may provoke audiences into reflecting on the societal implications of robots, but at the same time challenge the established techno-centric concepts, methods and underlying epistemology of robotics research.