Students left the lab to do ethnographic studies
of individual Los Angelenos. Our deliverable
isn't news from 2010, or designed objects from
2010 – it's PEOPLE from 2010.
These are remarkably interesting personal studies,
but in the interest of the privacy of the very
real people involved, I won't say a word
about them.
I will say that, even though I myself wasn't doing
any of that work, I now understand daily life
and the everyday people of Los Angeles
vastly better than I did a month ago.
More to the point, once we get down to
the work of designing for 2010, students won't
be designing for some vague, inchoate
notion of 'future consumers' – they'll be
designing for real people they know well
who happen to be existing at a different time.
Once their IDs are filed off, these real people
we have studied become a prototype to help focus
design thinking. They're no longer entirely
real, but they do have constraints, limits, talents,
problems, daily challenges – keeping them
in our mind at all time gets us to useful grips
with the grain of the material, the resistances
to raw possibility and the unmet needs that
might trigger future change.
We call these prototyped future people
"personas."
