Status in Industrial Studies
Claudia Eckert
Engineering Design Centre
Engineering Department
University of Cambridge
Cambridge CB2 1PZ, United Kingdom
cme26@eng.cam.ac.uk
1
Introduction
The result of empirical studies in industry depends on many factors. One aspect that is
independent of the method applied to the study, is the personality of the researchers. If
they get on with the people they are interacting with, they are more likely to find out
more and get an intuitive understanding of the culture. However in my personal
experience, this is not just a matter of personal sympathy, but also a matter of the
perceptions people have of the researcher and the way the study has been set up. This
paper is a very personal account of the influence the change in my status over the past
ten years – from a young PhD student at a polytechnic to a senior research associate at
Cambridge University – has had on the interactions I am having with the people I am
studying.
We all like to think that with increasing experience we become better and more
efficient at interacting with industry. This is certainly true to some extent, as we know
more about design and about organisations we can recognise and interpret patterns and
therefore make better sense of what we see. However what we get to see and hear can
be more restricted. People are often open towards students, whom they can personally
help, but they may feel quite differently about somebody whom they are sent to see by
the orders of their boss’s boss. There is a trade-off between the access to individuals
and one’s visibility within an organisation. One approach is to interact with those
individuals one wants to interact with regardless of hierarchy, contacting relatively
junior members of the organisation. Another is to come in championed by the company
management. Everything in between might be more difficult. Some researchers have
been able to avoid potential problems by going into an organisation with a distinct role.
Henderson (1999) negotiated a role as a technical author in order to do ethnography –
but found she gained access to different information when people knew she was a
sociologist studying them. Bucciarelli (1994) was invited into projects as a consultant.
The ethnographic researchers at Xerox PARC (e.g. Minneman, 1991; Button, 2000) are
brought as internal experts into Xerox projects to gather knowledge for building
support tools.
In recent years my role has changed from being a student doing observations myself to
setting up case studies for my own students. Section 2 describes the case studies I have
undertaken and the roles I had in them, while section 3 concentrates on the influence of
the way these studies had been initiated and in particular on the role of the project
champion within an organisation. The section 4 will discuss other important factors that
determine the outcome of studies in more detail, before I draw some conclusions in
section 5.
2 My different roles
My studies fall into two distinct phases. Between 1991 and 1998 I studied design
processes, communication and the role of inspiration in the knitwear industry in the
UK, Germany and Italy, through a combination of interviews and ethnographic
observations (see Eckert, 2001; Eckert & Stacey, 2000, 2001; see Stacey & Eckert,
1999, for a discussion of the methodology). Since 1999 I have concentrated on largescale engineering design, focusing on how designers modify existing products and how
they plan their activities.
2.1 Student – designer girlie
My initial goal at the beginning of my PhD was to built an intelligent support system
for placing patterns onto garment shapes thus making sizing garments and fitting them
to individual measurements easier. With a background in AI I was determined to
undertake proper knowledge acquisition exercises (see Tunnicliff and Scrivener, 1991),
but I was never able to get the commitment from an expert required for conventional
knowledge elicitation, and therefore had to find other ways of gather knowledge. I
attended design classes for knitwear designers and knitting machine programming
classes for technicians. I felt very strongly that I needed to understand how designers
and technicians worked and thought, because the few I had already spoken to were not
happy with the computer systems that they had. Without any formal knowledge of how
to conduct empirical case studies I decided to visit companies and talk to the designers
and technicians. I started doing ethnography, with the strong belief that it was
important to understand cultures from the inside out, before I discovered the existence
of ethnography as an academic field. While I was home in Germany I was given a list
of knitting companies and rang technicians directly. I told them that I was only in
Germany for a few weeks and was writing a thesis on how technicians and designers
get on with computer support systems back in the UK. Only in one of the nine
companies I rang up were the technicians not interested in talking to me, and I managed
to visit seven companies. One technician took me a meeting room and one introduced
me briefly to his boss. All the others took me along to their desks, gave me a cup of
coffee and talked to me about their work. I had prepared a set of questions, but tried to
encourage them to speak freely. Some took me along to their knitting machines to set
up the machines for other test runs. They showed me their computer programs and the
garments they had made with great pride. Knitwear technicians are mostly recruited
from the shop floor and have done apprenticeships after the minimal legally required
schooling. The job is intellectually challenging and varied with fairly immediate
gratification through tangible products. However, they are often frustrated that the
designers don’t understand what they are doing and don’t appreciate their skills. They
saw in me just another designer girl, like many others who come on company visits or
placements. But I was really interested in what they did and they explained their tasks
to me openly and clearly. While I thought I was doing a knowledge acquisition
exercise, I was in fact doing a cultural study of the knitwear industry.
