Reckoning with Reality: Reflections on a Place-Based Social Innovation Lab
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
Well written manuscript on the concept of sustainability in context of shared building spaces of commercial tenants.
Further, it is not clear from the manuscript , about the research design (which I suppose to be experimental one) further, how the validity of the design being tested. Again concepts like privacy interventions, specific org. culture, timings of shared spaces, possible distrubance out of such arrangements have not been discussed. Further, manuscript also does not talk about the demographic of commercial tenants, for instance office timings (as some firms do operate during night time too).
Overall an appreciative effort by authors. Looking forward to see the revised version.
Author Response
Thank you for your feedback on the paper. Revisions have been made in response clarifying the methodology section.
Additional details about the demographics of commercial tenants were outlined, as was linking to Appendix B for a more detailed description of prototypes. Other key concepts and interventions identified were left outside the scope of this paper but additional references to the complimentary paper Dreyer et al (2021) were added where the approach outlined there provides additional context. That being noted, the intervention itself is still underway so more writing has been included to clarify this and the impact of COVID-19 disruptions on the place based intervention.
This piece grew out of that one as the particular issues with and tensions in co-design processes that were surfaced were viewed as being of sufficient interest to merit publication but were sufficiently distinct that they could not be explored in sufficient depth there.
Additionally, in the Contribution to Praxis section an additional paragraph was added discussing the generalizability and validity of the findings (line 416).
Reviewer 2 Report
The research question is very clear and is coherent with actual issues related to the role of social innovation lab process in establishing and building an ongoing culture of sustainability. In particular, the paper focuses on two fundamental aspects in the field of social innovation: the first is related to the design tensions that stimulate main actors involved in co-design processes towards social and the second is related to the aspiration of voluntary participation in terms of different expected outcome linked with the multiple missions of involved organizations.
The paper presents a clear and specific methodology to demonstrate the thesis, supporting the proposal both from theoretical point of view and from the practical one (through the description of a case study and the use of WISIR Social Innovation Lab model).
The article is written using a simple language and the use of the English language is very appropriate and understandable.
The results provide a very interesting perspective and summary in the complex system of factors to be considered in a participatory design process: context-setting, inclusion, fair involvement, governance and power-sharing, time spending, willingness to pay, heterogeneity of human and infrastructural contributions. So, I think that the main contribution of this research is to represent a potential roadmap that allows participatory process designers to focusing on main issues of co-design processes, learning by previous experimentation, such this. The dissemination of these practices is very important, from my point of view, as participatory field seems very often confused and uncodified. As I know the complexity of this processes, I very much appreciate the effort to make these experimentations clearer and manageable.
I found very appropriate the authors’ considerations about the limits of their research and their future research interests and I have appreciated very much their perspective.
Author Response
Thank you for your feedback and supportive thoughts on the paper. Although you had few specific edits for the paper mentioned, the abstract and findings/discussion/conclusion have been updated to highlight the key findings you noted as contributions from the paper. You will see that the updated abstract and conclusion highlight material you had mentioned.
Reviewer 3 Report
1. The Abstract Section requires improvement:
Abstract seems to be incomplete. What are the main findings and implications of this research.
2. Line 61. "While failure is not the appropriate term to describe the results that have been achieved so far, the wide gulf between expectation and reality provides insight into the challenges of using co-design processes to govern common-pool resources."
The statement itself depicts that the results are a failure, or the author should have explained the situation in a more convincing way for the ease and interest of the readers.
3. Line 70. "We" is not a suitable word as there is only one author. Additionally, We/I like pronouns are not commonly used in the scientific literature.
4. The paper does not implicitly explain the number of participants/respondents. Moreover, it is not clear that the same/different participants were asked questions in one/some/all phases.
