Dr. Lene Nielsen outlines her approach to developing personas:
Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.
You can have a look at the entire article here, and see a larger version of her chart here.
Thank to Ian Lyons for the find.
In the West Wing episode “Constituency of One” the VP says to Will:
“I admire speech writers. They have to have the tendency to doubt and the capacity to believe in equal measure….”
and I can’t help but think that these are one of the base pairs in the DNA strands of planners.
I often have people ask if I need to 100% believe in the product I’m working on- or if cynicism feeds good work.
Yes and no.
You need to doubt that the problem put in front of you is the one that need solving, you need to doubt that you have enough insight into a group of people of which you are not part and whose behaviour and reactions you’ll need to understand. You need to doubt the ‘known knowns’.
You also need to believe- that what you’re doing can help keep businesses sustainable, can create great culture and good working environments inside of organizations and that the siren call of the manifestations of our entrepreneurial spirits will write the kind of future we’ll want our kids to live in. You need to believe in answers.
As for the balance between the two? All things in moderation- including moderation. Passion will out. Know what feeds yours.
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.
One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries.
The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
I was out with some friends the other night and we were having a chat about licensing – and I was being pretty vigorous about supporting copyright holders in their efforts to make sure they got paid.
My thought is basically this:
When it’s your IP that someone else is making money off, you’ll understand
from why i am not afraid to take your money, by amanda fucking palmer:
listen.
artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.
artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.
artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.
I can see a lot of the thinking that might well have been inspired by the presentation given by Matt Jones at Design by Fire 2009 called “we have all the time in the world” - but Bud has taken this seed, personalized it, brought it to life within the context of message creation and the potential of the ideas of how we experience ‘time’ to help craft more effective opportunities for calls to action.
Seriously- lovely work.
Filed under: Great Stuff
I’m a bit fond of innovation and I have quite a big crush on the MIT High-Low Tech group.
It seems they’ve tasked themselves to integrate high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures.
What I love about this aim is that they’re engaging diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies- paper architects, fashion and textile designers as well as the usual suspects. By situating computation/ technology/ agile deployment in new cultural and material contexts they’ve created a wonderful story that might just facilitate the democratisation of engineering.
The project demonstrates a belief that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices.
The goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end the group explores the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design. And they ask themselves bloody good questions.
Have a look at some of the projects (a complete list so far here):
- living wall: project site
- This project experiments with interactive wallpaper that can be programmed to monitor its environment, control lighting and sound, and generally serve as a beautiful and unobtrusive way to enrich environments with computation.
- teardrop: a kit for paper computing: project site
- What interfaces might we build if we could sketch functional systems directly on paper? What will circuits look like when they are painted or drawn instead of etched or machined? This project explores the creative and practical potentials of paper-based computing.
Spotted this on the great Kitsune Noir blog. It’s a design piece by Jessica Hisch.
I think you might use it like sending letters to Santa- fill it out and set it in fire.
Filed under: Great Stuff
The Perfect Gift for a Man – 30 Stories about Reinventing Manhood :
Well-known author of the book Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph:This is one hell of a book. Born out of a triple j week focusing on men’s lives, and created by its listeners, it’s a remarkable piece of work.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the current suicide rate for men in Australia is more than three times the rate of women. But research shows that encouraging men (and young men in particular) to share their feelings and their experiences has a huge impact on their health and wellbeing.
Please buy this wonderful book for the men in your life – regardless of whether they need it or not. Encourage them to read it and to share it with their mates, with their uncles, fathers and sons.
You can buy the printed book from Blurb.com or you can purchase the eBook version from The Perfect Gift for a Man website. ALL the profits from the book are being donated to The Inspire Foundation.
You can also find out more about the book and see the social media release here.
And dip you toes into some of the chapters here (make sure you have some tissues):
A freak stranglet from the Large Hadron Collider is interfering with many potentials incuding my ability to get my thoughts down in post form. Time is not my friend right now. Perhaps the future is merely being kind.
There are heaps of speaker notes in the presentation- loads of chewy thinking:
Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?
“People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.
Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt Jones explores what we might call neochronometry and illustrates some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material.”
Filed under: The Rules
Episode 4
- “Collaboration” just means you’re in charge but you want people to feel included in the process.
- Feel free to edit anyone’s contribution without their knowledge- particularly if you’re not presenting that particular piece of work.
- Remember: no discipline integrating with yours needs more than 5 minutes to explain itself or its role in your idea.
Filed under: passion
Missing!!! AUSTRALIA, originally uploaded by ihateyoubikethief.
I love a rant- especially one that starts a global movement.
