Interview Prep
Today’s class began with us looking into tailoring out interview questions. In the coming weeks we are all expected to carry out an interview and film/record the process, from which we will all produce a 3-4 minute video. Our general scope will be to look at how 1st year students at The University of Dundee use photography. An important part of the interview and gathering quality material to use in our videos is selecting the right questions to ask.
To help us our lecturer highlighted three key things to consider that would help us prepare for our interview and prep our questions.
1 – Use open ended questions, for example “How do you use photography?” would be better phrased as “Can you tell me a little about how you use photography?”.
2 – Avoid using leading questions i.e. a question that might prompt a certain response, “How do you feel when you use your camera?” is a neutral question and lets the interviewee generate his or her own positive or negative thoughts.
3 – Probing issues in depth. “What do you mean by this?” a follow up question probing for further information. Silent probing, by remaining silent the interviewee might share more in an attempt to fill the silence. Echoing probe, by repeating the answer given the interviewee will hear and possibly edit their response, add more etc. The “uh huh” probe, by responding with affirming responses the interviewer hopes to encourage the subject to keep sharing or elaborating in their answer.
This has forced me to think more about the sort of questions I want to avoid using and also how I must consider what questions to use to provoke or encourage a certain response but not micromanage or directly control the interview & responses.
Generative Design Methods
We were all asked in our groups to quickly produce a model of our ‘dream house’.
These were by no means actual dream houses, the time constraint wouldn’t allow for that.
We all then went round to each model and had the respective group explain their design after which we highlighted the reoccurring themes.
This would hopefully give us a list of desirable features that we could conclude would be ‘standard’ features for a dream home design. This method however wouldn’t work in our class, there were only 8 models so common features or themes across the class weren’t very unanimous, there were only 3 highlighted ‘common features’. To get any information that would be useful from generative design there would need to be more designs to analyse.
Jordan Snitch - Product Design Student 