From Scale to Scalography - international workshop

Ahead of tomorrow's workshop entitled Scalography, organised by my colleagues in the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, I've just finished adding my scalar interferences to the lecture theatre where it is taking place. When Steve Woolgar first started telling me about this event, I found myself imagining rather grand (to my mind, architectural) interventions to the room. But instead what we've done (helped by Linsey McGoey, Noortje Marres, and Tanja Schneider, is make some modest additions to the lecture theatre as the photo shows.

I hope to write up the event. In the meantime use the link to view the programme for the day and links to papers, including the provocation piece by Woolgar et al.

Social networking site, 1691

Lloyd's coffee house v2. See wikipedia.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 8

Managing as designing

This final class engaged with Boland and Collopy’s proposal that managing is designing and Roger Martin’s call that managers be more like designers. Developing further Herbert Simon’s distinction between the sciences (exploring what is) and design (what could be), these educators have begun to change management education in theory and in practice. Armand Hatchuel's further development of Simon's ideas provides an important way forward for theories of design and their relevance to managing and organising, beyond problem-solving.

To test some of these ideas, the class undertook a short practical exercise in which they applied design frameworks to business models. Inspired by the example of Alex Osterwalder, whose blog and forthcoming book describe how his firm applies design to business modelling, the class first sketched a business model known to them; discussed it; and then selected other frameworks to apply, such as mapping stakeholders; analysing it for usefulness, usability and desirability; and creating stakeholder journeys. What all the groups found was that the (apparently simple) activity of drawing a diagram helped the group reach understanding and agreement about what they were talking about. Some groups learnt nothing new by drawing the business model of the organisation they were discussing; they found they had to find new ways to represent the organisation visually in order to generate ideas. Others found that combining the business model diagram with the stakeholder map helped them generate new concepts that could potentially reframe the core business. One group acted out their understanding of the difference between the company’s core offering and how competitors might respond to customer needs, illustrating how human-scale stories offer decision-makers meaningful accounts that highlight opportunities for change.

At a time when people all over the world are facing huge challenges, both business education and design’s role in creating unsustainable consumption are being criticised. Meanwhile design schools are beginning to offer MBAs (like at CCA, led by Nathan Shedroff, interviewed here) and b-schools are teaching design practice as part of MBA electives (like mine) or in their core curriculum (like at Imperial College, or Case Western Reserve). But it’s too early to tell what impact these educational developments will have and indeed, whether these new institutional arrangements will last. This elective I have designed and taught will continue to exist at Said Business School for one more year (since my current fellowship will end in September 2010). I’m grateful to the students with whom I have had an opportunity to learn through prototyping these ideas over the past four years.


Further reading

Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (eds) (2004) Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books
"Managing is Designing? A conversation with Fred Collopy & Richard J. Boland Jr.", Next Design Leadership Institute Journal, 8.1
Dunne, D. and Martin. R (2006) “Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: An Interview and Discussion”, Academy of Management Learning & Education, (5) 4, pp. 512–523.
Hatchuel, A. (2001) "Towards Design Theory and Expandable Rationality: The Unfinished Programme of Herbert Simon", Journal of Management and Governance, 5: 3-4, pp. 260-273
Martin, R. (2006) “Designing in Hostile Territory”, Rotman magazine, Spring/Summer pp. 4-9
Martin, R. (2003) “The Design of Business”, Rotman magazine, Winter pp 7-10
Starkey, K., Hatchuel, A. and Tempest, S. (2004) “Rethinking the Business School”, Journal of Management Studies, 41:8, December, 1521-1531

Coming up: Tactical Play, July 1

I'm looking forward to this event, organised by curator Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight, taking place at Birkbeck in London on July 1. More details on their blog here. Most of the speakers are artists and social scientists who use playful enquiry as a tactic for research.

I'm going to be talking about my rat project and showing (at long last) a short film I made about the event I organised at Camden Arts Centre back in 2005 attended by about 40-50 rats and 400 people and which showcased the world premier of the "Is Your Rat an Artist?" drawing competition for human-rat-software assemblages.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 7

Emerging practices in design



















For this class, the MBA students travelled to London. First we visited the Hub at Kings Cross to meet Inderpaul Johar of architecture practice 00:, who designed it. Then we went to see the newly-opened show SuperContemporary at the Design Museum, followed by a visit to service design consultancy Engine. Together, these encounters offered a rich set of experiences illuminating some of the current conversations within design practice.

