Bettina Hauge

Almost like being there; the Power of Personas when designing for foreign Cultures

Abstract Much research on personas focuses on how to develop and use personas, less on the validation and concrete value of them in the development of products for cultures far away from the actual design site. This article illustrates how such a validation was accomplished through producing a film and it provides an in-depth case description of how personas were developed and used. When designing a waste management system for soft plastic for a small village in India, personas were developed and applied by the designer to maintain a user-oriented focus throughout the participatory design process. During a three-month stay in the village, personas based on real people and the villagers’ everyday life and practices were developed by getting to know people and their ways of life through the use of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, workshops and a film). The personas created a substantial understanding of the users’ individual needs, interests, values and emotions and helped to overcome the physical and cultural distance, enabling a strongly contextualised design.

Lives under the Sun

ABSTRACT This article describes peoples sensations of daylight and their practical, daily engagements with the sun and daylight. Based on a qualitative research project in Denmark, the article shows how some Danes experience the world through the sun and its daylight and illustrates its significance to their bodies and lives as they describe it. Taking a biomimetic approach, I present a metaphor that, like plants, some people crave daylight in order to feel well. By showing peoples engagement with the sun and its daylight the phenomenon of natural light becomes imbued with sociality and I show how people design their daily life in accordance with the sun. The sensation of daylight normally taken for granted and acknowledged as a physiological element in our being-in-the-world is foregrounded and shown as a sense in people that may have a physiological origin when daylight hits the eye, but whose impact on people and their lives may best be investigated psychologically and socially, as when studying how daylight sensation is practiced by people and how it entangles and intertwines with their everyday lives.

Re-designing the everyday: The use and perception of time among cancer patients combining work and treatment:

This article describes how time was used dynamically by a group of people at risk of losing their lives. It is shown how these people appeared to experience a change in the relationship between inner and outer time and that time literally was felt in this situation. An empirical investigation of 16 cancer patients performing their jobs while going through demanding treatment programs found time as their main motive for working while being seriously ill. Actions at work point to a time ahead, so by taking part in the time at the workplace they were inscribed in a future presently under pressure by their cancer diagnosis. The article describes how cancer-struck women and men perceived time in their different life-worlds, at work, at home on temporary sick leave, and at the hospital, and it shows how these perceptions changed during the process of recovery. To these people, time appeared in three forms: a time beyond control, realizing that they had cancer; taking control of time, discovering that they could go to work; the time of the future, which was their new perception of time as cured. This new perception of time reflected the incidental discovery of the cancer, realizing life as coincidental. Having their life time threatened made them feel vulnerable and liminal (neither sick nor well, but on the way to recovery). This vulnerability can be seen as the result of a breakdown of our taken-for-granted space–time world. For these people, going to work seemed to reduce the unbearable waiting time towards recovery by re-establishing links to a well-known life-world, the workplace.