Means-Ends Inquiry: a strategy for directing inter-disciplinary research conversation

The urban environment is shaped by the interaction among decisions by numerous design, construction and regulatory professionals. If urban development research is to be relevant to inter-disciplinary professional practice, awareness of a broad range of issues relevant to the urban environment is required, in addition to those of immediate research focus. This requires some inter-disciplinary understanding. However, appreciation of distinct disciplinary areas is time consuming. A time efficient strategy for identifying the practical implications of inter-disciplinary collaboration, "Means-Ends Inquiry", is presented, with a case study involving researchers from eight different urban development research projects. This involves conversation focused on A) design values illuminated by each project (design "ends"), and B) urban environmental factors that significantly influence those values (factors shaped by "means"). The results were analysed using a method originally developed for inter-disciplinary engineering product design, producing a simple, but broad-scoped and explicit, representation of a inter-disciplinary urban design problem that each project contributes towards. This enables systematic discussion of various urban development issues and makes explicit multiple competing objectives. Because the research projects were quite diverse, limited detail from each contributed directly to the final representation. Instead there was more emphasis on fundamental "assumed knowledge" basic to each project. The strategy is likely more immediately fruitful for inter-disciplinary problems where the subject matter is strongly interacting, and where fundamental knowledge is already shared and only more detailed technical knowledge must be communicated. Nevertheless, it generated a wider urban design problem context, which forms an explicit starting point for a more sophisticated detailed understanding.