The Hub is a fast growing enterprise offering members desk space at convenient locations in major cities. Unlike other such offerings, The Hub is designed around a shared ethos with a particular focus on social entrepreneurs. Involved in designing both the physical space and the way it operates in practice, Indy explained how the design of the social architecture is critical to the success of the operation – for example, having a strong gatekeeping function, and employing a “host” who helps people connect with one another. We also saw how the physical arrangement of space, combined with these practices, resulted in a viable and profitable social enterprise with much higher use of space than similar ventures. Indy talked more broadly about his firm's practice and the ways they aim to design sustainable institutions, not just physical assets.

Later, we visited Engine Group, one the leading service design consultancies, where Aviv Katz and Gavin Maguire talked us through two projects - one public sector and one commercial. In their work for Kent County Council, Engine have helped create the Social Innovation Lab for Kent (SILK). This work has resulted in the council's own teams learning design approaches and methods and developing new tools to help use design to lead to innovation in council services. (See this video). We also heard Engine's experience of working with Virgin Atlantic on the design of the terminal within a terminal in London's Heathrow, where insight gathering was used to generate service principles on which to base the design of the customer experience delivered through various touchpoints.

I hope to do a separate post about SuperContemporary, the new show curated by Daniel Charny at the Design Museum open until October 4, but if I run out of time, I’ve included a few images here including a visionary garden hanging over London's Trafalagar Square by El Ultimo Grito with Urban Salon.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 6

Users, stakeholders, customers: People!

This class was an opportunity to get messy through design. I asked the students to use two design methods - following "extreme users" and "experience prototyping" - to analyse the stakeholder experience at the train station, come up with improvements, and quickly prototype the improved experience to share their ideas.

Like von Hippel’s lead users, the idea of extreme users offers to way to understand the service by looking at the margins of the stakeholder group (eg people who do not speak or read English). By looking at the service through the experience of extreme users, the students uncovered some surprising assumptions built into it. Analysing these may offer easy ways to improve the service experience from the point of view of many other kinds of stakeholder.

Having been to the station following one of the members of the team (the extreme user - see the photo in which the student presents a piece of paper to the customer service rep saying he doesn't speak English) and documenting this through photography, video and sketching, the teams generated ideas to solve the problems they identified. The next task was to mock up, using whatever means seemed appropriate, the experience of part of the service, as a way of making tangible and testing some of the improvements they came up with. Finally, we invited someone to walk through these prototypes.

The reading for this week drew on recent work on the boundaries of ethnography and design ("anthrodesign"), participatory and inclusive design, and the notion of wicked problems. Once multiple stakeholders with very different ways of understanding the world are asked to frame problems, design methods which serve to create visual and experiential representations can play an important role in tackling such problems.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 5

Design management + design leadership

This class looked at how design is managed within large organisations and the things that managers of design processes, strategies and the design function need to consider.

First, we used a video case I'm developing of Joe Ferry, head of design at Virgin Atlantic Airways, and his colleague Angus Struthers, lead service designer. Joe and his team are responsible for several innovations in their industry including the first fully flat bed in business class; Virgin Atlantic's Clubhouses; and the "terminal within a terminal" at London Heathrow's Terminal 3, including the proposition that passengers can get "from the limo to the lounge in 10 minutes". Prompted by material from my interviews with Joe and Angus, the class engaged with a number of issues, including:
- the strategy for design: styling or differentation
- interfacing between the design function and the rest of the organisation eg engineering, marketing and operations
- evaluating the contribution design makes to organisational effectiveness

Then, our guest speaker Les Wynn from Xerox, gave us an analytical lecture drawing on his 8+ years with the organisation, during a transition from a technology-led manufacturer of photocopies, to a market-led supplier of services. Hearing this detailed account of the change in the role of design and and how design is managed raised several questions similar to the Virgin case.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: Video

A think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa: MBA students collaborate with designers from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Over one day, the MBAs and designers used visual methods to frame and tackle problems facing the organisation. Soul of Africa employs women to make shoes which are sold around the world, while a percentage of the profits goes back to help communities in South Africa affected by AIDS. Mixed teams worked on strategy, operations, marketing and design combining creative and analytical approaches to generate recommendations for Soul of Africa. This short film gives an overview of what happened on the day.

