Research for Design: Developing Personas (Week 2)
This week we continued our work with climate change and flooding the help of a survey. Soham and I immediately put out a survey on Tuesday and began pushing it to communities we were a part of.
We had 30 responses by Tuesday and then I started messaging friends and family to take the 9-question survey.
By Sunday night we had 168 responses. Our goal was to get more of a snapshot of the attitudes and moods around flooding and climate change so we didn’t ask a lot of questions that placed respondents into strict demographics.
We did get some interesting data from the survey regardless. When asked if people would consider living further away from the coastline, 80 said yes, 67 said maybe, and 20 said no.
Similarly, when asked if they thought climate change was real we got 1 no and 2 maybes. The rest were all yeses.
With this survey, we were able to craft three personas.
The first is Mark, who is a student studying oceanography. He needs to live close to the coast for work but is also very ecologically aware of climate change. In making decisions to relocate he constantly weighs how much harm he’s doing to the planet.
The second is Beth, she’s a 55-year-old woman who lives in Nebraska. She loves where she lives and has seen flooding. She’d likely move if her own house flooded, and is aware of the coast of living near the coast, but is not necessarily looking to move anytime soon. Beth’s future goals include retirement and she’s concerned about the rising cost of home insurance and other expenses.
Then there’s Gary, who works as a barista. He believes in climate change but thinks the conversation needs more nuance. He is politically aware and engaged with the issues. He’s not directly affected by flooding but is aware that it can happen. He wishes that there was a political change that would focus on helping the impoverished people who need the most help in situations like this.
From there, we’ve begun to develop some possible interventions. While we are not sure exactly what we’ll be developing, some ideas include an RPG game where flooding is one of the main dangers and a marketing plan to convince anyone in repetitive loss properties to relocate.
