Interventions and dissonance in industrial research: dressing the emperor in new clothes?

This article describes the efforts of an ethnographically trained architect, employed as an industrial researcher in an architectural firm, as she tests ways of being relevant to both scholarly and business audiences. Drawing on the STS-inspired concept sorting attachments, the study illustrates how the industrial researcher aims to handle implicit friction inherent in the industrial research framework, while at the same time introducing frictions by her interventions in the firm’s practices. While frictions may simply be disruptive to this type of collaboration, they also hold the potential for creating what Stark calls a sense of dissonance – moments in which competing criteria of worth allow the firm to create new business opportunities. We investigate the industrial researcher’s efforts in three specific moments of interventions, in which she tests different ways of engaging with the diverging agendas and interests present in the firm. The study demonstrates that it is when the industrial researcher joins a design team and adopts their task, their purpose and problems, while at the same time mobilising conceptual tools from her own academic practice that we can observe the creation of new ways of working in architectural practice and new ways of conducting ethnographic fieldwork.