Social Experiments and Participatory Research as Method

Interdisciplinary research with stakeholders and users challenge the research methodologies to be used. These have to provide a shared language for all the participants, to build up trust, and to offer insights into the diverse perspectives of the participants. Further more it challenge ways to discuss and validate contributions from each others - across different criteria for each discipline, and crosswise different agendas for stakeholders, politicians, practitioners and researchers.

Participatory research and social experiments are methodologies which have been developed to cope with this kind of complexity in regards to technology development and design projects. Based on experiences and lessons learned from the project "The Digital North Denmark (DDN), the chapter reflects on participatory research in a complex organizational setting of researchers, stakeholders and users emphasising practice-based methods where "social experiments with technology" and "dialogue research" are the key-words.