Sheep do have Opinions or What is a generous approach to do research

In this first story, I'd like to briefly talk about doing research from a generous perspective. A generous approach to do research allows its subjects to act and respond in a large space of possibilities. A very good example of this kind of approach is Rowell’s seminal work on sheep. Briefly, T. H. Rowell, who is an ethologist, offered an additional bowl of food to the flock of sheep she studies, so that there are 23 bowls of food for 22 sheep. What is interesting in this approach is that it is sharply in contrast to other studies that offer limited amount of food and aim to explain the sheep behaviour according to competition over scarce resources. The additional bowl of food enables the possibility of new understandings of sheep behaviour to be produced, since:

"The idea is not to prevent the sheep from entering into competition around the supply of food; it is to leave them the choice of > doing so, to ensure that competition is not the only possible response to a constraint, but rather a choice in response to a > proposition. If the sheep choose competition, the hypotheses of scarcity of a resource can no longer account for their behaviour." (1)

The bowl is thus part of a set-up that makes a difference to how we may understand sheep. Therefore, I believe an innovative experiment is where the subject is provided an opportunity to exhibit novel unexpected behaviour that may have transformative consequences for the knowledge we have about it and of the world as such. The questions to understand the sheep behaviour may include:

• What are the conditions that sheep require to expand their repertoire of behaviours?
• How are we going to afford sheep the opportunity to give us the chance to talk differently about them?

Fig. 1. Allowing the sheep to act more interestingly

Similarly, in the case of researching multiple aspects of users’ experience of an online/physical product, an important strategy might be to facilitate the conditions that can expand users’ repertoire actions for doing what they wish to do. Metaphorically speaking:
How do we provide an extra bowl of food when doing user research?

I think having a more generous perspective towards doing research is very exciting as it provides a larger space of possibilities for people being researched to act and improvise.

Reference:
(1) Despret, V. (2006). Sheep do have opinions. Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, 360-370.