Barry MacDonald died in 2013 of an irony—a public mind slowly cloistered by encroaching dementia. Barry was one of the original founders of case study evaluation in the early 1970s. Case study was the methodology of choice for his democratic approach to curriculum and program evaluation. In this article, I explore his core methodological belief that evaluation was based on understanding the individual in innovation. This article was presented at his memorial seminar in April 2014. Barry had always found inspiration in Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In fact, he was a public eye where Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were private eyes.
