Week 4: I feel like an outsider while doing my research.
(This is week 4 of my final major project blog for the MA Service Design course at UAL LCC)
Who am I?
I am nine months into an intensive MA in Service Design at the London College of Communication, UAL. That sounds like I should have been settled into it by now, but the truth is, I have barely grasped what it means to be a service designer. The definition of the field keeps shifting, and the discomfort of that uncertainty — the ambiguity and the refusal to resolve into something clean and fixed by the end of the process — never really goes away.
I come from a background in Visual Communication, with three and a half years of industry experience across multidisciplinary projects. The design process I was trained in is, comparatively, straightforward: understand the user, solve their problem, communicate it visually. But the biggest intellectual shift I’ve experienced studying Service Design is the realisation that relating to your research subjects is not enough. Particularly in social impact contexts, you have to try to inhabit their world — to understand not just the surface of a problem but its weight and texture. And that is where this project has started to push me the hardest.
Why Positionality Matters Here
I want to talk about where I come from before I get pulled into the whirlwind of this project — not as a disclaimer, but because it shapes everything I will see, ask, and interpret here on.
Reflexivity comprises an awareness of how a researcher’s background and experiences can largely shape all stages of the research process, including the research design and later interpretation of the findings. Researchers thus embed themselves in the process and outcomes of data collection (Hertz, 1997; Bukamal, H., 2022). In qualitative and ethnographic work, especially, the researcher is never a neutral component. What I bring to the room — my background, my assumptions, my blind spots, my privileges — is part of the data.
I do not have lived experience of SEND, either as a learner or as someone close to a person navigating the SEND system. I am not a teacher. I have never worked in the specialist education field. I arrive at OneLab as what researchers call an outsider — someone without the embodied knowledge that comes from living inside the community being studied (Merton, 1972).
The two interactions with OneLab
I have now had two interactions with OneLab. The first was a meeting with the CEO, which reframed my entire project. The second was attending their make and sell event, where I had conversations with instructors and with some of the learners.
Both interactions were genuinely insightful. And in both, I felt it: that quiet, persistent sense of being an outsider. I could follow the conversations. I could relate to many of the tensions being described. But I could not fully inhabit what it means to stand in front of a room of young people with autism, without formal training, and try to teach them something that matters for their futures. I could not fully understand what it costs, emotionally, to do that work day after day in a system that does not adequately support you.
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Costanza-Chock (2020) writes that designers must resist the temptation to treat research communities as sources of data to be extracted. The question is not only what I can take from this community but what I can give back. Does my process itself treat the people inside it with the dignity and respect their knowledge deserves? That commitment is easy to make on paper but harder to live up to. I am still working out what it looks like in practice.
What I Hope This Project Does
Dwyer and Buckle (2009) argue that insider and outsider are not fixed categories but positions on a spectrum, and that most researchers occupy a space somewhere between the two, depending on the dimension being considered.
I am scared that I will impose a service design framework on a problem that is fundamentally about human relationships and emotional labour. And that I will produce elegant blueprints that map the system, but miss what it feels like to be inside it. But I do come with hope. I hope I can create a change I am so passionately drawn to, and the following is what I hope to do:
What this project is slowly teaching me
I came into this MA with an understanding that design is a production of artefacts. I am slowly learning that service design is a practice of listening, of understanding how structures produce behaviours, how behaviours produce experiences and how experiences converge into outcomes depending on the context, injustice, inequality and the way things are. What I am trying to say is that it’s mostly about people than artefacts.
The discomfort I feel doing this project is not a sign that I am in the wrong place. It is a sign, I think, that I am taking it seriously. Schön (1983) described the reflective practitioner as someone who learns through doing — who interrogates their own assumptions in the act of practising, rather than before or after it. That is what I believe this project is demanding of me, and I am trying to do exactly that. And that’s a wrap on week 4.
References
Bukamal, H. (2022). Deconstructing Insider–Outsider Researcher Positionality. British Journal of Special Education, [online] 49(3), pp.327–349. Available at: https://nasenjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8578.12426.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The Mit Press.
Dwyer, S.C. and Buckle, J.L. (2009). The space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), pp.54–63. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690900800105.
Hertz, R. (1997). Reflexivity & voice. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Schön, D.A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Temple Smith.