2.2 Open University researcher
Towards the end of my PhD I become a research fellow at The Open University, the
British distance education university, on a research project looking at the use of sources
of inspiration in knitwear (see Eckert & Stacey, 2000, 2001). Largely as a result of my
previous observations, the main focus of my PhD thesis (only part of my research on
knitwear design) had changed to analysing communication problems between designers
and technicians, and building a computer support tool that helps knitwear designers to
generate unambiguous representations of garment shapes thus eliminating the need for
technicians to interpret confusing specifications and redesign the designers’ work
(Eckert, 2001; see Stacey & Eckert, in press). In the meantime I had learned about
ethnographic studies, and I tried to get access to companies to undertake ethnographic
observations of the entire design process, but focusing on communication and
inspiration. In the UK I first wrote to head designers in companies and later rang them
up. I gained access to nine companies in the UK. In five companies the designers felt
that a better use of their time and my time would be talking to them instead of
observing them, and I was granted an interview with the head designers either in their
offices or in a show room. This was partly because these designers were concerned
about the intellectual property of their designs, and partly because they did not see how
I could get more out of watching them than talking to them. Four companies allowed
me access to observe them for several days. In knitwear design it is possible to observe
designs in many different stages of development during a short period of time, because
the development time of each individual design is short and the company works on
many different designs at the some time. Some designers felt uncomfortable with being
observed. Particularly younger designers, whose bosses had invited me, felt insecure. I
got the impression that how happy the designers were to be observed was a direct
reflection of how well they work in a team and much they trusted each other. For
example I visited a company in the Scottish borders for three days where the designers
were very close friends with each other, but struggled with unsympathetic bosses.
During the visit they made me feel so welcome, that I felt like joining a soap opera as a
side character, picking up the story lines on subsequent visits. Later I went back to
some of the companies I had observed to do experiments followed by debriefing
interviews, where I gave the designers two images as sources of inspiration and ask
them to turn these into designs (Eckert & Stacey, in press). Knitwear designers are
isolated in their companies and have little contact to designers in other companies other
than through personal contacts, therefore they have little understanding of whether
problems in their own organisations are endemic in the industry or due to personal
problems. They enjoyed talking to me because I was able to tell them that many issues,
like communication problems, were universal and arose from the inherent nature of the
problem, rather than their own inadequacies.
2.3 Cambridge University post-doctoral researcher
In 1999 I joined the Engineering Design Centre in the Engineering Department of
Cambridge University, and with it the world of engineering, without much technical
background in engineering as opposed to design in general. The EDC works closely
with industry, so our research is driven both by our own long-term agendas and by what
we find in the companies we work with. In my first field project in engineering, in an
aerospace company, instead of working out how to elicit task-based process models
from the users of a process planning system – our initial objective – we were drawn
into a case study looking at their customisation process (Eckert et al, in press). This was
a very different experience from the knitwear studies. Somebody from the company
had contacted us and got internal funding to support the research. After an initial
meeting we drew up a plan of the people we wanted to interview to gain an
understanding of the overall processes. A graduate trainee was tasked with organising
18 interviews over six days (with 5 further interviews later on). Each interview lasted
between 45 and 90 minutes. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The
interviews were held in a meeting room. Between interviews I sat in the mathematical
analysis office hoping we would be able to observe people working. This proved to be
very unsatisfactory with people working on their own in front of a computer; however
it gave an opportunity to understand the bonding mechanisms within the company. The
participants were promised a debriefing meeting that provided feedback to them and the
organisation about our findings. The people we encountered had high expectations of
us and expected that we had a highly methodological process to elicit information from
them. Nobody refused to be interviewed, but some people felt slightly cagey and
intimidated by me as a researcher and the reputation of my institution.
A year later we did another study at an automotive company, where I interviewed about
15 engineers for about an hour each. We were brought in at the invitation of one of the
directors to look at planning and communication processes in conjunction with an
internal process improvement initiative (Eckert and Clarkson, 2002). The people who
were involved in that initiative perceived us as a slight competition. Again a program of
interviews was negotiated with the director and the site manager. They identified the
people we should talk to and their bosses to make sure that the people were released for
interviews. The people we spoke to seemed to have been given little choice whether
they wanted to participate in the study. The site manager organised the interviews and
allowed us to use his office. The interviews were taped and transcribed. Following this
study several of our students were brought in to build process models and look at the
company’s quality control process. In both cases the interview studies were intended as
a background to later observational studies that did not happen (so far) for political
reasons in the companies. Both studies drove the development of design support tools.