Check out the global phenomenon of cheesed of bike (ex)owners :
Join us in our campaign against these criminal fools and send us your stories in any form – video, pictures, or just your own words – at ihateyoubikethief@gmail.com. We’ll post your story. And if you get really inspired, create your very own poster against these two-wheelin’ villains and send it our way.
Or…get your t-shirt at Threadess
Filed under: Experience
still the same when it’s called experiential…
Filed under: Get Activist
I’m riding my bike to work. Usually in a frock and heels. It’s great.
And I just wanted to share it- the great feeling of getting the wind in your face every morning, the comradery and casual chats with other cyclists at the lights, the ‘good on yous’ from people in my apartment complex…but most of all I’ve felt a big hug from pretty much all my co-workers, my friends and my family who have gone out of their way to make sure that I’m safe- that I have lights, that I wear a helmet, that I stick to the bike paths.
We’re all in it together.
Filed under: Experience
I’ve been ruminating on complex systems science and the small world theories of Duncan Watts for a while now since falling in love with their elegance and potential after watching the documentary How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer ( you can watch it here)
Here is my delicious file on network thinking: http://delicious.com/katiechatfield/network
What got me started? What did I fall in love with?
- the notion that everything is much more interconnected than we thought
- the idea of mapping the amount of nodes you need in a system before you achieve synchronicity
- like: how few mobile phones do you need in a football stadium before anyone can instantly pass a message to any other person?
- the democratisation of where trends start and how information flows
- the hierarchical top down notion of Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory strikes me as having very little rigour and a lovely fairytale of post facto rationalisation
- I’ve worked in industries that trade on the currency of cool…but I’m much more interested in the architecture of effectiveness
In 2006 Duncan co wrote a paper Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation:
A central idea in marketing and diffusion research is that influentials—a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers—are important to the formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influentials hypothesis,” using a series of computer simulations of interpersonal influence processes. Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires more careful specification and testing than it has received.
A key finding of the paper is:
Large-scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else but rather by easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.
Since writing this paper Watts has become a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. The presentation above show some of the Big Seed thinking he is developing there and my favourite (well apart from the notion of ‘mullet strategy’) is this juiciness:
- Bad news is that complexity of influence networks means we can’t predict either what will succeed, or who will make it succeed
- Good news is that we don’t need to….
…and so this this is how I get to my thinking around ‘curating resonant agents‘:
- A resonant agent is a stakeholder that is easily influenced to take action on your message
- Curating is partly Watt’s notion of “DIY Influentials’- promote those who promote you- but more active than merely recognising them and using them as part of your broadcast/ blogger outreach strategy.
- Curating is about creating experiences for resonance. It’s about Kurt Lewin’s wonderful equation:
- B=ƒ(P,E).
- Behavior is a function of the Person and his or her Environment
- It’s about the more you understand people, the better you can design environments that they can experience in order to deliver the impact on their behaviour you’re after.
Filed under: Experience
One of the greatest client obstacles I come across with transmedia planning is predictive modelling. Everyone wants to know exactly what they’re going to get for their investment. Before it happens.
We forget that every time we put out a message into the complex system of society- it’s an experiment.
No one seems to be aware that when we’re talking about numbers here, we’re essentially talking experimental rocket science…
Let me thrash out a metaphor. The word quantum is Latin for “how great” or “how much:
Quantum mechanics helps describe potential: the state of a system at a given time is described by a complex wave function. This abstract mathematical object allows for the calculation of probabilities. For example, it allows one to compute the probability of finding an electron in a particular region around the nucleus at a particular time.*
The deal with quantum mechanics is that observation collapses the waves of probability (essentially a description of all of the potential outcomes) into a single reality. So you don’t know where some thing might be until you look at it. Then you definitely know (but you’ve probably affected it’s position by looking at it.)
Right- so how does this relate to predictive modelling?
- Unless your clients can deal with this:
they probably won’t be able to understand how people might respond to:- (SM+ UCG+ CRM+ CSR+ ATL +WOM…)
- and we probably won’t know how to model it either
Let’s look at this differently:
- What if we don’t try to accumulate numbers, what if we try to curate them instead?
- What if we tried to find out where the energy is in the system between a brand and it’s stakeholders?
- What if we tried to find out the most resonant agents in that system?
- What if we tried to find out how few people we could talk to to get the effect we were after?
- What if we tried to find the people that counted? (and not just count the people?)
Ultimately, media+messaging really isn’t about what gets served…it’s about what serves you.
* Yes I know QM is about subatomic particles. It’s a metaphor.