The MBA students then carried on working on the project as part of their assessed work. Their documents were shared with Soul of Africa, who may take some of the ideas forward.

Organised as part of the MBA Design Leadership elective, Said Business School, University of Oxford in April 2009.


For more information about Soul of Africa visit http://www.soulofafricacharity.org/

Design Thinking track at EURAM 2009

At last week's European Academy of Management in Liverpool, a gathering of organisation and management academics mostly but not only from Europe, I was delighted to spend time with some scholars paying serious attention to questions of designing and it relation to managing. The track on Design Thinking, Management and Innovation was co-chaired by Armand Hatchuel, from Ecole des Mines and Rachel Cooper, Lancaster. Hatchuel and Weil's C-K (Concept Knowledge) theory is an important contribution to the study of management, via engineering design theory, and formal logic. Not that this was being presented at EURAM on this occasion...Hatchuel's chairing encouraged speakers and those listening or asking questions to take seriously the claims we were making, whether rooted in economics, sociology or by way of Foucault.

I particularly enjoyed papers by
- Le Masson, P., Hatchuel A. and Weil, B, on new design strategies;
- Starkey, K, on Foucault and the history of the business school;
- Bejean, M, Segrestin, B. and Hatchuel, A. on art-based firms, and
- Stigliani I. and Ravasi, D. on how organisations collaborate with external consultancies
(written in pseudo citation format for any readers searching for references).
I was left with a sense that the work being done in North America by Boland and Collopy, and by Roger Martin, and others, is in an important dialogue with these ideas, whether they are familiar with these scholars or not.

Some references

Hatchuel A., 2002. Towards design theory and expandable rationality : The unfinished program of Herbert Simon. Journal of Management and Governance 5:3-4
Hatchuel A., 2001. The two pillars of new management research, British Journal of Management, Vol.12, special issue, (S33-S39)
Hatchuel A, Weil B. 2003. A new approach of innovative design: an introduction to C-K theory. In: Proceedings of the international
conference on engineering design (ICED’03), Stockholm, Sweden, pp 109–124
Hachuel, A., Weil, B. 2009. C-K design theory: an advanced formulation, Research in Engineering Design, Volume 19, Number 4 / January
Starkey, K.; Hatchuel, A.; Tempest, S. 2009. "Management research and the new logics of discovery and engagement", Journal of Management Studies, 46 (3), pp. 547 -558.

Ahead of my visit to Liverpool next week (and Tate Liverpool and, even better, FACT...) here is my paper I'm giving at the European Academy of Management (see . I've already had loads of useful criticism including from journal editors (within management/org studies). I'm posting it here in the expectation of reworking the paper after EURAM and welcome other feedback from readers.

Design practices in design thinking
Abstract

Management and organization scholars interested in design typically draw on Simon’s (1969/1996) distinction between science and design. Scholars, educators and practitioners proposing that managers adopt “design thinking” often describe the practices of professional designers, but neglect the studies of designers’ activities in design studies. For its part, that tradition has paid little attention to the practice turn in contemporary social theory and the role of non-designers in constituting designs during consumption. This paper contributes to discussions about the value of the ways designers do things by using the practice perspective to attend to what constitutes design practice. Drawing together these traditions – studies of what designers do within design studies, and practice theory within organization studies – a pair of concepts is proposed: “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”. Using this pair offers a way to move beyond discussions of individual designers and acknowledge the work done by others in constituting designs.

Key words
Design thinking, design, practice, design-as-practice, designs-in-practice

Download the paper from here

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 3

In this class we undertook a “crit” (critique) of design at Said Business School and began to generate a vocabulary for talking about the success or failure of design outcomes. I asked MBAs to identify two examples of ‘good’ design at SBS and two examples of ‘bad’ design based on their own criteria, and bring them to class. Examples included service and process design, product and furniture design, web/interface design, graphic and communication design, interior design and architecture.

