New Value Institute

Lab

Value Elicitation Lab

Develops and tests methods for pre-categorical inquiry, extended conversation, and situated archives.

Development Focus

Value Elicitation and Articulation

Lab Function

Conversational method and situated archive development

Current Status

Active method development

Central Question

What conditions allow latent value relations to become articulable without predetermining what they mean?

What the Lab Develops

Derived from Voice to Voice, the Lab isolates and develops conversational and spatial operations that allow lived relations to value, work, recognition, usefulness, dignity, and self-worth to become articulable. Its concern is not information extraction. It develops conditions in which speaking itself can function as inquiry.

Founding Corpus

Voice to Voice and its interview archive

Source Materials

  • The Voice to Voice interview archive
  • Cross-industry and cross-position participant composition
  • Mobile interview architecture
  • Extended one-to-one conversations
  • Testimonial video works
  • Listening booths
  • Conversational and spatial research
  • Emerging methodological analysis of the interview process

Development and Testing

The Lab separates and tests the conditions that allow conversation to remain truthful without becoming a factual inventory, reflective without becoming an academic discussion, personal without collapsing into a prepared declaration, and open without losing the thread of inquiry.

The method does not assume that a speaker arrives with a completed answer. It constructs conditions in which a previously unarticulated relation may become recognisable through speaking.

Components under development include participant and field composition, trust formation, spatial and temporal conditions, conversational suspension, prevention of premature conceptual closure, thread recognition, relational return, deepening without leading, contradiction and revision, ethical editing, and situated archive construction.

This method is still being developed and tested. It is not a generic interview service, therapeutic practice, focus group, or validated diagnostic system.

Method Components and Archive Operations

  • Participant and field composition
  • Trust formation
  • Conversational suspension
  • Thread recognition and relational return
  • Deepening without leading
  • Contradiction and revision
  • Ethical editing
  • Situated archive construction

Outputs

  • Conversational inquiry methods
  • Pre-categorical inquiry designs
  • Situated narrative archives
  • Comparative narrative analyses
  • Partner-specific inquiry designs

Possible Test Contexts

  • Organisational change
  • Future of work
  • Employee experience beyond surveys
  • Government and public consultation
  • Policy inquiry before categories are fixed
  • Community research
  • Foundation field inquiry
  • Cultural institution stakeholder research
  • Social transformation
  • Situations where an institution knows that a problem exists but does not yet know how to define it

Development beyond the Source Work

Development beyond the founding work proceeds through external cases, comparative testing, interdisciplinary expertise, and bounded institutional applications.

Documentation

Collaborate

Develop and test conversational inquiry, situated archive, or pre-categorical methods in a defined field or institutional context.

Explore method development

Related Work