Interview project
I saw this a while ago and didn’t blog it, but decided to today…
Interviewing has become super interesting to me, I especially had troubles, but also increasing interest, with the interviews part of my work this year, and looking at how people use interview in design. I generally have issues with it, simply because it’s so hard to execute well. Looking back though, the interviews are where the belief project actually started to come alive. I guess it’s obvious to say that design can be mulled around and played with in the studio, but essentially it has to go back to people in someway, and thats what the interviews were.
I remember thinking at the beginning of the year about how you can kind of pry into sections of peoples life. Looking at Sophie Calles hotel work, and the questionable ethics that go along with it. The interview project starts to do a similar thing I think and the concept is very simple; drive around asking people for interviews, but it’s executed perfectly, and starts to highlight interesting little bits of peoples lives that become really beautiful.
I think the reason it works well is good editing, an interview only becomes interesting when you feed it to someone, it can’t be pages and pages or hours and hours of research presented in a block, perhaps the ‘design’ here is the editing; choosing the interesting bits. I’m not sure how you do that quite.
I think these two are my favorites so far (though I can’t embed them unfortunately):
hey man- so i think interviewing is awesome too- I really like it as a research tool (not limiting it to just that) but it’s my only experience with it. I love how you get ‘real’ qualitative data fast. The thing I struggled with my project, and I think as it was research it is different to what you were speaking about, was the way it was presented- peeps didn’t want to be videoed so had to be either audio or transcribed- so the easiest way was that method of pulling out pieces of text and making it larger and highlighting it- creating both a full reading of the interview and the ‘edited’ version. Interviewing is the ace though- people love to talk especially if you can get them to talk about something they like.
There was also that lecture we had off that guy from live|work, which was good- less like interviewing more like workshops but kinda similar.
It’s where I’m going to start some future projects to try and get some kind of interesting start point- or real’ human need or something- people can really anchor and ground a project- it’s really easy as Goldsmiths student to be up in our own heads (some more than others…. hmm hmm lol) and people can bring that academic bullshittery back to something perhaps a bit more relevant.