Lesson 6: Conducting Without a Score

25 Jul

Posted at 19:36h in The Material of Teaching

Reference: Fellini’s Prova d’orchestra Learning Objectives Practice invisible leadership: holding alignment without dominating. Sense and name tension in teams (time pressure, ego, fear). Design conditions for insight, not just activities.   Headline “You’re not the soloist. You hold the tempo.” Narrative & UX Interpretation In Prova d’orchestra, chaos erupts when no one trusts the conductor—or the score. UX research often sits in the same tension: product...

25 Jul

Posted at 19:35h in The Material of Teaching

Reference: Barbara Kruger Learning Objectives Examine how language frames insight and shapes power relations. Practice distilling tension without flattening meaning. Learn to use form (typography, hierarchy) as part of research argument. Headline “If you must compress, compress the system—don’t compress the user.” Narrative & UX Interpretation Kruger’s bold text slaps meaning into view. She exposes how statements position the reader. In research, our words do...

25 Jul

Posted at 19:34h in The Material of Teaching

Reference: Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique Learning Objectives Balance qualitative and quantitative inputs without collapsing one into the other. Hear “correspondence” instead of forcing fusion. Recognize silence and absence as analytical signals.   Headline “Let the data sing in two voices—don’t force a single melody.” Narrative & UX Interpretation Pärt writes with two voices: the melodic and the triadic. They move together, but never merge. In research,...

25 Jul

Posted at 19:33h in The Material of Teaching

Learning Objective To cultivate students’ ability to hold qualitative and quantitative insights together without collapsing one into the other. Headline Not fusion, but correspondence. Narrative and UX Interpretation Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli style weaves two voices: one melodic, one triadic. One searches. One grounds. The tension is not resolved — it’s held. UX researchers often struggle to balance data and story. One becomes dominant. The other decorative....

25 Jul

Posted at 19:31h in The Material of Teaching

Reference: Christopher Nolan’s Memento Learning Objectives Understand how order shapes meaning in research narratives. Practice reassembling fragmented data without forcing coherence. Distinguish between what happened and how it’s remembered or reported. Headline “Sequence is not neutral—every order is an argument.” Narrative & UX Interpretation Memento tells its story backwards, forcing viewers to question cause and effect. Research often does the same unconsciously: we tidy messy...

25 Jul

Posted at 19:30h in The Material of Teaching

Reference: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Learning Objectives Train sustained observation: notice rhythm, pause, hesitation. Separate “what was said” from “how it was said.” Build a personal practice of attending before interpreting. Headline “Pattern appears when you stay long enough to see it.” Narrative & UX Interpretation De Keersmaeker’s choreography is built from repetition, variation, and the precise use of time and space. Watching her work...

25 Jul

Posted at 16:38h in The Material of Design

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...

25 Jul

Posted at 16:36h in The Material of Design

Interviewer: There’s a quiet belief in UX research: That once we’ve gathered findings, we can preserve them. Store them. Share them. That insight is something permanent — something that can be “handed over.” But you’ve said that what research remembers isn’t always in the report. That sometimes what mattered is what disappears. What does UX research forget? Zulberti: We forget tone. The rhythm of how something was said. The hesitation...

25 Jul

Posted at 16:34h in The Material of Design

Interviewer: Research begins in language. But the language we use is often pre-shaped by business logic: “Will the segment understand this?” “Does it scale?” “Is it clear enough for the report?” Do you feel that the words we use — to ask, to frame, to report — are becoming thinner? And what’s the risk, when we flatten language to make it more accessible? Zulberti: We’re flattening both...

25 Jul

Posted at 16:31h in The Material of Design

Interviewer: In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” He wasn’t talking about UX research — but he could have been. Most teams treat methods as neutral tools: surveys, interviews, usability tests. But what if the method is not neutral? What if it’s shaping the very knowledge we believe we’re collecting? Do you think of research methods as media — and if...