We provided feedback to companies about their processes by reporting back about the
range of opinions we found in the company, as well as about how we saw the
organisation working. Often stating the obvious as an outsider proved most powerful.
For example we pointed out that we managed to locate the aerospace company’s
avionics department after ten interviews, and drew attention to a total communication
breakdown between the avionics department and the rest of the organisation.
2.4 Supervisor
In our recent empirical studies I have been involved with setting up observational
studies and model building exercises for our students. In studies in an engine
manufacturer (20 interviews of about an hour each, and observations of two major
design meetings, with one PhD student) and an automotive supplier (10 interviews of
about an hour each, with another PhD student), we have again run a series of interviews
with a wide range of people to gain an understanding their processes, problems and
company culture. The engine company has well working processes and employees who
essentially like the company and each other; while there are shortcoming some people
in the organisation are acutely aware of them and try to work on changing the company
culture through bringing in processes and rewarding people for complying with them.
In the other company one employee draw us a line on our organisational chart to
indicate the divisions between the sections in the company. In both companies we
interviewed in general meeting rooms and could only see the people’s work spaces on a
guided tour. As with my previous experiences in the knitwear industry, the people in
the engine company, who were generally happier in their jobs, where happier to be
interviewed and gave us fairly clear accounts of their company’s strengths and
weaknesses, without moaning or glossing over. My own role has changed considerably,
because I now have to let the students ask their own questions and follow their own
trail of thoughts. At times this proved difficult when we both wanted to follow up
different line of argument after an answer and pulled the conversation in different
directions.
Commenting on the organisation to draw out comments from interviewees is becoming
more difficult, because what I see is immediately seen as an evaluation of their
organisation. Where the knitwear technicians would have told me in no uncertain terms
that I got the wrong end of the stick, the engineers now wonder whether they are
making a mistake. Some of the openness of my early interviews and observations is
gone. I can only hope that my students will be received with the same openness that I
originally found. Even though we have essentially been doing consultancy for the
companies, we have so far not been paid. We traded feedback on the organisation for
access to designers, to build models and test out tools. In the future we are hoping to
move to towards paid projects, because we feel this will increase the companies’
commitment to the studies. My next role will probably be consultant.
3 Project champions / contact
Besides the role of the researcher the greatest influence on the study comes from the
role of the person who has brought us into the company and the role of the person who
organises the interactions. This has been different in each of the Cambridge studies and
accounts for some of the differences.
In the early knitwear studies I was able to interact directly with the people I wanted to
talk to, without anybody perceiving any need to involve management or bother with
confidentiality agreements. The technicians were very open, because I was an outsider
who did not have any further link to their organisation. They only talked to me because
they had wanted to talk to me. Some of the knitwear designers were already quite
concerned, because I had been invited by their bosses and would talk to their bosses
about my impressions. The teams were small enough that the head designers either
walked me round the office to introduce me personally to the designers or called a brief
meeting to do so. If the designers were insecure, this reflected on how they behaved in
interviews. They always knew what the studies were for, and most of them felt that
anything that could potentially help them in their jobs was worth a little of their time.
Some of them were also unsure what to make of me, because they had not encountered
design studies research in their own degrees and found it puzzling how somebody
coming from a computer science department could know anything about design.
The helicopter study was initiated by a contractor, who had been involved in a number
of projects in the company and had worked solely for them for several years, but was
still not on the payroll as member of the company. Many of the engineers perceived
him as an outsider and were concerned about the agenda that he was pursuing. He
divided opinions in the company, and it was difficult to get collaboration from people
who did not like him. He had seen several different departments, but did not have the
full overview over this remarkably complex product. The selection of interviewees was
strongly biased by his personal view of the organisation. People did not necessarily see
the link between the questions we ask and the project that our contact person presented
as ours in the company. The interviews were organised by a graduate trainee, who spent
considerable effort talking subjects into taking part in the study and participated in the
interviews. Our contact did not have the full support of management and once he left
we had great difficulty in maintaining contact to the company.
The automotive study was championed by one of the directors and organised by the site
manager. They simply pulled rank on the participants. Everybody – other than someone
involved in an internal initiative on process improvement – came to the interviews as
and when required and tried to provide as much information as they could. They
probably felt that non-collaboration would be held against them. By contrast the study
on engines had also been sanctioned by the technical director, who immediately
devolved responsibility to a senior manager. This manager spend a lot of time with us
explaining the background of the company and later going through our results, but left
the detailed organisation after a brief discussion to a engineer with about ten years
experience. This engineer set up all the interviews through Lotus Notes and everybody
appeared on time for interviews. He is well liked and his personal involvement seems
to be sufficient to persuade people to come. He also took us for lunch explaining any
open questions. This study was in stark contrast to the study in the automotive supplier.
