Diagnosing melancholia
3.1 INTERVIEWS *Note: all interviewees permitted me record and use the interview material. Their names have been changed for privacy reasons. The filled out interview templates can be found in Appendix A (Part I) and the raw interview data can be found in the separately-bound Appendix A (Part II).
aimed to reach a small, but highly varied sample. I approached people knowing that I wanted to speak with a D.O.C. employee, business owner/managers, various visitors, someone of Mãori culture, a range of nationalities, and also a range of relationships to the Park and the Glacier. I managed to speak to almost every desired ‘demographic’, except one key figure in the village and a person of Mãori culture. I later reached out to two experts to address the gaps.
The primary method used to understand subjective experience is “unstructured, open-ended interviews”, as inspired by Lertzman (2015). This section describes the interviewee selection process, the interviewee profiles, how the interviews were conducted, content analysis approach, and the results, according to the elements of environmental melancholia and interviewees’ reflections.
I did not plan the snowball candidate selection process, but because Aoraki/Mt. Cook Village is a small, tight-knit community, each interviewee referred me to others. I also approached other visitors staying at Unwin Lodge. The Lodge had a homely atmosphere and attracted a range of people, including New Zealanders, groups, and solo travelers. They were happy to participate in longer-length interviews. I was surprised and pleased at how receptive visitors and locals were to speaking to me. Arranging interviews was a relatively fluid process. It might have been because of the relatable subject matter and possibly also because customer service is part of the culture the Park.
The interviews consisted of two clearly split parts, the first was a conversation to understand experience and the second involved the projective design alternatives. Only the first part of the interviews is addressed in this chapter and the second part is addressed in Section 5.1.
3.1.1 PROCESS Interviewee profiles Of the twelve people I spoke to in Aoraki/Mt. Cook Village, there were five visitors (a teacher, nurse, doctor, and a retired couple), three guides, a ranger from D.O.C., a business manager, a receptionist for a heli-guiding company, and a barista. They came from New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil and Mexico. The time individuals had spent in the Park ranged from a week-long visit to a working history that began in the 1980s. The ages stretched from mid-twenties to retirement. Their reasons for being in the Park were varied.
New Zealand I went to New Zealand in April of 2019. I had to go shortly after starting the project so that I could visit Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park before winter, while there were still many visitors and the landscape was free of snow. I began and ended in Christchurch, where the two professors, Heather Purdie and Jacky Bowring, supported me prior to conducting interviews and doing fieldwork. Heather Purdie knows the community in Aoraki/Mt. Cook Village. She recommended contacts, including the head ranger of the Department of Conservation, the manager of the boat tour company, amongst others. She also suggested where to host interviews and warned me of ‘interview fatigue’, because Haupapa/Tasman Glacier is such an extensively researched site.
Interview approach As described in the introduction, the interviews were unstructured and open-ended. They were sometimes spontaneous, if the person was available immediately and sometimes planned. Everyone I spoke with was willing to give the conversation as much time as necessary, so they lasted until the conversation naturally died out, between half and hour to an hour and a half.
Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park I stayed at Unwin Lodge (belonging to the New Zealand Alpine Club 2km south of Aoraki/Mt. Cook Village) in Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park for two weeks for fieldwork and data collection. I was there in autumn, at the tail end of the tourist season. The national park experience and accessibility of the glacier changes through out the year, so I relied on secondary sources to supplement my personal observations. I concluded that having such a short time in a tourist destination was not detrimental, because it is a place caters to short-term clients and spontaneity based on weather conditions.
With every interview, I explained that I was interested in understanding people’s connection to the glacier. I asked for a personal introduction and then I brought up the glacier casually and inquired into the person’s connection to it. Each interview was so different because, although I set the stage for a discussion about their relationship to the glacier and the Park, the interviewees described what was important to them and I would then inquire further into the topics they brought up. I feel that my openness and curiosity made for genuine conversations where interviewees said what they truly thought and felt. The interviews also lead to topics that I would not have considered alone. However, the lack of structure made content analysis difficult and it was not convenient for direct comparison on specific subjects.
Participant selection As introduced in the Section 1.4.2 (Methods), the intention of this study was to understand personal experiences in depth. This meant that I could not reach a large number in the limited time and achieve the necessary depth of conversation. I therefore 22
