Mostly when we think about social science, we think about small gangs of researchers armed with clipboards and questionnaires. Sometimes they have laboratories and electrodes, but mostly they just want to ask us questions. When I answer social science surveys, I usually assume that the researchers have a hypothesis in mind and that there are good and bad answers. Hard to avoid this and researchers have to be really careful to avoid what is called 'good respondent bias'.
This project is different and uses a alternate approach which is more inductive and more emergent. When we started talking about this project and Lucy began preparing a proposal, we just had a sense that it was interesting territory and that there was a good chance a trek across the terrain might involve some interesting encounters. So we are using an approach to data collection that is less formalised and more opportunistics, but which seeks to build a reasonable collage of the dynamics of service design. Officially, we could call it a grounded theory or inductive approach to research. It treats participants in the research project as co-producers of knowledge; researchers might be able to add some linguistic polish or theoretical gloss to the processes and phenomena, but overall this is a joint expedition.
'What is the plural of anecdote? Data'. Wildavsky said this at a meeting somewhere. We are collecting, collating and synthesising data all the way through this process. Flip charts, arguments, lists, observations and arguments (conflict surfaces some of the most important phenomena). We may have to do a few follow up interviews but all these sources will come together over the life of the project.
