Reflection Card: Design of a Tool to Assist Novice Designers with Interview Retrospectives and its Application to the Climate Crisis Interview Project

Abstract

“What went wrong?” Beginners constantly reflect on their growth process. The same is true in interview situations. Novice designers sometimes mess up interviews because they rely on experience and knowledge. So how can novice designers quickly learn how to conduct interviews well? How can gain deep insights from interviews? This project was based on the interview experiences of seven novice designers who participated in the “Development of Climate Change Response Guidelines and Exploration of Future Research Topics in the Performing Arts Field” design project. The goal is to explore awareness and practices related to climate crisis response in the performing arts industry and derive future tasks based on this. The novice designers encountered the wicked problem, which was the theme of the project. During the interview process, they strongly felt asymmetry due to imbalances in knowledge, information, ethics, and emotions, not only due to technical aspects but also due to the complex nature of the problem. In this situation, novice designers simply thought they had ruined the interview, but they had difficulty clearly recognizing the “essence of the problem”. To address this, I developed “reflection cards” as a tool to promote clear and structured reflection. This paper aims to explore the usefulness of this tool and the results of reflection interviews conducted with novice designers who participated in the aforementioned project using reflection cards.