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When I felt that I had acquired a sufficient data set for the construction of a “master narrative” of the living lab project, I began its construction by creating a timeline of the most relevant events based on the information in the meeting memos. The meeting memos were ordered chronologically, carefully read through twice and coded manually as were the transcribed interviews. Based on the memos I was able to reconstruct the backbone of the smart floor biography (e.g. key events, the evolution of the artefact, project participants, the methods of co-design that were used).
I coded the segments of text from the meeting memos and transcribed interviews into the following categories related to my research questions: who participated in the project, how the participant network evolved during the project, the interests and goals of different stakeholder groups, the kinds of tensions and conflicts present in the collaboration, the kinds of tools and methods used to transfer knowledge between different stakeholder groups, how the artefact evolved during the project and how the collaboration shaped the evolving artefact. The categories were not imposed a priori upon the data, although theoretical literature, especially in the field of STS, inevitably guided my understanding of the phenomenon and observations that I made from the data.
The picture that was formed based on the meeting memos was critically evaluated against the information gathered through the interviews. The interviews revealed the importance of certain key events and themes to the participants, especially with respect to tensions and conflicts. The interviews also played a key role in shedding light on the developer’s perspective as the meeting memos were written by the project workers and mostly reflected user-side interpretations and concerns.
As a result of the analysis, the biography of the living lab project was written out in Finnish (see Hakkarainen, 2013) and the key informants were given an opportunity to read and comment on it. The result of this biographical analysis can thus be seen as a “master narrative” with respect to the articles of the dissertation.
Triangulation
The study seeks to demonstrate how the technology, relationships around it and practices of different stakeholder groups evolved during and after the four-year living lab project.
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Data and method triangulation (Denzin, 1979) has been widely used in BoAP studies and innovation studies more generally as different data types and sites of data collection frame the phenomenon differently. Flick (2014: 184) defines triangulation as taking “different perspectives on an issue under study or – more generally speaking – answering research questions.”
These perspectives can be founded on several methods, several types of data and/or several theoretical approaches which are compatible with each other.
Combining different methods and data is common in the study of innovation processes, which are slowly maturing social processes that continue over several years and which are polyphonic and contradictory by nature (Miettinen, 1993). The biography of an innovation is a construction that has been shaped by the kind of data used, theories that have informed the questions asked and the way the data has been analyzed, as well as by the temporal, personal and material resources available to the researcher.
The reliability of analysts’ interpretation is improved through two mechanisms. First, through studying different actors across several interlinked sites and comparing juxtaposed accounts, otherwise taken-for- granted features and local framing effects can be unpicked and balanced accounts of interaction created. Moreover, second, the extended scope of study tends to level out particular actor concerns or “displays put on for the ethnographer” when one enters the site over a sustained period. (Hyysalo, Pollock, and Williams, forthcoming)
From these grounds and by following the tradition of historical case studies in STS (see subchapter 3.1), the biography of the smart floor has been reconstructed by using methods of historiographic research and data triangulation (Denzin, 1989; Flick, 2016: 182–192).
When studying and reconstructing historical events, we should utilize and combine different kinds of data in order to minimize distortion (Elton, 2002). Miettinen (1993) recommends the historical approach in the study of innovation as it makes the different interests and motives of stakeholders visible and helps in understanding how local practices resist change; it also helps in creating hypotheses about the future. A problem with the retrospective approach is that the current situation influences the assessment of past events and the events of the past are only
C a r i n g f o r T e c h n o l o g y : E v o l v i n g L i v i n g L a b C o l l a b o r a t i o n 9 4
partially reconstructed (Flick, 2014: 126). This limitation can be lessened by the triangulation of data and methods.
Next I will describe how the research was carried out in the individual articles.
Methods and Analysis by Article
In articles 2–4 a second level of analysis was performed. This means that the smart floor master narrative was reanalyzed by focusing on the actions of a particular stakeholder group (article 2), by comparing two cases (article 3) or by performing a cross-case comparison where the smart floor was one of many cases (article 4). Next I will go through the methodological choices and further analysis made in each of the articles, as elaborated in them.
Article 1. How Do We Keep the Living Laboratory Alive?
The first article (Hakkarainen, 2013) provides an overview of the results of my licentiate thesis and focuses on user involvement, learning and interaction between participants.
The research questions of the study were: What kind of learning took place between participants? What were the challenges in achieving this learning? How were these challenges overcome? The data and analysis of the paper are described in the current and previous subchapters.
Article 2. The Evolution of Intermediary Activities
The second article (Hakkarainen and Hyysalo, 2016) concentrates on the role, tasks and activities of individual user-side innovation intermediaries, in this case the project workers in the living lab project. The developer company hired the key project worker, so the analysis is extended to the time after the market launch of the product.
The data covers almost eight years of the biography of the smart floor. The article continues analysis that began in my licentiate thesis (Hakkarainen, 2013) and continued in my first two articles (see Hakkarainen and Hyysalo, 2013; Hyysalo and Hakkarainen, 2014). The data of the study consists of the data set described previously. The unit of analysis were the work tasks of the living lab project workers.
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By task, we mean an organized set of actions that can be either a one-time effort or a repeated pattern in the practices of the mediating personnel – in any case, a set of actions that formed a mutually recognized whole by both the mediating personnel and their colleagues (Hakkarainen and Hyysalo, 2016: 49, citing Strauss, 1993). The tasks were coded from a detailed project description (in other words the “master narrative”) and from follow-up interview notes. The smart floor innovation process was divided in four phases based on process dynamics observed in my licentiate study (Hakkarainen, 2013) and findings from previous empirical research on innovation processes by Van de Ven, Polley, Garud et al. (1999) and Pollock and Williams (2008) (see figure 5).