This company is very political and the person who organised the interviews is the most
junior member of one section of a small but very hierarchy conscious organisation.
Through being associated with him, we were firmly associated with one camp and the
designers’ answers appeared to be tailored accordingly. Most of the people we spoke to
did not understand what he does within the organisation and seemed to view our study
as another of his peculiar projects.
4 Important Issues
The change in my status is only one of the factors that have changed between the
studies I have undertaken. It is worth considering other key parameters influencing
what we could learn through the studies that we have undertaken. These issues are not
unconnected to the status of the researcher, but are worth considering separately in
setting up empirical studies.
4.1 Paradigm of interaction
During the studies I fell into a number of different interaction paradigms. In the early
studies people saw me as a student or apprentice who would ask them questions to
learn from them and who would make mistakes that they needed to correct. Explaining
what they are doing to a student is the most natural from of sharing knowledge about
work for most people. The knitwear companies are used to placement students and
apprentice technicians and accept that training the next generation is part of their duties.
Engineering companies take a similar attitude to graduate trainees. Most designers like
to explain, and asking questions falls naturally into the apprentice paradigm. People
seem to find it entirely acceptable (judging from an analysis of transcripts of my early
interviews) to go over the same question repeatedly until a sufficient level of
explanation has been reached. Sometimes I sat with and chatted to them while they
were doing fairly manual tasks, for example arranging colour schemes or washing and
tumble drying pieces of fabric. These are very relaxed situations where people are
happy to chat about everything, as though to a visitor at home. I learned a great deal
when I fell into the role of an agony aunt, someone they could moan to who would
listen to their problems. Sometimes I could reassure them that the problems occur in
other companies as well and are not just due to their personal inadequacies, at other
times we just talked to each other. In the debriefing interviews after the experiments I
functioned as a thought provoker: many designers commented that they found it very
interesting to talk about the organisational and mental processes, because they normally
never took time out to reflect over what they were doing. In the later knitwear studies
and the engineering interviews the design managers / bosses often discussed design
process issues with me as somebody who knew about design processes, had seen them
in other companies and could give them some ideas from the experience of others. If
this is done with sufficient discretion, it can easily be an exchange between equal
partners. In most of the engineering interviews the paradigm was that of a consultant,
who needs to gather information at the request of senior management. In this situation
the interviewees’ behaviour was influenced by how secure they felt in the organisation
and with their colleagues.
4.2 Bonding with the subjects
In most of the studies I tried to strike a bond with the people I was interacting with,
finding issues of mutual interest to make people feel at ease. With the knitwear
designers I talked about fashion, even though some felt that not coming from a fashion
background I somehow could not know. Later I talked to them about children.
Discussions about the problems of being a working mum yielded many insights into the
nature of deadlines and time pressure in their jobs. In the engineering companies
bonding with subjects and project organisers was considerably more difficult, because I
had much less in common with them as people. All but three people, whom I
interviewed briefly, were men. None of the men I discussed the topic with had wives
with professional jobs. With little in the way of personal issues to discuss conversations
over lunch can be very difficult, because the conversations did not flow naturally
without our almost formally interviewing the people who looked after us.
4.3 Domain knowledge
In the knitwear studies I understood the product, the mechanisms of the industry, and
the basics of programming a knitting machine. I was therefore able to make sense of
people’s answers in technical terms. When people were asked open-ended questions
about problems, they often could not provide answers. Even leading questions about
specific areas were unproductive until I could explain convincingly that I had problems
when I was confronted with a particular question. This often resulted in detailed advice
how to solve a particular problem, including many useful domain heuristics. In many
interviews it is vital to think of convincing domain examples quickly to go through
specific cases or to stimulate discussions about trade-offs. In engineering interviews I
have to make a very conscious effort to learn specific examples to get designers to
discuss them.
In practice however my not having a technical background has caused very few
problems, because the interviews we were conducting centred on process issues.
Therefore an understanding of the technical context is less important than
understanding typical problems in design processes and being able to assess the
company culture. The danger is of course that the interviewers totally embarrass
themselves and lose credibility with the subjects.
4.4 University status
The status of Cambridge University is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it helps
getting access to companies (and funding), but on the other hand it intimidates
engineers in companies. We are introduced and treated as the experts with the answers
as opposed to the researchers with the questions. In particular engineers who did not
have university degrees were often quite cagey and defensive until they realised that I
had a degree from the Open University. The Open University is a very democratic
institution that enables people to get an education later in life that they could never get
without it, and everybody in the UK knows people who have done Open University
courses. Therefore many individuals showed a lot of goodwill towards Open University
researchers, but the companies are considerably less willing to engage in formal
collaborations with the Open University than with Cambridge.
