Case study research

The eclectic character of this dissertation is not limited to theories and concepts, but extends to the methodological approach. As indicated in chapter one, the main motivation to study design processes came out of an interest in doing engineering: in contributing to the understanding of how to create a new system. Engineering education is based mainly on normative approximations to such processes like those represented in figure 12.

Figure 12: Diagrams showing schematically how engineering design processes should be (Dym, 1994: 25, 31).

Some experienced engineers have moved away from these schematic ways of understanding design and planning processes (Leleur, 2005). However, their view of design or planning processes still pictures politics as external to the technical project, like a gray cloud (figure 13), thus conveying the idea that while the technical is susceptible to systematization, the political is not.

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Figure 13. Diagram showing the relation between planning activities (rational and ordered) to the right, and negotiations and decisions (messy politics), the gray cloud to the left. Image taken from a slide of a presentation of Professor Steen Leleur, Course of

Planning Theory, September 4, 2007.

With the above in mind, my justification for using case studies is connected with the fact that I wanted to examine in detail some design processes in order, first, to discover if normative approaches were valid (like many of the other cases I refer to in this analysis: for example Ardila-Gómez, 2004: 13; see also Johnson, 2009). Second and most importantly, I wanted to produce a rich description (Bender, 2009; Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2003) of some cases that would allow for further theorization and discussion.

One important case study that has served as a methodological inspiration to my work is Bruno Latour’s study of the design of the personal rapid transport system ARAMIS in France. Looking back on the study itself, Latour acknowledges that this particular case study had a very important impact on his whole carrier, since it provided a basis for discussing how difficult it is to present a project as opposed to objects that seem so definite, especially in engineering (Blok and Jensen, 2009: 225). What Latour did in that study was to “follow the actors” (Latour, 1996: 18), which today has become the oversimplified slogan of ANT methodology. However, the process of following the actors has many elements. In the following, I make these elements explicit so the reader can understand the scope and limitations of my own analysis.

Like the study of Aramis, and Hughes’ study of CA/T, my study is based on document compilation, analysis and interviews conducted with designers, planners, technicians and other persons that participated in the design of the systems, or have studied the process, or that were excluded from the process. Like the study of Aramis or CA/T, my study has struggled not to impose theoretical categories on the materials collected, especially on what the interviewees elaborated. On the contrary, I have done my best to respect the interviewees’ own accounts. This special feature is what makes ANT

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practitioners, and especially Latour himself, talk about ANT as a methodology rather than a theory.

I have used several case studies – those that have been presented under the labels ANT, LTS, and arenas of development – as inspiration to elaborate my own cases. I have followed the material scripts, as a way of following the actors in order to investigate the role of visions, politics and knowledge in the development of large technological systems.

In ANT ethnographies of laboratory practices (for example, Latour and Woolgar, 1986), and in reconstructions of practice based in interviews (Latour, 1996), the authors have concentrated on the way practitioners make sense of their own activity. I have adopted the same strategy here, but instead of focusing on laboratory practices, I have focused on the genesis, stabilization and agency of particular material scripts. In this respect, I have adopted a method assemblage perspective, which proposes to abandon the idea that an object, a system, an idea, or knowledge itself, exists out-there, is independent, is anterior, is definite and is singular. (Law, 2004: 21). Instead, the qualities of terminated objects and systems are made to happen through design, through a network of support and constitution, through the undoing of existing connections, through the establishment of new connections, through visions. In my research, I have accounted for the process by which designers struggle to produce a system that exists out-there, is independent, and can be told in a narrative that makes it anterior, is definite and seems singular. By tracing the genesis and nature of material scripts, I have reached out to the ways in which designers define visions, struggle to align actors and assign meaning to the elements that make the systems exist.

Like Latour in Aramis and Hughes in CA/T, I have had access to the process of design through interviews and document analysis and through an approximation to the communities that constitute the systems. Following the scripts, as I have done here, can also be understood as a way of following the actors as scripts become actors that enact the system (and the city). By looking at the scripts, I have thus attempted to re-construct the ways in which designers created presences (the final chosen scripts), which are co-dependent on those that are manifest but not present (alternative scripts), in a process of translation where traces have been covered – or to put it another way – where many other things that make possible and actual scripts have been othered (Law, 2004: 83-85). In all these processes, designers are not the starting nor the ending point, but actors that attempt to re-order the world. In this sense, designers do things, but they are also influenced by visions, politics and the dynamics of the arena of development in which they operate.

To uncover this process, interviews are also important, because they reveal what was left behind, what was considered but discarded, that which Law calls manifest absences, like the closed overground Metro stations in Copenhagen or low platform buses in Bogotá. In some cases, I have been able to retrieve those elements that were othered – that is, those elements that were covered, like the dismissal of concerned groups during the design of the first phase of Transmilenio. This process however is the most complicated to uncover, because interviewees, especially those that still have a strong relation to the systems they helped to create, are interested in covering traces, in

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presenting the outcomes of design as facts, in making them the best choices, through the narrative of the interview.

The limits of my method assemblage are connected with the project’s dependence on interviewees’ own accounts. The selection of scripts has been guided by what my interviewees refer to, rather than by a rational selection of the main features to be analysed. The interviewees have also elaborated on their readings of the history of the arena of development to talk about the scripts. Therefore, the references to the arena of development is not a layer of explanations I add to the analysis, but something that emerges from the sources of the research.

To sum up, my methodology is based on the principles of ANT – agnosticism, symmetry, and free association. These have been the guiding principles of my research, and they are central to LTS, ANT and arenas of development theory. As many proponents and practitioners of these theories argue, they are not so much theories but rather methodologies (Law and Hassard, 1999), because often the boundary between theory and methodology is not a clear and definite border. In addition, these methodologies do not suppose a priori that the world out-there has any kind of pre-defined structure or geography. Rather, they argue that the form of what becomes out-there emerges from the dynamics of multiple gatherings (Law, 2004). I have reached out to the process of gathering in Transmilenio and the Metro through my interviews and the documents I have consulted.