(Photo: UnBeige)

Last night at the White Rabbit lounge in New York City, the School of Visual Arts' MFA in Interaction Design program hosted the second event in its "Dot Dot Dot" lecture series. Among the four speakers that addressed the standing-room-only crowd in ten-minute mini-lectures on this month's topic— "the interviewers"— was documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit. The director of Helvetica, Hustwit is now working to wrap up the production of Objectified, his hotly anticipated documentary about industrial design that will debut early next year. His decision to address the crowd without PowerPoint slides was indicative of his approach to interviewing or perhaps his lack thereof. "My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people," said the cheerful Hustwit. "I'm trying to get them to forget that they're being interviewed." He accomplishes this by avoiding the word "interview" in his communications with subjects and going into a meeting with a list of conversation topics, never a list of prepared questions.

"You're trying to capture the person on screen both saying something interesting and actually being interesting," said Hustwit of the challenges of capturing good talking head footage. He's found that his own facial expression makes all the difference; it directly affects the expression of his subject, even one who is speaking through a translator in a language he cannot understand. "I still have to act like I know what they're talking about," he added.

Hustwit left the crowd with a charming interaction-related anecdote that took place on Monday in SoHo, during a lunch break from filming some consumerism B-roll for Objectified. A young boy cautiously approached Hustwit's table and examined the camera tripod that he had propped beside him and that was about the same heigh as the boy. After examining the three-legged metal object for a while, the boy quietly posed a question to the tripod. "Are you a robot?" He asked. When there was no answer, Hustwit assured the boy that "Yes, he is a robot, but he's taking a nap."