4.5 (Hidden) Agendas
Industrial studies are rarely undertaken just to investigate a single question. They often
are part of a more complex agenda. Only the early knitwear studies were really just
aimed at understanding the problem better; later I realised that good contacts to
industry are a great asset for a researcher. Funding is difficult to come by without
industrial collaborators, and the credibility of research findings also depends on the
reputation of the companies involved in studies. All the Cambridge studies are aimed to
set up long-term relationships of trust with companies. All the researchers and PhD
students in our group need companies for case studies. Each study has to be successful
from a long-term perspective. The assignment of the right people to each study is very
important, because we cannot afford to alienate practitioners with outlandish ideas.
Further projects that are not yet conceived will make use of the data. Therefore we are
trying to learn as much as we can about an organisation, so that we can select
companies for other studies and put the findings of those studies in context. As the
British manufacturing industry is dwindling it is imperative for us as a group to
maintain contact to those companies that are working successfully. We are trying to
stay in touch with our industry contacts by inviting them to workshops we organise and
through personal communication.
While the knitwear technicians and designers were entirely content to do me a favour or
to give time to the vague promise of better support tools in the far future, the
engineering companies hope for concrete outcomes. Design managers need to be
persuaded to assign time, resources and money to a project. They expect us to come up
with ways to improve their processes through new methods or tools. It is a challenge to
manage their expectations, because the development of research into usable tools is
notoriously hard to predict. We try to combine the promise of tools in the long term
with immediate feedback on their processes and some comments on solutions that other
companies have chosen in similar situations. In this respect it is easier to first develop a
tool and second do case studies to evaluate it, because it is possible to describe what the
tool looks like and anticipate its potential use. Collaboration with a prestigious
university can also be on the personal agenda of individuals who are trying to derive
kudos within their own organisation.
4.6 Location of interaction
In the knitwear studies I typically talked to designers or technicians and observed them
in their normal work environments. Only one technician took me to a meeting room,
but everybody else proudly showed me their products. They had illustrations for
discussion points readily to hand. Interesting points arouse naturally from the objects
that surrounded the subjects. This was vital in the study on sources of inspiration,
because how the objects surrounding the designers influenced their work was a major
research question. Through my memories of the different work environments I
remember each designer or technician very clearly as an individual. All the engineering
interviews were held in meeting rooms that the people who organised the interviews
had booked ahead of time. This makes memories of the interviews very repetitive,
because there is no visual clue to differentiate between individuals or to encourage
questions. Illustrations, such as sketches or requirement specifications were not to hand,
unless the subject had brought them along. In this case they often had a preconceived
idea of what we might be interested in and almost gave us a presentation instead of us
interviewing them. Many engineers promised to provide us with illustrations; some
wrote down what they have promised to give us and some brought the materials. We
were given guided tours through all of the engineering offices, but only rarely any
opportunity to observe the engineers working.
4.7 Recordability
The location for interviews was often chosen to facilitate audio recording. It is much
easier to set up a tape recorder in a meeting room, and the subjects might have been
uncomfortable to speak on record in front of their colleagues. The background noise of
shared offices interrupts recording and audio tapes of group interactions are extremely
difficult to analyse. Videotapes would be extremely useful when people are observed or
interviewed at their desks, but very few companies are comfortable with any cameras
on the premises let alone video cameras. During the knitwear interviews I usually took
only very few notes during the interviews and wrote summary records as soon as
possible afterwards. This contributed greatly to the openness of the subjects.
5 Conclusions
The perceived status of the researcher is a very important factor in the success of a
study. It is easier for senior researchers to get access to a broad range of people in a
company through the support of a senior manager, but they may be received with less
openness than a far more junior person. The sample of companies that can be studied is
easily biased, because only companies that are reasonably confident about their
economic future and quality of their processes are likely to allow researchers access.
The relationships to companies and individuals is very personal and depends on the
individual researchers more than their institutions.
While I have learnt an enormous amount about design practice in industry as a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University, and know much more about research
methodology, I still think my earliest studies of knitwear design were the most efficient
and productive. I had direct access to the people I wanted to talk to, they were all open
and very happy to help me personally with the questions I wanted answers to. Now I
can get easy access to a wide range of people, but the time I see them for and the
environments I see them in are extremely limited. I am acutely aware that seeing people
working in their normal environments is a crucial part of research on design practice
and processes, but I find it increasingly difficult to make happen. I have come to
appreciate that interviewing people at their desks and watching them working is
something I need to push for harder.
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