Artifacts and Meanings

Akama et al. suggest using artifacts in interviews as “triggers for reflection and imagination, tools for the articulation and communication of ideas and experience, and facilitators for participation and generative meaning-making” (2007: 173). Their discussion about artifacts reminds me of the research Csikszentmihalyi (1993) does on the meanings of household objects. Considering the rich underlying meanings and social relationships, artifacts could be a powerful tool to facilitate interaction, retrieve memories, and encourage insights when coupled with traditional interview techniques.

Artifacts provide “a form of comfort” (Akama et al. 2007: 177) especially when they are indigenous to the participant’s native environment, such as their home. The participant’s familiarity with the artifacts makes the interview process feel more relaxed and less formal. Therefore, artifacts can be good interview ice-breakers that invite participation and bridge the psychological gap between the participant and the interviewer.

Artifacts also provide focal points in the interview process. The material dimension allows for sensory touch, which can aid participants in processing thoughts and triggering memories of experience with the artifacts. They enable recalling of histories and stories associated with them, as well as other objects they have relations with. There can also be other people involved in these histories, stories, memories, and network of objects. With proper follow-up questions, artifacts serve as starting points that can help the interviewer snowball questions, thereby catalyze generative meaning-making, nuances and insights that otherwise may not be uncovered.

Focusing attention on artifacts enables opportunities for interview participants to reexamine how they relate to the objects at issue. In so doing, they reveal their sense about who they are. As Csikszentmihalyi (1993) argue,

[Objects help] both focus attention, reducing entropy in consciousness, and vividly brings back old memories and experiences, thus adding a sense of depth and wholeness to the self of its owner… the most meaningful symbol of his private self … had the power to put him back in touch with himself. (25)

Therefore, artifacts “embody the values and tastes as well as the accomplishments of the owner” and they serve as “repositories of meanings about the self” (Csikszentmihalyi 1993: 25-26).

The way in which people talk about artifacts they own also reveal how they place themselves in the social networks in which they define themselves. For example, the participant I interviewed today selected a ceramic bean pot and a cookbook (see photo above) from his grandmother. The cookbook was published in 1903 and is in Norwegian. It reveals the participant’s family origin, and his relationship with his grandmother, who laboriously prepared very time-consuming and yet delicious Christmas meals that the participant still vividly remembers more than half a century later. 

As repository of meanings, artifacts are often capable of drawing out rich narratives complete with sounds, smell, images, tastes, feelings, emotions, and the context in which these sensory dimensions exist. Therefore, engaging interview participants with artifacts opens the window to peek into the holistic experience the owner of the artifacts has had.

To me, the most important take-away of studying the use of artifacts in interviews is developing sensitivity toward the interaction between artifacts and people, and toward the experience surrounding such interaction. Artifacts are not just objects. The acts of acquiring, keeping, and using an artifact, as well as giving it a spot in their private homes all have meanings. Why and how an artifact becomes a part of someone’s life is intriguing.

References:
Akama, Y., R. Cooper, L. Vaughan, and S. Viller. 2007. Show and Tell: Accessing and Communicating Implicit Knowledge Through Artefacts. Artifact I (3):172–181.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1993. Why We Need Things. In S. Lubar and W.D. Kingery (eds.) History from Things: Essays on Material Culture , pp. 20–29. London: Smithsonian institution press.