Object Personas — MDes Seminar III, Fall ‘18

This project was completed in association with Advanced Interaction and Service Design Concepts at Carnegie Mellon University.

In pursuit of my master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University, I’m exploring the ways in which designers might leverage the smart home paradigm to provide environmental feedback and support ecological consciousness. As part of this investigation, I developed the following activity in order to generate possible scenarios for future interactions between user and device. The hope was that participants would be challenged to imagine human-object dynamics that currently don’t exist within the IoT paradigm. What would it be like if our smart home devices challenged us? Provoked us? Judged us?

Theory

Through our readings and in-class discussion, I was introduced to the Actor-Network Theory. Inspired by the level of agency afforded to objects in this type of approach, I wanted to further explore the ways in which devices and humans might mutually shape one another. This led me to the work of Elisa Giaccardi (TU Delft) and Iohanna Nicenboim in what they call Thing-Centered Design — an approach which aims to “involve non-human actors in the design process as co-ethnographers and co-designers.” Instead of viewing devices as mere tools at the disposal of human users, this methodology acknowledges the influence objects have on the people who interact with them and aims to surface these potential personalities, quirks, and ‘agendas’ to more proactively contemplate their effects.

A selection of cards from the futuring deck

Process

In the early iterations of this activity, I provided participants with the deck of futuring cards and asked them to produce a combination that they found interesting (for either positive or negative reasons.) From there, I asked them to create a representation of a “day in the life” of the object they’d imagined. However, I found that participants struggled to find a conceptual “footing” with the tasks; they lacked a clear mental image of the device and therefore found it difficult to render, often backtracking as their stories unfolded.

Early iterations included “a day in the life” storyboarding

As a result of these observations and follow-up discussions with participants, I determined that the activity lacked sufficient structure and would need to be bolstered for best results. So to move forward, I created a more in-depth persona worksheet for participants to use as a tool for sorting out the characteristics of their imagined device, drawing from some of the parameters commonly outlined in UX personas for human subjects.

Object persona worksheet

Activity

To begin the activity, each participant was asked to select a series of cards (one from each of three card types labeled with numbers 1, 2, and 3) in order to produce a future scenario upon which the rest of the activity would build. From there, some participants moved straight into building a 3-dimensional representation of their device, while others chose to complete the Goals, Values, and Personality sections, saving the physical modeling for last. (This was left intentionally open to accomodate different thought processes and preferences.) To complete the Form section of the worksheet, participants were given a kit of abstract geometric shapes in a range of materials to work with. The intent in using this kit (originally created for a previous project) was to constrain the number of parameters each participant needed to consider, encouraging them to assign meaning to shape and materiality.

3D modeling kit

Example of a completed object persona worksheet

After completing the worksheet, I asked each participant to explain the 3-dimensional object they’d created, an approach I believed would encourage them to speak to the device’s most dominant qualities. In addition to revealing the traits a participant found most critical to “knowing” the object, this discussion revealed additional qualities including an object’s motion (if any) and the functionality of specific components. Ultimately, the persona worksheet acted as a framework in which participants were able to more clearly process and then articulate the characteristics ascribed to their imaginary objects — a marked improvement over the overwhelming possibilities presented by the wide-open initial prompt.

Observations (Content)

The patterns that emerged in the physical forms across different participants were striking.

1. “Positive” future scenarios evoked images of amenable, anthropomorphized devices while “negative” ones were less familiar, less predictable, and more strong-willed.
2. Stability (or lack thereof) was a dominant theme throughout the forms, indicating that this is a critical attribute to consider when designing a device and could be added to persona worksheet.
3. Material choice allowed participants to further articulate qualities not otherwise represented in the persona worksheet (e.g. choosing the rubber connectors implied flexibility and selecting soft materials conveyed that one participant’s device was “huggable.”)

From this activity I hope to draw out key principles (such as the effect of perceived stability observed above) to keep in mind when designing potential smart devices by digging into the reasoning behind the positive and negative associations participants had with particular qualities. For example, the implied notions of familiarity — and therefore predictability — that seem to underlie the desire for anthopomorphic shapes provide extremely valuable insight into the ways in which we relate to objects.

Devices from a “desirable” future were distinctly anthropomorphic, exhibiting friendly and predictable characteristics.

Devices from an “undesirable” future exhibited erratic and uncontrollable qualities.

Reflection and Next Steps

For me, the value of this activity was twofold: first, in going through various iterations of the activity format, I gained further experience in striking a balance between structure and freedom when devising research methods (I personally think that navigating this tension is one of the most challenging aspects of design research,) and second, I was able to identify some emerging patterns as to the emotional effect of object personalities. However, I feel that there is yet untapped potential in this activity and as such, I intend to develop an additional step to carry forward the object personas created (e.g. asking participants to tell a story about their device or place it in a fictional dialogue with a person) to further probe the imagined user-device dynamic. I also plan to create a more specific prompt to better fit the parameters of my own thesis investigation. At this stage, I wanted to keep guidance to a minimum, slowly honing in on the appropriate amount of structure to support participants’ creativity while avoiding undue influence on the results, but moving forward I think it would be beneficial to narrow the overall context.

For any other designers looking to adopt a similar method, I would recommend the following considerations:

1. Participants may need a bit of additional context up front, depending on their level of comfort executing open-ended creative tasks. In instances where more structure was needed, I found it useful to suggest that participants start by assembling a scenario they would consider “positive” or “negative” in some way.
2. The persona worksheet is most effective (in my expereince) as a foundation for further discussion because the implications of a participant’s representation are so multi-layered. By asking them to “introduce” their device and expand upon written responses, it’s easier to dig deeper, exposing each individual’s core (and often unconscious) values.