1In this meeting, two final-year geography students report the findings of their recent fieldwork to their supervisor, Doctor Hughes.
2They had spent three weeks observing a much-publicised smart district and interviewing a fairly wide range of local residents.
3Their initial hypothesis, namely that residents would warmly welcome the technology, turned out to be only partially correct.
4Younger interviewees generally appreciated the real-time transport information, whereas older residents frequently described the very same system as intrusive.
5One particularly striking finding was that hardly any of the residents could say which company actually controlled their personal data.
6The students had originally planned fifty interviews, but in the end they completed only forty-two, which the supervisor considered sufficient.
7Doctor Hughes noted it was not the sample size but the lack of shopkeepers' perspectives that weakened the study.
8She advised them to acknowledge this limitation openly in the report rather than simply hoping the examiners would overlook it entirely.
9The pair also discovered that the district's celebrated energy savings had been calculated using a rather generous baseline.
10Contrary to the developer's repeated public claims, overall energy consumption had barely fallen when compared with similar conventional neighbourhoods nearby.
11Before they left, the supervisor asked them to draft their conclusions carefully without using the word revolutionary anywhere at all.
12Their final report is due in six weeks, and it will include a full appendix of carefully anonymised interview transcripts.