I thought I might start with the Nielsen entry on personas (personae?), as the concept in its application here is, for lack of a better word, bizarre. According to Nielsen, a persona is an entity that sits somewhere between a specific person and an archetype. Rather than a fully-rounded individual, the designer's interest in a given persona is confined to its application within a specific context. As a tool, it seems to be meant to engage designers in research and production by drawing and tethering their attention to user experiences. By relying on narrative theory, the persona and the scenario in which it is embedded add emotion and allow for some understanding or prediction without explicitly providing every piece of information. While not a fatally flawed concept, the derivation and uses suggested by Nielsen seem to represent exactly the sort of procedural shoddiness opposed by the other authors. Nielsen admits that it is not entirely clear how personas are derived, that is whether or not they should ideally be imagined or sourced from actual data. This seems a rather serious oversight, as products are (one would hope) intended to be used by actual individuals. Aside from planning for a worst-case scenario, I have a hard time imagining that users who are dreamed up by designers can be anything but a poor substitute for actual input from their real-life counterparts (which, in fairness, is one of several methods mentioned by Nielsen). When designing personas and scenarios based on specific design needs, however, it seems that it would be quite difficult to avoid being influenced by the very assumptions they are meant to sidestep.
With the FemTechNet manifesto and the Duarte piece in mind, the use of personas as a design tools seems quite problematic. While not strictly a procedural document, the FemTechNet manifesto's focus on critical literacy and the social/political implications of tech points us toward structural issues that Nielsen does not seem to account for. Throughout the piece, there is the awareness that the technologies in question can both support and oppose existing power relationships, which seems to suggest that design thinking must have some sort of complement when applied to a design problem. Shifting slightly, Duarte gives us an opening to such insight by proposing an intersectional feminist approach to the study of interfaces. As boundary objects, certain interfaces (labeled "prismatic") are especially useful in that they reveal underlying structural elements of various systems as they are encountered by raced and gendered groups. This epistemological complexity, embedded intersectional feminist discourse, both helps to illuminate some of the hidden factors influencing design problems, and offers human context that is based on lived experience rather than narrative conventions.
Though coinciding in many ways in terms of approach, I thought it interesting to close with Browne as a possible complication. Of particular interest is the data body referenced in the introduction: the collection of records, files, documents and other information that constitute a biography for a modern subject. In such a system, humans are broken down, their identities are abstracted from bodily existence, and they are reassembled elsewhere for some specific purpose or another. While Browne concentrates on oppositional or emancipatory uses of various surveillance systems, it is interesting to consider the digital (or physical) trail left by these and other critical gestures. What might be the result if a system such as that described by Nielsen is turned toward more equitable design as a goal with acts of resistance as its user data?
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