Structured Interview

For this project, I had to work with one of my peers to design interview questions intended to identify research interests for possible projects and how groups should be organized for upcoming group projects.

We created the questions based on our goals, as well as trying to receive honest and complex answers based on experience, feelings, interests, behaviors, and personalities.

We agreed that we don’t want to formulate questions that will result in self-descriptive answers. We rather people describing an experience or their feelings about working in a group. What challenges they had in the past, and what are the conditions that make the group work comfortable and productive.

The first set of questions is to find answers to meet our first goal:

• Goal One: Your partner’s research interests and what kind of group projects they might be interested in working on.

The answers from my peer are below:

1. Tell me about your professional, academic, and or practice background
Academic: undergrad business/ finance and entrepreneurship. Banking Merril Lynch making a report about finances. Work: Banking since then, curious person, learn and understand things how they work. As time moves on is a kind of management, no so much analytical or hands-on as before. Data visualization, predicting for the future, modeling, showing a true understanding of what is happening, and show it to people clearly. No so much programming as a skill but more as a process to learn things underneath. You can use data that can articulate an underline truth.

2. Tell me about the recent projects you have been inspired with/ precedents
Main takeaways the realization of the potential of culture and data analytics. Data so far is the basis of my inspirations. The library of congress: Classification of humanity and cultures, most libraries. How society thinks about certain ideas. Every time that you put things in boxes there is a bias. There is a potential to explore Better ways to identify bias if the very systems that we use to communicate are biased themselves.
Exploratory work. Visualization tries to take a person in a digital way and explore aspects of life while giving some boundaries.
Work the Smithsonian data site
Cultural classifications in data

3. What are your reading interests?
General fiction, creativity for the sake of creativity, Russian authors, Dostoevsky, James Joyce. Character development.
News related things, quick youtube, Reddit comment section (an additional comment that people can provide about social topics) where the world is heading? What is happening with science, economic, environment
Data, social, and culture

4. Why do you want to know more about that topic?
All comes back to the self, trying to understand as much as possible the future. Curious person, whatever it is it is, true. The data is based on the project, it is biassed. It is not a purely natural collection. You have to try harder to find non-biassed information. What is important and beneficial to the world in terms of information.

The second set of questions is to find answers for the second part of the goal.

• Goal Two: How do you think project groups should be determined for the group project later in the semester.

The answers from my peer are below:

1. General
Tell me about your past experiences working in a group
I like where is a democratic process, people being heard, giving feedback, having motivation. I like when people are not afraid to do new things, I like the getting things done attitude, and people participating.

What are some challenges you’ve faced working in a group?
In the academic aspect: keeping people engage and contributing is challenging and frustrating. Sometimes, I had to compensate for others when they are not engaged.

While working in a group, what do you think is more important the skills or the interest for a topic? Why?
Both are important, skills are more important, anyone that is skilled in some way and is motivated is important.

2. Structure/working style
What size of teams do you prefer working in (number of people)? Why?
Depends on the scope of the project, but 3 I think is a realistic balance, especially in the current state of things because of scheduling.

Asynchronous or synchronous coordination?
It needs to be a balance, a continuous checking to see that everyone is on the same page. 66% asynchronous, 33% synchronous.

3. Role / Background
Do you prefer defined or undefined group roles?
Defined but most important, have a plan and actions, having clear takeaways of what needs to happen, and prioritize actions over roles. Having a clear set of responsibilities, concrete and define tasks that someone needs to do during the asynchronous time.

What type of role do you want to explore in a group? Why?
Content and structure of something, the overall flows and makes sense and naturally builds into a conclusion. Initial research to understand the topic, and turning into an outline, so others can make it more visual. I want to explore what I already know. Research.

What type of skills do you look for in your group partners? Why?
I look for complementary skill sets and background knowledge.

What type of personalities do you like to work with? Why?
Personalities combine helps the success of the group, motivation and work hard. I want to do a group job, a good final product.

Affinity Cluster:

While creating the questions we realized that there were certain areas that we had to, and we were diving into to meet our goals. Those areas are:
To meet the first goal: Background, inspiration, exploration, interests.
To meet the second goal: Group, good past experience in groups, challenges in groups, group coordination, group size, role, personality needed, skills needed.

These areas will lead us to understand what personality, behavior, aspirations, and characteristics have the interviewed. What type of people they prefer to work with and why, what are their expectations or fears about working in a group, what are their interests, and what topic they would like to explore, not just in terms of pure academics but also as their personal goal.

Having defined the areas based on the formulated questions it was easy to find the keywords and organized the affinity cluster.

Empathy Map

Once I finished my affinity cluster I created the empathy map which provides a better, and structured understanding of my peer so that I can design a product more accurately for him.
‘Says’ contents user’s quotes or keywords, ‘thinks’ contents user’s goals, desires, and/or ideas, ‘feels’ contents user’s emotions, and ‘does’ contents user’s actions.

Insights

My Peer is highly curious, therefore he is seeking for understanding the future and send a clear, non-biassed message to the world.
He is passionate about his work and he wants to succeed in his work results. He will step up to make the work done, but also it has to be up to his standards. He likes to work with people that are committed to his same work values, but at the same time, it’s important to him to work with people with complementary skills and backgrounds to see that implemented in the final result.
He is looking forward to the use of data visualization to articulate the underline truth, the potential to visualize social and cultural aspects of the world, to create beneficial information that has to be transmitted clearly to the world.