This paper reports on a field study of more than three hundred ‘incidental’ human-robot encounters in a public outdoor space. We have used an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic method, employing breaching experiments and membership categorization analysis to reveal how Incidentally Co-present Persons (InCoPs) interact with and make sense of robots in an urban environment.

Compelled by Yoo’s (MIS Q, 34:213–231, ) call for research on experiential computing, the paper suggests meditations as a genre for both doing and reporting on fieldwork. Meditations are used to engender passionate renderings of research encounters that are part introspective and reflective and part causative and instructive. The meditations weave together everyday experiences with IT with theoretical reflections on embodiment and affect, and suggest the potential for a new scholarly sensuousness. The paper suggests that paying attention to feelings related to technology in everyday life and the use of alternative representational tactics and theoretical motifs can be generative of new matters for empirical research. Emphasizing the senses and the body and their importance in developing a sensory apprenticeship in IS, the paper suggests alternative routes to knowledge and representation.