Personas are fictional archetypal consumers that aid designers and engineers in more effectively creating products with a human interface. As more products shift from strict utilitarian function to meeting additional physical and psychological needs, designers and engineers must implement emotional design in more domains. Learning to employ personas to explore elements of emotional design is beneficial in an academic course and capstone project as these personas allow students to consider engineering requirements from the perspective of Donald Norman’s three aspects of emotional design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. In this paper, we present an approach to evaluate the efficacy of using abbreviated personas, which are truncated personas containing typical user biographic information, goals, habits, or experiences. In our first experiment at Stanford University the students focused on the use of and outcome from the abbreviated personas and not the persona generation itself. The lessons learned from this experiment were then applied in a capstone course at the US Military Academy to better understand the full extent of implementation into engineering education.
The automotive design capstone originated in a mechanical engineering course focused on engineering engagement through story-telling and included three distinct presentation methods for abbreviated personas at a public exhibition. Over 250 participants interacted with the abbreviated personas and manipulated an analog display based on their understanding of each persona. From these participants, 82 provided written feedback and completed exit surveys on the presentation methods for the abbreviated personas. The data indicate that despite some differences between the presentation methods, all the abbreviated personas contained enough information for making design decisions based on user emotion and requirements. The second application of abbreviated personas builds on this notion and unifies the presentation method to focus on the inputs of the abbreviated personas throughout the design/build process in the capstone. Team member interviews and surveys will capture the data from this iteration.
Jonathan graduated from USMA in 2009 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. After serving in the 82nd Airborne Division as a Combat Engineer for several years he was selected to join the Special Forces. As a Green Beret, he has worked with several partner nations throughout Africa. Jonathan completed his MS in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2019 focusing on Dynamics and Manufacturing and is currently an Instructor in the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Department at USMA. Jonathan enjoys exploring national parks with his wife and children and traveling to francophone countries.
Barbara A. Karanian, Ph.D. , Lecturer, formerly visiting Professor, in the School of Engineering, in the Mechanical Engineering Design Group at Stanford University.
Barbara's research focuses on four areas: 1)grounding a blend of theories from social-cognitive psychology, engineering design, and art to show how cognition affects design; 2) changing the way people understand the emotion behind their work with the intent to do something new; 3) shifting norms of leaders involved in entrepreneurial-minded action; and 4) developing teaching methods with a storytelling focus in engineering and science education.
Founder of the Design Entrepreneuring Studio: Barbara helps teams generate creative environments. Companies that she has worked with renew their commitment to innovation. She also helps students answer these questions when she teaches some of these methods to engineering, design, business, medicine, and law students. Her courses use active storytelling and self-reflective observation as one form to help student and industry leaders traverse across the iterative stages of a project- from the early, inspirational stages to prototyping and then to delivery.
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