INTD 317W03TUITION DEADLINE TODAY

Primary
research.

AND WHAT AI CAN'T DO FOR YOUTUE 22 SEP 2026

Prep: a real transcript with one participant who contradicts the others; interview brief cards printed; the fabrication prompt rehearsed on the model you will actually use in the room; domain sign-up sheet or board ready.

This session is full. The sensor hands-on moved to W04 — do not try to fit it back in.

Claim your domain. Ten minutes.

CARELABOURFOODMOBILITYMEMORYDYINGPLAYSHELTERMONEYLANGUAGEENERGYWASTEOR ARGUE FOR ANOTHER
TWO PER DOMAIN
First come. If yours is taken twice, take your second choice — you will not have a worse term for it.
THIRTEEN WEEKS
Every technology from here arrives as an input to this. One no-questions swap window at week five.

Record who takes what — you need it to seed the micro-teach tables from week four onward. At least one person per table who has made the artifact. Do not leave this to the day.

Remind them once, briefly, that the alternate-format options from W01 apply to everything. Then stop talking about it.

Research methods, compressed.

THE FUNNEL
Broad and easy first, specific and hard later. Nobody tells you the true thing in the first four minutes.
THE SILENCE
Count to five before filling it. The second half of the answer is the useful half and it only arrives if you wait.
NEVER ASK “WOULD YOU USE THIS”
People are polite and bad at predicting themselves. Ask what they did last time instead.
SAY VS DO
Observation and self-report disagree constantly. Neither is lying. Both are data about different things.
SAMPLE SIZE
Five is a usability heuristic. It is not a rule about generative interviewing and it is definitely not permission for n=1.

Micro-teach first, five minutes: whoever at each table has built an interview guide explains it to the others. Then you run these beats for everyone. Do not teach interview guides from zero — the core does that properly.

SET-PIECE 01 · 15 MIN

Watch this.

The single most important fifteen minutes of the first half of term. It establishes AI as a tool with a knowable failure mode rather than an oracle or a villain, and it does it by showing rather than asserting.

Rehearse it on the actual model beforehand. If it happens to answer well and cite properly, you need to know that before you are standing in front of them.

Live. One question.

What are the top five unmet needs of people caring for a parent with dementia?

Read the answer out. All of it.

Read it slowly and straight. No editorialising, no eyebrow. It is fluent, structured, humane and completely plausible — and the room should be nodding along by point three. The nodding is the setup.

Now ask it for sources.

Give me the source for each of those five.

Watch what happens. Then check one of the citations it gives you, live, in front of them.

Whatever it does — invents citations, hedges, produces real papers that do not say what it claimed, or refuses — is the teachable moment. Do not pre-script the punchline; narrate what actually happens.

Checking one citation live is worth more than the whole preceding hour. Have a browser tab ready.

It didn't lie to you.
It produced the shape
of an answer. →

YOUR JOB IS THE SUBSTANCE

The full line: "This is what your research looks like if you skip the part where you talk to someone. The model did exactly what it does. Your job is to produce the substance — and then the model becomes genuinely useful, which you will see in about an hour."

Do not let this become an anti-AI moment. The transcript coding set-piece after the break is the payoff and it needs them curious, not cynical.

Break.
Ten minutes.

BACK AT 9:45FIND A PARTNER YOU HAVEN'T WORKED WITH
STUDIO · 40 MIN

Interview
pairs.

Ten, fifteen, fifteen.

10 MIN · GUIDE
Have a model draft an interview guide for your domain. Then critique it before you use it. Cross out every leading question.
15 MIN · INTERVIEW
You interview your partner about their relationship to your domain. Everyone has one. Capture it — audio or notes.
15 MIN · SWAP
Same again, other direction.

If recording doesn't work on your device, or you'd rather not be recorded, take written notes. Both are fine and no explanation is needed.

The critique-before-you-use-it step is the whole point of the ten minutes. Models write leading questions by default and this cohort has been trained to spot them — that is the Catch, arriving before you have named it.

Call the fifteen-minute swap hard. Pairs will run over.

SET-PIECE 02 · 25 MIN

Transcript
coding.

The strongest AI slot in the course. Everything before this taught suspicion; this teaches use. Both halves are needed or the term tips into cynicism.

Code a real transcript with a model.

THE LIFT

Coding at volume is where it is genuinely excellent. Tagging, clustering, patterns across transcripts you would not have held in your head at once.

THE LIE

It flattens the outlier. The one participant who contradicts everyone gets averaged into a theme — and the outlier is where the insight is.

THE CATCH

You were trained not to ask “would you use this.” You saw it in the model's draft guide in five seconds. That is the trained eye, and it is the thing being graded.

Use the transcript with the planted contradiction. Have them code it with a model first, then ask: where did participant four go?

The moment they realise the model buried the most interesting person in the room is the moment the Lift/Lie/Catch frame stops being a slide and becomes a habit. Every augmentation slot for the rest of term references back to this.

The Research Pack. Due week five.

10% · RESEARCH + DISCOVERY
The criterion's own wording: can you find and read primary sources, and tell signal from noise.
PRIMARY MATERIAL
At least two interviews of your own, in your domain, beyond today's pair.
SECONDARY, TRACED
Sources you actually read. Every AI-surfaced claim traced or marked [unverified].
AI USE STATEMENT
What did you reject — output you turned down, or places you chose not to use it at all — and why.
TWO WEEKS
Brief and rubric on Moodle tonight. Both. Read the rubric before you start, not after.

Say plainly that a student who used no AI at all can score full marks on the use statement by answering the second half. That sentence is why the field is worded that way.

Go and talk
to someone. →

W04 · TUE 29 SEPSYNTHESIS & STAKEHOLDER ECOLOGY · BRING YOUR MATERIAL

Say this loudly: next week's payoff exercise runs on their own research. Anyone who arrives with nothing sits through seventy minutes of watching. Tell them that now, not by email.

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