25 Jul Conversation VI — Titles for an Unwritten Report
Interviewer: You’ve shown that research is not just a practice — but a material.
Something shaped by time, by silence, by distortion.
You’ve spoken about forgetting, misremembering, and the ways research leaves behind more than it records.
And yet, most research ends with a document.
A report. A slide deck.
A story that says: “Here’s what we learned.”
So now, at the end, I want to ask something simpler.
If we don’t end with findings, what do we end with?
Zulberti: Sometimes we end with something that doesn’t quite belong anywhere.
Something that didn’t fit the method, or the format, or the team’s expectation.
A moment. A glance. A sentence that collapsed halfway through.
I’ve learned to hold on to those moments — not as data, but as reminders.
And sometimes, I give them a title.
Interviewer: A title? Like naming a finding?
Zulberti: No. The opposite.
Not to label, but to remember.
I give a name to the thing that slipped past the structure.
Something quiet.
A gesture that changed the room but couldn’t be quoted.
A question I didn’t ask.
A silence I didn’t know how to explain.
It’s not for the report.
It’s just for me.
But the title holds it.
Interviewer: Can you share a few?
Zulberti: A few I’ve kept:
The Button She Never Touched
Everything We Couldn’t Translate
You Had to Be There
Interviewer: They sound more like poetry than findings.
Zulberti: Maybe they are.
But poetry is a way of holding what resists being broken down.
Helen Scott didn’t reduce Truffaut or Hitchcock — she carried them.
She translated not just the words, but the mood.
That’s what I’m trying to do, too.
These titles carry the mood of something I didn’t want to lose.
Even if I couldn’t explain it.
Interviewer: So research, in the end, isn’t just what’s said.
Zulberti: Exactly.
It’s also what holds the space around what’s said.
The atmosphere that made it possible.
Sometimes the only way I know how to preserve it — is with a title.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
Interviewer: Is there a phrase or image you return to — not to explain anything, but to remind yourself what matters?
Zulberti: I often return to this line:
“If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.”
It makes me smile — but it also reminds me of the power of detail, of quiet persistence.
Not everything we carry from research needs to be large or provable.
Sometimes the smallest trace — the pause, the aside, the unfinished sentence — is what changes how we work.
And that’s enough to remember.
Position in the Series
This final conversation closes the loop without closing the meaning.
It moves away from findings entirely — toward fragments, traces, and inner memory.
What began as a fold in time ends in a pause between documentation and disappearance.
It’s not a conclusion — but a soft afterimage of all that came before.