I’ve been having enormous trouble pinning down practitioners for an interview. I had really been hoping to catch two in Bristol and two in London by tomorrow, but the earliest date I managed to fix is 24th November – disappointingly after my next supervisory tutorial when Tom had asked me to bring some initial ‘results’ (the product of a process I now begin to understand as ‘the empirical moment’ to which Kevin has been saying he’s also looking forward). Part of the problem has been identifying practices which really specialise in user-engagement in the design process – there seem to be more which occasionally operate in this way, but not consistently. In conjunction with my current reading of Saul Alinsky (‘Rules for Radicals’, 1971), with his suggestions that “a society devoid of compromise is totalitarian” (p.59) and that “concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa” (p.32), I’m beginning to think that perhaps the difficulties I’m experiencing relate to the fact that I’m looking for examples of something which doesn’t exist – an architectural practice that derives all its income from public engagement projects. If so, perhaps this speculative observation could act as a hypothesis which can serve as the kind of ‘analytic generalisation’ that Yin (2003:50) describes as essential to the design of a case study – enabling data to be evaluated in relation to a ‘rival theory’ to be tested (for replicability rather than for sampling-based logic).
Yin observes that
“…‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, capturing what you are really interested in answering, led you to the case study as the appropriate strategy in the first place. Nevertheless, these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions do not point to what you should study. Only if you are forced to state some propositions will you move in the right direction… At the same time, some studies may have a legitimate reason for not having any propositions. This is the condition – which exists in experiments, surveys, and the other research strategies alike – in which a topic is the subject of ‘exploration.’ Every exploration, however, should still have some purpose. Instead of propositions, the design for an exploratory study should state this purpose, as well as the criteria by which an exploration will be judged successful” (p.22).
Yin also notes that:
“…theory development prior to the conduct of any data collection is one point of difference between case studies and related methods such as ethnography and grounded theory” (p.28).
What will my ‘rival theory’ be? That one alternative to engaging only occasionally in community-oriented projects might be to supplement architectural practice with teaching-based activities.