Teaching Interview Techniques: An Approach to Research & Writing
by Adam Harrison Levy
Over the years students have taught me to be a more attentive listener, to be more specific in my assignments, and to be more honest in my criticism. Students have also taught me how incarcerated prisoners re-fashion their regulation footwear to express their individuality, how burning tires are used during political revolution, and how children’s playgrounds are designed. The function of sporks, doilies, and butter knives were explained one semester, and the design process of how an emergent nation, South Sudan, branded itself was the subject of one particularly memorable thesis.
That students are able to pursue such thrillingly unexpected (and culturally resonant) subjects is one of the reasons why I teach here. Design, as we interpret it, is a wide and wondrous space, and as long as you enter it with curiosity and rigor, we, the teachers, will guide you as best we can. In my class, I encourage students to pursue topics that start off as knots, areas of inquiry that are tangled, layered and compelling, that need to be unwound, described, and analyzed. It’s an interrogative mode, both of objects and people, and one that I hope leads to narrative: the telling of a story framed by analysis and deepened by historical context, a process of interior and exterior discovery.
Learning Through Failure
Another reason I teach is because I have failed. And I want to teach you so that you don’t fail as well. I have failed to complete a book that I worked for almost a year, I once badly flubbed an interview with James Brown (who walked off the set), and I currently have an uncut documentary on my hands.
So from those failures (and a few successes) what skills will you learn in my class? You will learn, when interviewing, to ask open-ended questions, and how to pace and order those questions. You will learn how to write a piece of narrative non-fiction based on ten images pulled from an archival folder in the Picture Collection at the New Public Library. You will learn what a well-turned sentence looks and sounds like. You will learn what it is to read literary writing about design by writers, filmmakers, and designers such as John McPhee, Jessica Helfand, Errol Morris, Michael Beirut, Annie Dillard, and Roland Barthes, among others. You will learn how important it is to persist.
Writing the Interview
Would you like an example of an assignment? I’ll ask you to write a short, five- hundred word design-centered essay based on an interview. We will workshop the essay in class. And for the next class I will ask you to write it again. And I might ask you to write it a third time. And why is that? It’s another example of how apparent failure can lead to the potential for genuine growth. “Try again, fail again, fail better” as Samual Beckett once wrote. Revision isn’t the “after party”, it is the party, an opportunity to deepen your first impressions and engage more fully with your subject matter. I’ve learned that I fail as a writer when I write what I think I know, rather than writing in order to discover what I don’t know.
Interrogating Primary Sources
When interviewing a subject I’ll urge you to listen for, and probe, what I like to call the grain of the voice: the nuances of diction, word choice, and habits of speech, as well as what is left unsaid in pauses and silences. In a similar way, I’ll encourage you to interrogate first-hand primary sources, oral histories and interview transcripts as well as letters, diaries, leger reports, and even anonymous photographs and print sources. This is yet another form of learning through failure, in this case the failure of previously sanctioned narratives to include voices that otherwise would not be heard. In the archives it’s possible to excavate suppressed, marginalized, or overlooked lives, the imprint of a history that otherwise might have been lost to time. Using primary sources is yet another way to evoke the grain of the voice, especially when exploring histories that took place before our lifespan. If you listen closely, documents can be talkative.
When writing, and when interviewing, I’ll encourage you to use doubt to your advantage, rather than as a foe: how to walk the line between structure and improvisation. And I’ll pass along some insider interviewing tricks, the first of which is to never ask James Brown to take off his sunglasses.
Faculty Bio
Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and filmmaker specializing in the art of the interview. His writing has appeared in The Guardian and on The Design Observer and his films have been shown on the BBC. He has taught on the Design Research, Writing and Criticism course for nine years.
About SVA MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism
The SVA MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism is a one-year, intensive MA program well suited to the circumstances of established professionals, in addition to graduates wishing to continue their studies at an advanced level. In providing the research tools and journalistic techniques for researching, analyzing, and critically interpreting design, the program amply prepares its graduates for future-facing careers in research-driven design practices and institutions, in journalism and publishing, or for continued studies in a design-related subject.
We are now accepting applications on a rolling basis. Our next application review will be February 15, 2020. Successful candidates will be granted significant scholarships. Apply here.
Please contact us for more information at designresearch@sva.edu.
