Petitmengin, via Thinking with Sound (CHI ‘24), where it is the primary data-collection method.
What it is for
An interview technique that refuses the general question. Instead of how did that feel, it asks after the specific properties of a remembered moment: where it was located, what direction it moved in, how large it was, what pitch or texture or intensity it had, how long it lasted, what came immediately before.
The premise is that people cannot reliably report an experience in summary, but can be walked back into a single moment of it and describe what was actually there.
Why it is here
Because my research question is about embodied experience, and the obvious way of asking about that produces the least usable data. Did you enjoy it returns an evaluation. This returns a description.
It is also the method that made Thinking with Sound work, which is the closest existing study to what I would need to run.
Where it strains
It is built for a single participant, sitting still, recalling one moment in detail — a slow, one-to-one procedure, often an hour for a few seconds of experience.
The current question is about several strangers in a room and what happened between them. It is not obvious that an individually-conducted interview can recover a jointly-produced meaning at all: each person can be walked back into their own moment, but the thing I want to know about may not live inside either of them.
That is a real limitation, not a scheduling problem. Whether it can be answered decides whether the question is answerable.
Status
Not used. Read about, not read directly. Petitmengin’s own papers are the next step if this survives the question above.