He’s Just Had Coffee

Something that came out of a couple of talks I’ve given recently about the use of scenarios in design…

Scott McCloud in “Understanding Comics” makes a claim that simple, iconic faces in comics (canonical example: Tin Tin) allow us to mentally “fall into” the character - to identify with the character and see ourselves in the story.

I spoke about scenarios as GBN uses them as a way to tell stories about the future, but also as John Carroll talks about them - as a way to represent user studies to developers and designers. The latter tend to be based on rich characters drawn using some variation on Cooper’s “personas“, the former tend to have no characters at all unless the plot needs them (a hero, perhaps).

I spoke at some length about how personas have to be sympathetic enough to arouse our empathy, but detailed and different enough to allow room to honour The Other - to prevent our view of the client or user simply collapsing into our own preferences and values.

One of the tutors asked why we need personas in some scenarios and not others and I realised, right there, on the spot…

It’s because you want to maintain a critical reflective distance from a user scenario so that you can maintain that relation to The Other of the user, but you want to fall into a future scenario so you can imagine from within that imaginary place in spacetime.

McCloud’s a freakin’ genius, lemme tell ya.

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