25 Jul Conversation II — The Researcher as Listener
Interviewer: In most research contexts, the role of the researcher is to ask — to probe, to structure, to extract.
But the word “listen” implies something else: not direction, but attention.
Not technique, but presence.
Alessandro, when you think about research, do you see yourself more as a questioner — or as a listener?
Zulberti: I see myself as a listener.
That doesn’t mean I don’t ask questions — but that I don’t hold onto them too tightly.
Sometimes a participant says something unexpected, and the instinct is to bring them back to the task.
But I prefer to stay with what they’ve said — even if it goes nowhere. Especially if it goes nowhere.
Because that moment, that detour, often reveals more than the answer I was looking for.
Listening is about not filling the silence too fast.
It’s about allowing something to unfold — even if it breaks the script.
Interviewer: There’s a kind of humility in what you’re describing.
Not trying to guide the participant, not rushing to “capture” the insight.
What changes when you approach research this way — as a listener, rather than a questioner?
Zulberti: The dynamic changes.
You’re not the one driving anymore.
You let go of the idea that you’re “leading” a session — and instead, you start accompanying someone through a space.
It’s not passive. It’s a different kind of attention — slow, open, porous.
Sometimes the most meaningful parts aren’t what’s said, but how it’s said.
A pause before answering. A word repeated unconsciously.
Or a moment of contradiction — when someone says one thing but gestures something else.
I listen with my eyes.
A hand hovering above the mouse.
A half-smile when naming a frustration.
A glance toward something they didn’t want to talk about.
Those details matter.
They’re not just supporting data — sometimes they are the data.
Interviewer: What happens when your way of listening doesn’t match the expectations of the environment?
How do you hold that tension?
Zulberti: That tension is always there.
Because this kind of listening introduces bias — or at least the possibility of it.
It’s not objective. It’s not repeatable.
You’re paying attention to a specific moment, in a specific person, through your own lens.
So it doesn’t always match what teams expect.
They want clear findings. Patterns. Insights that can be plugged into the roadmap.
But what I’m describing isn’t a pattern. It’s more like a surface — like in raku pottery.
You can create the conditions for a certain kind of texture.
You can prepare the material, the glaze, the oxygen.
But you can’t engineer the crack.
The surface forms in the fire.
The same way that insight forms in the conversation.
You don’t control it — you just have to be present when it happens.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about translation.
Not just between languages — but between what you hear in the room, and what the team needs to hear.
How do you move from presence to communication — without losing what made the moment powerful?
Zulberti: That’s one of the hardest parts.
Because the moment I try to translate the experience, something resists.
Some of what I’ve seen — the silence, the gesture, the hesitation — doesn’t survive the shift into words.
It’s like what Susan Sontag wrote:
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Translation asks me to explain what I felt.
But the process doesn’t always make room for feelings — only findings.
I think a lot about Helen Scott — how she sat between Truffaut and Hitchcock.
She wasn’t just translating French to English.
She was carrying tone, intention, cultural rhythm.
She was shaping a shared space — not reducing, but preserving.
That’s what I try to do.
Not translate what happened into bullet points — but carry the mood, the tension, the truth of the moment into the design conversation.
Even if it’s incomplete. Even if it doesn’t sound like “research” as people expect it.
Interviewer: You’ve said that listening is a form of presence. That it’s about noticing what isn’t said, what isn’t planned, what isn’t clean.
But in the end, you still have to speak. You still have to bring what you’ve seen back to the team.
How do you know what to bring — and what to leave unsaid?
Zulberti: I don’t always know.
That’s the risk of this way of working.
Some things are meant to stay in the room.
They’re part of the moment — not the product.
They shape me more than they shape the design.
But some things need to be carried — quietly, carefully — into the next room.
Not to explain them,
but to let them stay present in the process.
It’s not about accuracy. It’s about integrity.
Did I stay with what was true, even if I couldn’t explain it?
Did I make space for the unsaid, even in the design?
That’s the work.
That’s the listening.
Interviewer: You’ve spoken about silence as presence — about letting a moment unfold without rushing to shape it.
Have you experienced a moment in your work where saying nothing allowed something deeper to surface?
Zulberti: As my own experience, I’ve seen how silence can act like a mirror.
When I don’t interrupt or prompt, the speaker often reconsiders what they’ve just said — and sometimes arrives somewhere more honest.
It’s not always comfortable, but it creates room for reflection that a question might have closed too soon.
Position in the Series
This second article focuses on the position of the researcher — not as narrator, but as listener.
It deepens the attention introduced in the fold, asking what kind of presence research requires.
Themes of translation, gesture, and bias connect this piece to later reflections on method and memory.