Personas and Scenarios

Had a session this morning on Personas and Scenarios.

Persona: An imaginable or fictional description of a character created to represent different user types – a character in a story

Scenario: A description of an everyday situation (an event or action ie something that happens)

So, we were to come up with 3 personas and start on a scenario with a view to storyboarding the scenario in the future.

This method I think will be good for my project. It’s narrative based (which is relevant), I’ve got experience in storyboarding and panel based narratives (comics) and I did something quite similar (with Lego) for the People and Design module to illustrate the journey and user experience of the ‘Food Bus’ project.

I’m using my new characters (monikered ‘Bods’, as they look a bit like the TV character ‘Bod’) to illustrate these scenarios and personas but I could just as easily use Legos and photograph them. I’ll see what seems to work best. The ‘Bods’ seem to fit this project now so i’ll probably stick with them.

Stay tuned for further developments in the scenarios and personas story…

Super Doodles

Monday afternoon… exhausted from presenting and watching presentations we were given an ‘easy’ little exercise to do.

A sheet of ‘white board’ plastic, a dry marker and a ‘Masters Project’… now doodle it, represent it in pictures… as succinctly as possible!

Mine are documented here, along side an image of my workspace, which is currently pretty uninspiring… but i’ll work on that.

My first shot at the ‘doodle’ was standard for me… and maybe a little too retro in terms of the ‘Space Invader’ as game iconography. But I was also concerned by the fact that the classic games of the 80’s are not examples of games based learning environments either.

I decided to bring more of the classroom environment into the illustration and adopted Nintendo style iconography…

I’ll work on some more iterations… I have ideas… but apart from anything else, I’m quite pleased with my new characters… I just hope I haven’t subconsciously stolen them from somewhere, so let me know if you’ve seen them somewhere before  : )

Project Presentation

Indirectly related to ‘presentations’ and ‘projects’, I recently produced a photo book using iPhoto which is the free photo library and editing software that comes on the Mac. It documents SuperFly in pictures (and a few words) from mid 2009 when I started organising the first show through to November 2010 when myself and two friends created a city wide QR game in Dundee for the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

I’m currently working on my version of the ‘knowledge swatch’ idea… but I think this book idea is a nice way to present a finished project in pictures and my preferred, tactile alternative, to a laptop to present projects and photos…

I’ve blogged some words and pictures about the book on my SuperFly Blog

Rule of three…

We had a great session this morning on presenting and presentations.

Given that we did a presentation yesterday I think our minds were widely open to suggestions.. more so than if we’d had this talk last week.

One of the points raised was ‘Rule of Three’; something I was aware of in storytelling (the hero always succeeds after the third fail…) but didn’t connect to my presentations…

Wikipedia has a great page that lists several ‘Rules of Three’ but in particular check out the ‘writing‘ one.

I’ve always been a bit wary of ‘rules’… the designers and musicians that I gravitated towards were openly ‘untrained’ and talked about being ‘free of rules’ because they didn’t know what they were.
While it clearly worked for them… I think I may have been lazy.

What resonates with me now is a quote I heard a while back…
I tried Googling it and I can’t find the originator, so what I heard may be paraphrased, but here goes,

” You can leave anything out, so long as you know what it is.”

Learning the rules is empowering, because when you break them (and you should…) at least you have an idea why..!

Over the last few years a great source of inspiration for me in terms of learning about presenting and styles of presentation has been the TED website. The first one I ever saw (JJ Abrams) is a permanently fixture on my about page; Sir Ken Robinson’s first TED talk (which I first saw sometime in 2009) was hugely influential in me considering a return to full time education… which is where I am now.

For an insight into TED and why presentations can be so profoundly influential to us, I’d strongly recommend this new interview with curator Chris Anderson on Charlie Rose.

Finally, Mike Press, who was leading the session this morning gave us an example of a great presentation (in contrast, he had a mock-up on screen of what it ‘may’ have looked like as a dull list of college lecturer bullet points…), Barak Obama’s victory speech. It’s freely available on YouTube… search it out.
However, I leave you with an alternative version, created by Adam Buxton of ‘Adam and Joe’ – I think you’ll be impressed by his use of Obama and the ‘rule of three’… “In. Your. Face. Sarah Failin!”

🙂