Through this discussion of what makes good or bad design we attended to the practices of people who uses the outcomes of design processes, whether they have been designed by professional designers or not - designs-in-practice. Our discussion of criteria for good and bad design drew on different ways of making judgements about design such as Vitruvius: firmness, commodity and delight; Sanders (1992): useful, usable and desirable; and IDEO's framework of desirable, feasible and viable.

Our second activity was to write briefs based on these criteria for design improvements in the school. Students took one of the issues they had identified, mapped the stakeholders connected to this issue, prioritised one, and then defined criteria from that point of view for a re-design.

MBA Design Leadership elective - session 2

After the 'think and make tank' collaborative workshop with designers the previous week, this session offered the MBAs a chance to consider and discuss what is distinctive about what designers do, how they do it, and the sorts of artefact they create along the way – what is sometimes called “design thinking” or “designerly ways of knowing”. Studying the research into designers’ work demystifies the creative design process and offer students insights about what to expect when products and services are designed by or with professional designers.

But the term “design thinking” has limitations – although people using it may claim to be user-centred, it nonetheless privileges the designer as the key agent in design, ignoring decades of work in anthropology and sociology. Introducing the terms “design-as-practice” and “designs-in-practice”, the elective offers students a way to understand that design is not just about what designers do (or how they think), but also about what stakeholders, users and artefacts themselves do in constituting design.

In this class we watched the well-known ABC TV segment in which the product design and innovation consultancy IDEO re-designs a shopping cart in just five days. A second viewing gave students a chance to analyze in detail the process the designers use to come up with their innovative re-design and identify when there was divergent and convergent thinking and use of methods such as ethnographically-inspired research, visualisation, brainstorming, and prototyping. Attending to the design or management of the process was identified as an important skill.

MBA elective: Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

During a one-day workshop, 37 MBA students worked with 11 designers from different disciplines to help frame and tackle some of the current challenges facing Soul of Africa, which employs women hand-stitching shoes which are sold internationally, with the profits going back to support AIDS-affected communities in South Africa.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

Tomorrow, the 36 or so MBAs taking my Design Leadership elective will be joined by 12 designers and three representatives from Soul of Africa, for a one-day workshop.  The aim of the event is to bring together the ways of problem framing and solving typically used by MBAs with designers from different disciplines, to help Soul of Africa engage with some of the challenges it is faced with. From Soul of Africa, we will be joined by co-founder Lance Clark, Galahad Clark of Terraplana, Franziska Amaral, and Martin Foley. Soul of Africa was originally started with £30,000 and has raised over $2m which has been invested into South African communities affected by AIDS. Women handstitch shoes which are then shipped to the UK and US, and sold in major retail outlets such as Clarks and Next. 

The designers - selected from an open call to participate to which over 75 people responded - are from backgrounds in textiles and fashion, graphics, industrial design, design management, interaction design. They are: Titi Abiola, Stephanie Chen, Jason Coop, Rachel Manning, Dejan Mitrovic, Kathryn Moores, Olive Ntkula, Lars Rosengren, Pammi Sinha, Tom Tobia and Rachel Turner. 

To help facilitate the day, my colleagues and others helping are: Marc Ventresca, university lecturer in innovation at the school; Sarabajaya Kumar, Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship; Trudi Lang, DPhil candidate, InSIS; Meng Zhao, DPhil candidate; Caroline Norman, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, course leader MA Design Management; and Hermeet Gill, MBA alumnus who did my elective last year. We'll also be joined for some of the day by Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entpreneurship. I'm grateful for their support and for our internal admin team for making this happen. 

In a week or two I'll be posting a short film showing some of the day's activities and some the approaches we are using. Right now, however, I need to go and make some props. 

The difference between art and design: Aurabox

One of the things that comes up in discussions of design is if, and how, it's different from art. At last week's European Academy of Design in Aberdeen, there was talk of critical design, a term associated with Dunne and Raby (see my earlier post about the conference) as well as other practitioners. One of the claims Fiona Raby made in her keynote at EAD was that in contemporary art, now you can do pretty much anything, nothing is shocking or draws attention, whereas it can be a radical gesture to present an artefact in the context of design, inviting audiences to imagine something in use through proposition and speculation.

