The Arts of Asking

The below is an excerpt from my new essay, “The Arts of Asking” (The full article can be read on my Substack).

It took a few days for me to recover from my OWN defensive mechanism.

It eventually comes to my realization that my sense of blankness upon reading my own interview questions was neither an accident nor a sign of personal numbness as someone exhausted by her work. It was because the questions themselves cannot sound any more unappealing—laced with fluffy words like ‘the biggest challenge,’ ‘most helpful,’ and ‘what to improve’.

Flashing forward to last year, when I temporarily set aside my regular work as a designer and researcher, I chested into a completely new field—that of a crisis counselor. Hustling between messages, I must keep every conversation going, and if possible, intriguing enough to keep those in real crisis engaged, thus safe. While taking a water break between people’s vulnerable moments, I can’t help but reflect on “questions”—the most fundamental element of human communication—and how they ship our intentions. That is, how much attention are we truly willing to give THE PEOPLE present in our conversation, regardless of OUR research, OUR findings, or a checkmark of OUR task?

That is what I am talking about—ask empathetically. It is about returning the attention to people, how their lives entangle and disentangle, and how their lives interconnect with ours.

The arts of asking

While I refuse to compress ‘empathy’ as one single masterline to guide all the conversation-involved practices, neuroplasticity does suggest that our conscious actions could reshape our attitudes, hopefully, leading to a slight shift in our stances toward greater empathy. So here are some of my personal practices of asking:

An active, non-judgemental stance

We are baiting for eye-liting, classic, or bizarre answers that can inspire our research. The most challenging. The helpful. The happiest. We refuse to lay the glances at people’s ordinary lives, just as we would never admit in an interview that we, too, are just like them—cramming onto the bus every morning on our way to work. Conversely, we idolize the one sitting in front of us undoubtedly, as though they could feed up our appetites to know.

After years of work and life talking to people(and also encountering silence or rageous exits many times), the lesson I learned is that letting people talk doesn’t require a splendid, miraculous question. It can sound simple, yet powerful:

“How was it usually like to {encounter certain problems/apply certain workflow/interact with certain organizations}? What did you do and how did you feel about it?”

Questions like ‘What did you do’ or ‘How do you feel’ are usually overlooked in a conversation. But in my experience, it is precisely these questions that take a pause amid wild thinking and have people chew on their lives.

They gesture an equal sense of care and attention to every detail and feeling of one’s life. Because we all tend to gloss over our experience without notice, unless receiving an explicit nudge to break our daily lives down.

Braid facts into yarns

Though empathy is proposed above, a common myth I fall into is fenceless patience and openness without a focus. Sweating and digging my toes silently, I was searching for a pause between every conversationist breath to slide my next questions in to keep up my agenda. Later, I found my interview notes full of scattered clues, which left me no choice but to follow up on more questions via email or phone.

An empathetic exploration does not necessarily spread around aimlessly; rather, like a rope, it twines and mixes emerging stories and clues together, braiding a rich yarn.

So if next time you realize you’ve been drawn into a conversation where the other person is roaming at a place you are unfamiliar with—

Take a deep breath. And prompt gently:

“I noticed we’ve taken some time on this story. From your perspective, how does it have you connected to our {research topic}?”

Consider researcher-participant relevant positions

The influence of language radiates to both sides, for both those who ask and those who answer. Questions draw boundaries to what can be included as relevant information; on the other hand, they limit researchers’ ways of seeing.

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in crisis counseling: the deeper I delve into the predicaments one’s in, the more intractable they seem, and the less room there appears to be to counsel or alter attitudes. Back in the researcher years, I encountered many conversations where participants and I both whirled in the loop of validating known information. I personally called this moment ‘When perspective caves in’.

Soon after, I wandered into a therapy approach known as narrative therapy, which is also widely used in participatory research and community work. Its core idea—“People are the experts in their own lives”—perfectly speaks that dialogue itself is like a role-playing drama, where the plot unfolds in many directions depending on what “hats” you have participants and yourself wear.

I would argue that empathy goes beyond care, curiosity, towards an awareness of your relevant place and posture in this world. The following reflexive practices helped me:

1. Explore the inner relation between participants, researchers, and research subjects

   “What role do I think my research participants play in this {research topic}? Problem solvers? Experts? Strugglers? Observers? Or a {blank}.”

   “What role do I think myself play in this {research topic}? Problem solvers? Experts? Strugglers? Observers? Or a {blank}.”

   “What does research subject pre-project onto researchers and participants?”

2. Reflect on actual questions that embody researches’ idea

   “How do my questions reflect my current ideas of participants’ role? How would my question change under different assumptions?”

   “How do my questions presuppose the knowledge, feelings, and roles of research participants within this {research topic} and the broader cultural/social context?”

Afterwords

There is an inherent power asymmetry between researchers and participants in traditional research practice: Researchers can take extensive hours to frame language and impose gaze, while participants are deprived of the chance to process, rest, reflect, challenge, and possibly deconstruct them. Questions are the tools by which this influence is transmitted in a dialogue.

Here I want to honor all those who, whether willingly or reluctantly, sit in a conversation with me—people whose unpretentious, unvarnished manner and words shook up my pride. Without them, I wouldn’t fully understand the influence of my questions. And how they either magnify, obscure, or distort what we see and how we see things, and, in turn, reconstruct us by reassembling our knowledge.