The seventh post in our series, Brief Interviews with Assiduous Mules. Read past interviews with Jessie Char, Shawna Seth, David McCreath, Nila Salinas, Paula Chang, and Stewart McCoy.

You’re a filmmaker and the associate director for the Disposable Film Festival. How has your idea of storytelling changed since you started at Mule?

I don’t think my idea of what a good story is and how to tell it has changed at all. There’s something very logical about putting together a story arc for narrative or testing a story arc after you’ve filmed for a documentary. Once you have the pieces of a story, you need to steep yourself in them, understand all the different ways they could be used. That determines the story line. When applied to films or educational materials, the story line steps people through the argument or narrative and encourages them to see what someone else sees or understand information in a new way. And when used in application to interaction design, it’s actually pretty similar.

I view my job as listening to how people talk about how and what they do and make sure that the processes that shape their behavior (through navigation or through brand language) work for and with those users. I want an application, site, interaction to work for the users and do the most efficient and complete job that it can in moving people through.

What are your tips for conducting solid interviews? What do you watch for?

Different interview techniques are needed for different types of research. I use slightly different strategies when talking to someone about how they manage money than when I’m asking them about how they negotiate barrier protection use in their sex lives. But there are some general principles; what we typically do at Mule ends up as open-ended ethnographic inquiry.

So my main tip for design research is to ask questions about what people actually do, not what they think; most people will tell you what they think about what they do. But if you ask them what they think, they rarely tell you what they actually do.

Also, it can be really useful to sum up what they said for them, since it gives them a chance to agree, disagree, or clarify.

What researcher’s notes and data would you most like to get your hands on?

Lord, that’s an exciting question. Because I was doing research on systems that affect sexual behavior decision-making, my college self might have said Kinsey or Margaret Meade. I’d want to see the actual written notes to see how they wrote about things and to get their personal stories too (lots of anthropologists in the field keep separate records of data, observations, and personal experiences).

I’d also like to see Robert Gardner’s notes. He’s a visual anthropologist who made two of my favorite films that walk the line between documentary and art incredibly well. Oh, and those from the story researchers at StoryCorps and This American Life would be awesome.

As for data to get my hands on: for a big birthday party my dad and siblings threw for my mom, I made a video retrospective using footage from all of our family vids, starting with the first video they took on Easter when I was 2 years old. I watched every minute of the tapes we had. It was a pretty amazing documentation, sometimes excruciatingly narrow, sometimes embarrassingly all-encompassing (hair, lost relatives, shorts, parenting, lisps, etc.), of my extended family’s relationships. And it’s not just my family’s movies. I could watch anyone’s family videos and photos for hours and hours. You know those people who complain about seeing old photo albums? I am not one of them. (For vids/pictures of your amazing and awesome and mind-expanding and unedited international backpacking and beach-combing, however, I will take a pass until they’ve been edited and/or aged).

I’d also love to see what sorts of notes “researchers” take on the bevy of truly crap and damaging reality TV shows.

What blogs or sites do you visit daily?

I have a group of food blogs that I rotate through, depending on my food moods/needs (Serious Eats, Smitten Kitchen, Fancy Fast Food, thisiswhyyourefat). Nearly always have something from RH Reality Check open. Other sites are A Softer World, fuckyeahmenswear, ProPublica, Twitter (to find news relevant to or quips hilarious about things/issues I care about), and at least 4-5 times a day: IMDB.

And I find myself using Wikipedia regularly, mostly in my very important daily investigations into vital information; earlier today, I did significant Wayans family exploration. Among other things, I discovered that only 2 of the 10 weren’t in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

In an idealistic world, what would be the best use of the web? What’s the best example right now?

In a very, very idealistic vision, the most exciting possibility that the web has is the assistance it provides to a society on the road to a more open world—because of the increase in exposure to other people’s experiences and different ideas that haven’t sprung up from wherever you happen to be born or wherever you live.

In a slightly more accessible and practical way, the internet provides places for people who have common stories. At its best it increases sharing and reduces stigma or isolation about difficult subjects. I love that isolated women can talk about breastfeeding and get support online. Scarleteen writes about sexual health for young people in great, plain English that many teens and others would never be exposed to. Plus, people can pool resources if they really care about a band or an artist’s print or a video about civil rights.

Of course, the internet can also be polarizing, allowing 14- or 45-year-olds to call people names and point fingers from the comfort of their own little desks, but the ability to bring together people who thought they were dealing with something alone balances that out for me. And that’s what good education, that’s what good administration/management, that’s what human-focused systems can do.

You also studied creative writing in undergrad. What’s the title of the first story you wrote as a child? Please give a synopsis of this magnum opus.

When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade I started a story loosely based on the themes and ideas from the Wayside School books (which is some seriously awesome writing for and about kids. I still think about getting a potato tattoo on my ankle). I went back to look at this important work of mine a few years ago, and I found it was just stacks and stacks of character studies. I think the idea was to weave all of the characters together in a delightful quirky cast of hundreds, but I was more interested in explaining how birth order affected one’s character, why another character didn’t have any friends who were girls, why someone was super good at geography but found spelling a bit tough…this has a fair bit of explanatory power. But since it wasn’t my thing to tie up and conclude things I started when I was a kid, I guess I’ll let other people decide what that explains.

You lived and worked in Ireland for a while. What are your top 3 favorite Irish slang (and their meanings)?

Ripping you off. I taught a class on video and photography to young women in a job skills program in the center of Dublin and would frequently find myself asking questions about their families and their kids and getting answers I understood pretty much nothing about. Once, one of the girls I got on the best with said she’d kicked the father of her unborn child out of the house. I asked her how she was doing, and she explained that he’d been ripping her off so she was better off.

I assumed he’d stolen money or her things to cash in. But then another girl mentioned the same thing had happened to her, too. I feel stupid now, but because of the amount of theft and drug crime, it wasn’t until I heard the raw anger in a third girl’s voice, when she said that her fella had ripped her off with this other girl’s sister that I understood what she meant. The reality that these girls hadn’t had their possessions taken but were cheated on was much more upsetting. The phrase itself does a better job of explaining how they felt, like something was stolen from them.

Rapid, massive, deadly. I heard some people talking about how “massive” some girl was and the fact that she had just died made it seem pretty insensitive. But then they followed that up with how gorgeous she was…rapid, massive, and deadly all mean various nuances of “good”, and they are a joy to use. “That dress is deadly; it makes your face look massive and your arse look rapid,” is one potentially awesome use of these words.

Dropping the hand. This is a nice little euphemism for a sexual practice: manual stimulation. It’s an example of how literal, direct, and bodily the humor can be about things—without actually being comfortable talking about them.

Tweet | Written by Tina Lee on May 11, 2011 |