A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people's own terms support the design of technologies by truly satisfying users' needs and drives. Examining the experiences of those working "out there", and our practises, we conclude persona is a vital designerly artefact to empowering people in representing themselves. A persona-based study on User-Created Persona in Namibia contrasts the current persona status-quo via an ongoing co-design effort with urban and rural non-designers. However we argue persona as a design device must ease its implicit colonial tendency to and impulses in depicting "the other". Instead we endorse serenity, mindfulness and local enabling in design at large and in the African context in particular

Reconceptualising Personas Across Cultures: Archetypes, Stereotypes & Collective Personas in Pastoral Namibia

The paucity of projects where persona is the research foci and a lack of consensus on this artefact keep many reticent about its purpose and value. Besides crafting personas is expected to differ across cultures, which contrasts the advancements in Western theory with studies and progress in other sites. We postulate User-Created Personas reveal specific characteristics of situated contexts by allowing laypeople to design persona artefacts in their own terms. Hence analysing four persona sessions with an ethnic group in pastoral Namibia –ovaHerero– brought up a set of fundamental questions around the persona artefact regarding stereotypes, archetypes, and collective persona representations: (1) to what extent user depictions are stereotypical or archetypal? If stereotypes prime (2) to what degree are current personas a useful method to represent end-users in technology design? And, (3) how can we ultimately read accounts not conforming to mainstream individual persona descriptions but to collectives

A value sensitive approach to communicate with users and designers in cross-cultural contexts

PhD ThesisCulture is embodied in many aspects of the identity of an individual. This makes it a critical component of understanding the design of technology for its intended users. Cross-Cultural Design has emerged as an approach to incorporate culture in the design of technology using off-the-shelf cultural studies. However, relatively little work has focused on how to approach culture and how to integrate cultural insights in the design of technologies. Additionally, the design space of this thesis, namely cultural values and how they impact the visibility of women in the digital media, is largely under-explored. The research presented in this thesis investigates how to develop value sensitive methods for conducting and communicating culturally specific research. This thesis presents an investigation on the visibility of Saudi women in the digital media using culturally specific methods. Following the Value Sensitive Design methodology in this context, this thesis describes: how I propose a bottom up approach to define culture, enabling value sensitive methods for user research that informs the design of technology; how I approach the integration of these cultural values in evaluating existing systems and develop an implicit value eliciting method; and how I adopt a Double Ethnography approach to develop effective methods for communicating culturally specific research to a multifunctional team of designers. In response to this context, I introduce two communication methods: Scenario Co-Creation Cards and Research Snippets, addressing these requirements. Scenario Co-Creating Cards are a novel value eliciting method which incorporate the cultural value of the users, while Research Snippets are a research communication method, which help designers to understand culturally specific research. In presenting the findings of a real-world deployment and evaluation of these two methods, this thesis contributes to current discourse in HCI on how to conceptualize cultural research to bridge the communication gap between user researchers and designers. This thesis is inspired by Vision 2030 (National Transformation Plan) in which women are supported to fully participate in all aspects of Saudi society. The past few years have witnessed ground-breaking reforms in Saudi Arabia to improve the rights and mobility of women. A major part of the reform was transforming the public sphere to be more accommodating to women, including their appointment to leadership positions. This thesis aims at understanding how to promote and support the visibility of women within their frames of cultural and individual values. We built this understanding from the voices of transnational Saudi women who have experienced a higher level of visibility. However, by improving our understanding of how to design across cultures, this work should contribute toward Vision 2030, helping to empower and support the visibility of all women across the entire nation.Saudi Cultural Mission through the national scholarship progra

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Computer Mediated Communication and the Connection between Virtual Utopias and Actual Realities

People have generally been very ambivalent about the potential future roles of new technologies (and the internet specifically) and their possible effects on human society. Indeed, there has been a tendency for polarization between attitudes or perceptions of naive enthusiasm and cynical resistance towards the use of computers and computer networks, and for such related concepts as ‘the information superhighway’ and ‘cyberspace’. The projection of such ambivalent perceptions into naively utopian (or even ironically dystopian) images and narratives might be seen as the latest and uniquely global permutation of a basic function of human culture - that is, to imagine ‘a better future’ or represent ‘an ideal past’. This paper will consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are\ud ‘connected’ to the actual individual and social realities of human participants. In other words, how important might it be to recognise a distinction between the use of virtual utopias (and utopian representations in any culture) as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and\ud as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other? Whether we live in a Panoptic or democratic Net ten years from now depends, in no small measure, on what you and I know and do now. Howard Rheingold, Afterword to The Virtual Community (1994, p. 310

Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson’s disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly

Moving Beyond the Virtual Museum : Engaging Visitors Emotionally

In this paper, we firstly critique the state of the art on Virtual Museums (VM) in an effort to expose the many opportunities available to enroll these spaces into transformative and engaging cultural experiences. We then outline our attempts to stretch beyond the usual VM in order to connect it to visitors in a measurably emotional, participatory, interactive and social fashion. We discuss the foundations for a conceptual framework for the creation of VMs, grounded in a user-centered design methodology and related design and evaluation guidelines. We then introduce two main cultural heritage sites, which are used as case studies at the core of our efforts, and conclude by describing the many challenges they bring for pushing the boundaries on the human-felt impact of the virtual museum