What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable – without them being too ridiculous.
Ben Bashford’s blog post entitled Emoticomp
It’s fascinating to think that personality could be the domain of a new type of designer that would understand psychology, interaction design, and could write with the skill of a novelist. It’s a strange intersection that this person would occupy.
In Bashford’s post, he suggests we start thinking about creating personas for the things we design.
Interaction designers are used to using personas (research based user archetypes) to describe the types of people that will use the thing they’re designing – their background, their needs and the like but I’m not sure if we’ve ever really explored the use of personas or character documentation to describe the product themselves. What does the object want? How does it feel about it? If it can sense its location and conditions how could that affect its behaviour? This kind of thing could be incredibly powerful and would allow us to develop principles for creating the finer details of the object’s behaviour.
That’s an idea I’ve been pondering for a while too, and discussed in my book. I call this design tool a Design Persona. Really fascinating to see other product designers moving in the same direction, and I’d love to see the idea evolve further.
We discovered in our design practice at MailChimp that the design persona was great for starting design concepts, but when it comes to formulating a detailed understanding of the voice of a product, we had to take things further. That’s why we created VoiceAndTone.com, a writing guide with emotion in mind.
Related posts
tagged: Design, emotional-design, interaction design
Good insight :) The concept and reality of a multi-dimensional designer is interesting. One person that is a master of multiple disciplines is a grand goal that I feel more and more people are moving towards. I believe this will become more common place in the future because for technology, science, culture and society to evolve, its people need to become ultra empathetic. Too become ultra empathetic, people need to truly be able to view reality from another person’s, or profession’s, perspective. Like when people start thinking like a programmer, designer, nano-technologist, electrical engineer, chemist, meta physician, geneticist and psychologist at the same time, then I think we will see a quantum leap in invention and innovation across the board. Think techlepathy and teleportation. (these two words are still not recognized by spell check, dreaming of the day the red snake squiggles disappear from underneath them)
The grand conjunction of disciplines is what it’s all about. People need to learn to hop from discipline to discipline learning about each. Perhaps when life spans are extended to beyond 200 or more years people will be able to learn more and apply all their knowledge. Hmm. Maybe technologies will be created to quicken the learning process so people will become masters of multiple disciplines with in a few days like when Neo from The Matrix speed learns by getting lessons downloaded super fast.
A New Type of Designer | Aarron Walter http://t.co/caLBo9hO via @aarron
After reading your book, we’ve started creating Design Personas (along with User Personas) for every project we do. They are just so darn invaluable in not only helping you understand what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for but also for maintaining consistency and continuity throughout the design process. Plus it’s great to be able to show clients the reasoning behind your decisions.
Wow, that’s great to hear, Grodon. So glad you’ve found design personas are helpful. Do you present them to clients or are they just used by your team?