To better understand the potential of plywood in interior design sustainability, it is important to research this area by applying the method of an interview. Taking into account that great attention is paid to the role of sustainability, one should identify the ways to implement it in design. For this purpose, the narrative interview seems to be the most relevant option as it allows for generating vision by collecting the experience of competent people. The main goal of the identified method is to ensure collecting and analyzing one’s perspective on plywood sustainability (Gemignani, 2014). This narrative interview will consist of a lengthy conversation (up to two hours) without rigorous development of questions, but before the conversation, the researcher will prepare some assumptions (hypotheses), which mean that the ideas about information to be collected will be developed.
Before starting the process of interviewing, the possible participants should be contacted to receive their consent. Two experienced designers working with plywood in their projects will be asked to contribute to this project by sharing their views. The interviewer will act primarily as a listener, who only sets the topic of the interview, providing a narrative impulse and occasionally directs the narrator (a respondent) along the thematic line (Sclater, 2017). In this case, the interviewer will prepare the preliminary questions, focusing on eco-friendliness, affordability, sources, negative and positive consequences, interior styles, and so on. A respondent’s extraordinary ability as a narrator and the interviewer’s skills as the interested listener who can create and maintain a relaxed and natural narrative atmosphere are important conditions. During the interview, an audio recording is required, which is subsequently to be decoded and presented in the form of a text (transcript), taking into account all the verbal and non-verbal features of the conversation (Hampshire, Iqbal, Blell, & Simpson, 2014). After that, the transcripts will be processed using special procedures of structuring information according to common themes and questions.
The description and interpretation of the data obtained will take place in the traditions of understanding architecture, design, intuitive interpretation, and conceptualization. Hampshire et al. (2014) state that the decisive methodological advantages of a narrative interview are its informal nature, including flexibility and phenomenological direction. Among the disadvantages there are a lack of evidence and guarantees of deep penetration into people’s true attitudes and beliefs. Instead of the concepts of reliability, accuracy, and sustainability, narrative interviews use the criteria of non-directivity, reference, and naturalness. It should be stressed that indirectness refers to the mastery of a neutral and non-suggestive survey aimed at minimizing the effect of the interviewer’s presence. This allows for reducing the impact of the researcher on the study of interest and participants.
Thus, as the private information about the past life is interpreted, the researcher will describe and structure the data in design terms to formulate hypotheses arising from specific socially and historically contextualized life experiences. Such a technique does not lead to generalization but helps to see the whole variety of forms of the course of one or another phenomenon, which is important to resolve the problem of sustainable design in this case (Hampshire et al., 2014). The methodology of a sound theory will be applied to switch from narratives of personal experience provoked by a researcher’s questions to statements claiming typological density in focus relevant to the research topic.
References
Gemignani, M. (2014). Memory, remembering, and oblivion in active narrative interviewing. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(2), 127-135.
Hampshire, K., Iqbal, N., Blell, M., & Simpson, B. (2014). The interview as narrative ethnography: Seeking and shaping connections in qualitative research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17(3), 215-231.
Sclater, S. (2017). The uses of narrative: Explorations in sociology, Psychology and Cultural Studies. New York, NY: Routledge.