Here's a contribution to that discussion. It's a work called Aurabox (2005). It looks a bit like something you might buy at IKEA. But what is not (yet) at IKEA is the two embedded LED lights indicating the status of the object's aura, either on or off. It's inspired by Walter Benjamin's idea in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.". Here's a short film showing the Aurabox in the group show Product and Vision in Berlin in 2005.

European Academy of Design 2009: Design Connextity

This is an image from Dunne & Raby's Technological Dreams Series: No.1 Robots (2007). Fiona Raby was one of the keynotes at last week's European Academy of Design 2009 conference in Aberdeen. What I enjoyed about the conference was its ability to step through several of contemporary design's realities, from work by Dunne and Raby (as exemplars of "critical design") to mainsteam design management to Josephine Green, who helps Philips think about and visualise futures. Fiona teaches on MA Design Interactions at the RCA, and alongside her and Tony's work, showed lots by their students (some of whom were collaborators with my MBA students on a short project in 2007). At the other extreme, Josephine Green gave insights into how a traditional manufacturer of objects is using design to visualise and rethink its core activities to engage with some of the challenges facing contemporary societies (see some slides from a similar talk here). I also very much enjoyed the talk by Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Lab, originally an engineer, now following what he calls an "undisciplined practice" at Nokia's Design Strategic Projects studio in LA. Julian's stated aim of creating more habitable near futures by combining material practices with knowledge practices was a model which complements my own efforts.

Ideas running round this conference included the fairly standard (how can design's value be understood...communicated...appreciated) to new disciplinary specialisms (eg service design, design for sustainability). For me, the benefit of attending, in addition to catching up with UK and international colleagues, was hearing how distinct approaches to design - from critical design, to Daria Loi's work in the Digital Homes group at Intel, to Stuart Walker's gentle arrangements- all involve the material practices of design in making things public through creating visual and tangible forms.

Think-and-make-tank for Soul of Africa

We've had an amazing response to our call for designers to participate in the one day workshop in April. In this 'think-and-make-tank', designers will collaborate with 36 Oxford MBA students and participants from the Soul of Africa organization to help frame and tackle some of the challenges this social enterprise is facing. A few weeks ago I put out a call to designers via emails to colleagues and friends, via blogs and on twitter. Over 75 designers applied, from many different disciplines, many from outside the UK including Finland, France, South Africa and the US. I was only able to pick 12 and that was very hard indeed. Our resources limited us to covering travel expenses in the UK.

From reading through the designers' statements, I have a strong sense that the shift that was already taking place within design education and practice, away from a fascination with highly styled consumer goods to a design practice that is concerned with equity and sustainability, has now changed things permanently. As the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship opens today in my building at Said Business School in Oxford, it's clear that designers, both students, professionals and educators, want to apply their practice to systemic problems we are all implicated in. One of the challenges is to create opportunities for that to happen.

Further details about the think-and-make-tank will be posted in in the next few weeks. For those interested in creating projects of their own, here are resources that may help through inspiration or more directly.
Social Innovation Camp
The RSA Design Directions Awards
Audi Design Foundation

Steve Vargo: Service-dominant logic

Vargo and Lusch are key thinkers within management studies addressing the theory gap in services - of relevance to service designers as much as to service managers. At a seminar organized by the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) last week, I was able to hear Steve Vargo first hand on the service-dominant logic. References to the key papers are below. There's also a book which I have not yet read. This is the quick summary of what Vargo presented which draws on the papers. Calling their ideas a 'logic' does not mean Vargo and Lusch are making claims to something that works similarly to a mathematical proof. Rather, they are drawing attention to the underlying dynamics of economic theory if it's rethought as to do with service, rather than products to which, in the industrial production model based on a (mis)reading of Adam Smith, value is added. The fundamental idea is that people (and organizations) exchange services for services.

1 There are no services - only service. (The use of the singular draws attention away from 'services' as offerings that are produced slightly differently to products, to the concept of a service-based economic model. This has already been influential in the renaming of the IBM-led initiative services science as service science.)

