Personas are like Elwood P. Dowd's imaginary friend Harvey - they exist only in the designer's head. Oh man, what a movie!
Elio
Elio Caccavale | Reader in Transdisciplinary Design Innovation | The Innovation School | The Glasgow School of Art | t: 0141 353 4719 | m: 07976 9535 63 | e: [log in to unmask] | radar.gsa.ac.uk/profile/554
On 23/05/2021, 22:09, "PhD-Design on behalf of Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Carma and Lubomir,
The use of students for many experiments always amuses me. We have extensive demographic data on college and university students, including the information on students populations at specific colleges and universities. By comparing data sets against author affiliations, it should be possible to state that any specific article attempts to make general claims about human beings from a specific population of students with these characteristics (family income, socioeconomic background, gender, etc.)
If anyone were willing to crunch the numbers, different kinds of data comparison would permit us to make broader statements about a large number of articles in any field or journal.
The use of student populations for psychology experiments reminds me of a story about Mulla Nasrudin from Idries Shah:
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground.
“What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked.
“My key,” said the Mulla.
So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked:
“Where exactly did you drop it?”
“In my own house.”
“Then why are you looking here?”
“There is more light here than inside my house.”
(Shah 1983: 9)
Design research has a similar problem that is worse.
Many designers invent personas, testing products or processes on personas whose responses they simply imagine. These designers don’t even bother to use a classroom with several dozen real and different people. Even though students are a narrow and limited sample, they are real people. A persona is not a real person.
Every persona is simply an imagined reflection of the designer who created the persona. Many design research presentations, papers, and articles don’t involve responses from real people — not even a narrow subset of the larger population of real people. Instead, they involve imagined responses of the designer or design team that creates a product and tests it in their own mental world.
This is even more puzzling than Western social science.
Yours,
Ken
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Reference
Shah, Idries. 1983. The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. London: Octagon Press.
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Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.journals.elsevier.com%2Fshe-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation%2F&data=04%7C01%7Ce.caccavale%40GSA.AC.UK%7Caaaad4c865c64901f5a408d91e2f05c2%7C67f9795821514513bd2170cde632768b%7C0%7C0%7C637574009584123603%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=hrPIrVDxfoAVAmMyBNUxYuD1QppxNtNb%2BVHph27ZOdc%3D&reserved=0
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