The study was broken up into two intensive three-week sections. The first half was mainly devoted to different techniques of participant observation. We engaged in photo-documentation of various types of journeys, collecting over one thousand photographs. The journeys we documented ranged from riding a given line of the Tube and alighting at each station, to focusing on observing the entire interior of a given train. This second type of journey, involved boarding a train and at each stop getting off to switch carriages, in this case focusing on people and their behaviours more than the architecture of the space itself. Additionally, one long journey from Brixton to Paris was taken, giving us the chance to travel by Tube, Eurostar train and the Paris Metro, allowing us to gain both continuity and contrast in our observations. Finally, since we spent a significant amount of time in London keeping a camera on hand at all times, we documented our own daily patterns and routines to reflect our own personal perspective. We also employed object shadowing, by leaving newspapers on the seats - a common practice in the Tube - and recording all the interactions which took place around, with and through these objects. This was done in an attempt to get a very focused perspective on a specific object which was an actual part of many people's journeys.

During the first three weeks we also met with two of the 19 participants who we would go on to interview during the second half of the study. Because we approached this study through a lens of diversity, rather than attempting to choose a statistically general sample of participants we tried to find a theoretically interesting one. We chose to look for participants who had a unique perspective on the Tube or some sort of "expertise" in order to highlight and explore the idea of diversity. We used both snowball sampling as well contacting people who we had learned about through blogs and the art community.

Our participants included four artists inspired by the Underground, two members of the Transport for London Museum, a woman living between two homes, a self-professed Tube enthusiast, a woman with "Tube-phobia," a mother whose adult children had been riding the Tube from an early age, a woman with a two and a half hour commute that spanned three transport networks, and a small social network of eight designers who hailed from six different countries.

While interviewing our participants we tried to elicit their personal experiences of riding the Tube, focusing specifically on the feelings brought up by different sorts of journeys. However, in order to bring a common thread of reflection throughout the interviews we used two select sets of photographs (which were taken from the first half of the study) as objects around which all the participants could talk. We had two packs of photos with about 25 photos in each pack. One was a set mostly of spaces, things and details. From these we asked participants to look through and select the one which most reflected their experience and explain why. The second set was one of people, and for those we asked participants to choose a person to tell us a story about.