5. Font in Table 1 and the Table in the appendix B is not inline with the remaining paper.
6. There are numerous mistakes in writeup. Words are spelled differently.
7. Overall, the paper does not give a suitable methodology.
8. The findings are not satisfactorily described. There is no major finding of the study.
9. The conclusion section also does not clearly depict the outcome.
Author Response
Thank you for your feedback on the paper. Revisions have been made in response and point-by-point responses are listed below. Overall I believe this has strengthened the paper and added a great deal of clarity to the work.
Two key pieces of clarification have been built into this revised version. First, this reflective piece is part of a larger action research project and clearer distinctions were made between this as part of a culture of sustainability (COS) strategic intervention rather than the entirety of the intervention itself. An outline of the broader COS strategy is in Dreyer et al (2021) and this piece is actually an outgrowth of that paper, as the particular issues with and tensions in co-design processes that were surfaced were viewed as being of sufficient interest to merit publication but were sufficiently distinct that they could not be explored in sufficient depth there.
Second, this paper comes from reflecting upon part of the COS process that is still underway. There is still just over a year in the project left (which may be extended due to COVID-19 disruptions) and the partial-/full-closure of the building itself since March 2020 has impacted the outcomes of the strategy so dramatically that evaluating the outcomes of the overall COS strategy at this point would be premature. Because of this the paper here is primarily focused on critically reflecting on the co-design process itself and hopefully this has been clarified.
- Main findings, implications and research methods are further developed in the abstract.
- ~line 61 re-written to better reflect the study and where the co-design process fits in.
- I/We/our statements have been eliminated from the paper to “depersonalize” the writing
- Workshop attendance has been clarified in the methods section, with a footnote added about missing data from the fifth workshop in line 263.
- Font updated to match the rest of the paper’s diagrams
- A further copyedit has been conducted.
- Methods section has been reordered and additional material has been added. Substantive changes have been made to the methodology section to clarify it, though a great deal of the material about the social innovation lab process itself remains in the appendices of the paper which have also been updated. Additionally, starting ~line 80 a discussion of the unit of analysis for the study has been included to clarify the distinction between the COS intervention and this paper as a reflection upon the design of social innovation lab processes.
- The findings and discussion sections were split in response to this point, with each section made more distinct. This reoriented the findings section more closely to reflections upon the codesign processes. Findings tied directly to Culture of Sustainability outcomes in the building and details of this application of the social innovation lab are highlighted in Appendix A and Appendix B, though other parts of the COS strategy were left outside the scope of this paper but additional references to the complimentary paper Dreyer et al (2021) which focus on the COS directly.
Clarification of this also comes through a discussion of the unit of analysis for this research in the “Research Question” section of the paper (~line 75).
- In the abstract, the introduction (~line 62) and conclusion (~line 429) additional context is provided about the COS intervention. Reporting results from that intervention is itself premature at this stage in the research project as there are still at least two more years left in the overall intervention. Moreover, (minimum) two year disruption in place-based interventions due to COVID-19 would greatly reduce the generalizability of results from the culture of sustainability findings at this point.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Well done Authors,
The quality of the manuscript has been improved. Nice work.
Abstract has been improved
Line 91-93: "This is, in turn, important for understanding both the generalizability of the findings in this paper and clarifying its limitations. For further information on the COS development process itself see Dreyer et al. [4].
While writing a paper, it is not suitable to write, " see Dreyer et al." Authors need to give references and clearly describe what referenced authors have stated in their paper.
Line 241: "However, it also served as a constructivist process for checking the validity of the findings of the author’s findings in this paper." should be deleted
Line 277-281: Now the respondents' information is much clearer.
Footnote 1: Deletion required: "but exact numbers are unavailable."
Line 316: Sentence is not started correctly.
Line 375: " though whether or not close fidelity was actually possible is explored more in the contribution to praxis section"
It should be: "explored in detail in the contribution to......"
Line 456: "These contributions to praxis being noted, it is worth noting the limitations of the approach in this study"
Please avoid using the same verbs more than once in a sentence
