Years ago, when I was refocusing my career from the doing of design (and design strategy) to design research, I tried to design a protocol for interviewing my friends.

Part of my motivation was to give my friends the experience design research participant have being interviewed by researchers who are urgently interested in what they have to say. Often they don’t want it to end. They say it is better than therapy. Yet they’re just talking about mundane experiences. Being listened to closely by someone whose entire attention is focused on what you are saying is apparently rare.

So I invented what I thought was a set of fascinating questions. But it sucked. It made people more confused or anxious than inspired. I kept tweaking and tweaking. The more ordinary the questions got, the better the responses.

Eventually, after much experimenting, one question stood out. The interview never made it past this point. People would start talking, and then have an epiphany and try to answer in a new direction. They started playing and creating, and the responses were like a tour of their soul.

Some people told me that experience changed how they saw their lives and themselves.

The question is magic, and now I’m realizing I need to letterpress print it.

The interview is:

If you were writing
your autobiography,
what would be the
table of contents?

The key to the magic: the question invites a person to lay out their values architecture — to articulate the schema of what matters in their life.