Status in Industrial Studies

Status in Industrial Studies

Claudia Eckert

Engineering Design Centre

Engineering Department

University of Cambridge

CambridgeCB2 1PZ, United Kingdom

1Introduction

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 CambridgeUniversity – 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.

2My 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 large-scale engineering design, focusing on how designers modify existing products and how they plan their activities.

2.1Student – 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.

2.2Open 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.

2.3CambridgeUniversity 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.

2.4Supervisor

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.

3Project 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.