2 There is no new service economy. Instead all economies are inherently service economies. Some services are direct and some are indirect, involving goods or money.

3 There are no producers and consumers. Instead all parties are what Vargo and Lusch currently call 'resource integrators' playing a role in assembling resources in to offerings. Service is a process.

4 Goods are not 'goods'. Intead goods are value propositions within service. Goods (what some people call products) are 'appliances' for service delivery.

5 Firms do not create value. Value is co-created.

6 There is no B2C. Instead, economic interactions are all B2B in which all of us are resource integrators operating at different scales.

My apologies to Steve Vargo if I have got their ideas wrong in this summary.

References
Vargo, S. and R. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic in Marketing,” /Journal of Marketing, /68, 1-17
Invited Commentaries on “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing”, /Journal of Marketing /Vol. 68 (January 2004), 18–27
Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch Robert (2008), "Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1), 1-10.

Designers wanted: Join a Think-and-Make-Tank for Soul of Africa

Wednesday 22 April 2009 10-5.30pm
Saïd Business School, Oxford

We need up to 10 designers who want to use their design practices and skills to help social enterprise Soul of Africa tackle some of the challenge facing it, during a one-day workshop in Oxford in collaboration with MBA students.

The workshop is a participative, creative "think-and-make-tank" that brings together people from management and from design to use visual methods to analyze and tackle specific problems identified by an organization. MBA students from Saïd Business School will be joined by designers from different disciplines to help social enterprise Soul of Africa engage with key challenges.

Soul Of Africa is a charitable initiative and a self-sustainable project created to facilitate employment and funding aimed at helping orphans affected by AIDS through the sale of hand-stitched shoes. Unemployed and unskilled women in South Africa are trained to hand-stitch shoes, giving them the self-empowering ability to feed their families and provide them with essential health care.

Download more details here.

What we are looking for

Designers (recent graduates, current MA or BA design students, and design professionals) are invited to take part. Ideally, we’d like a mixture of people from these backgrounds:
- visual communication
- product/industrial design
- service design
- interface design
- fashion
- design management

How to get involved

To apply, send an email to Lucy Kimbell (lucy dot kimbell at sbs dot ox dot ac dot uk), to arrive on or by Friday 20 March 2009.

The email must include
- your name and contact details and any institutional affiliation
- your design discipline (eg product, visual communication)
- up to 150 words on why you want to participate.

Successful participants will be contacted by Friday 3 April at the latest. Reasonable travel expenses to Oxford (standard class return, UK only) will be reimbursed to those who attend the workshop, on the production of a receipt.

Apprenticeships: an economic history

Contemporary art and design practices - even if now taught in art and design departments in modern universities - bear some relation to the institutions of apprenticeships that developed over hundreds of years in several European countries. A seminar at Said last week raised some interesting questions about what we think we know, and what we actually know, about such apprenticeships. Tim Leunig of LSE, an economic historian, gave a wonderful seminar for the Centre for Corporate Reputation drawing on his work into apprentices in London in the pre-modern period. Given access to a huge set of data (produced a man whose job allowed him time to input vast amounts of data from historical records) about 161,000 London apprentices between 1420-1930, Leunig and colleagues found out some interesting things which challenged their - and my - assumptions about how people were trained in pre-industrial societies in England.

Looking specifically at records from 1600-1750 from 760 London companies (eg vintners, grocers) whose members were masters offering seven-year apprenticeships, Leunig and colleagues found, to their surprise, that
- kinship relations and local connections were not important in how young men chose their masters in London;
- nor were their fathers' trades important in the decisions they made about what to become apprentices in; and
- nor did the distance of their village or town from London have that much of an impact either.
There remain questions about how these young men did make decisions about who to pick to be their masters and what information they had available. But this research suggests that these young men made choices that were not encumbered by things we associate with pre-modern societies - such as kinship and location. Like "modern" apprentices, they made other kinds of choices.

Being of an ethnographic orientation myself, I must confess I have never really "got" quantitative research before. But now I do! The way these scholars framed questions around the data set, crunched numbers to produce something meaningful, and then told a clear story about it was an inspiring piece of scholarship.