Since I designed the persona core poster some years ago, a lot of people from all over the world have downloaded the poster and are using it to create personas. This is by far the most downloaded file on my blog. Just got the question to have this also in an spanish version. Here it is with the help of Carolina Flores-Hine.
If you are using the poster in workshops I would be happy to receive some pictures. Must be awesome to see all the personas from all over the world.
Please drop a mail to christof [at] creative-companion.com
Can folk music be a model for setting up a co-creation culture?
In his book We-think: The power of mass creativity the author Charles Leadbeater is talking about a relation of co-creation and the habit of folk music that people borrow musical structures from a shared tradition and taking ideas from a shared pool of multipliers without concern for ownership. A climate of sharing and giving leads to mass innovation often with an individual touch and not mass production.
With this in mind it is interesting to watch the development of the new Global Jukebox project, a tremendous collection of field recordings, of Alan Lomax. The folklorist’s archive of 17.000 field recordings will begin to stream for free very soon, including music from Britain, Ireland, the US, the Caribbean and the former USSR.
Global Jukebox - Alan Lomax
Although Lomax’s name is not as well known as some of the musicians he helped discover, e.g. Woody Guthrie, his work continues to have an enormous influence. For example the soundtrack of the film O Brother, where art thou? is using samples from Lomax. He introduced Pete Seeger to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, recorded Vera Hall’s Trouble So Hard (made famous by Moby), and his recordings will even be featured on Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming album, Wrecking Ball.
Besides the popularity to use this material for other musical inspiration it is also interesting to get more information on the system and categorization of the material. Lomax is talking about ‘cantometrics’, the term refers to a system for the measurement of singing style, like blue notes and sounds of animals. The system was also applicable for pop music and he also developed ‘choreometrics’ for dancing and ‘parlametrics’ for speech.
The principles of ‘cantometrics’ are used in the Music Genome Project of Pandora.com a new automated music recommendation service comparable to last.fm and spotify.com
This year I did one of my biggest projects on how to compile and communicate user insights from consumer research together with quantitative research on women. It was a challenging project with international, interdisciplinary teams and one goal: to bring it all together – aspirational personas (the brand point of view) and reality personas (based on quantitative and qualitative research).
To communicatie this inside the company to have a better understanding “for whom we work” there were 100 copies shared internally at my client Veldhoven Group with the brands Sandwich, Stills, Turnover and NoNo. I facilitated all the workshops (including the seasonal briefings), did consulting on personas and the overall design of the persona posters, the female mindstyle posters and this little booklet including tips and tricks why and how to use it. Here a short impression of the work (iPhone video).
User centered design, service design and persona thinking is thinking of our time and getting more popular. A current example is now in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Netherlands), here a short description from their website:
The fourth and final part of the exhbition programme Play Van Abbe is called The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker). The exhibition presents a selection of important works from the museum’s collection together with several special guest artists. You are invited to play a role whilst visiting the museum; the roles are the pilgrim, the tourist, the flaneur and the worker. The pilgrim is focused on the object of art; the tourist on stories; the flaneur on time and the overall museum experience. Finally, the workers are the roles that seek an active confrontation with art and produces new ideas for themselves and others. You can change roles during your visit and experience how artworks appear different.
So if you want to experience persona thinking in a museum context you can do this until august 2011 in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (see the website)
If you want more inspiration in how personas work in business and design, how you can make and use personas for your company or project you can do a one day workshop to start with. At the moment I am organizing two dutch workshops in Den Bosch (Steedelijk museum) and Amstelveen (Cobra museum). This workshop can also be done as an in-house workshop in english, german or dutch.
Please note: this is my original blog from the year 2011.
I have developed more human-centred templates and a fresh approach called Music Thinking. You will also find the book The Power of Music Thinking with the explanation of aspirational Persona vs Reality Persona and Target Group vs Quick Profile.
Download The Persona Core Poster
Because the Persona Core poster was downloaded more than 100.000 times on this blog, I also have included it on the NEW Persona-Workshop.com website, full of information.
For years I am working with personas from aspirational to reality.
Most of the time, I follow the same basic questions and approaches while developing the personas.
Finally, I found time to design a poster that you can use in workshops and I hope you like it. I post the A3 template here as a PDF under the creative commons licence, this means you can print it, use it and even change it, just name the source. Tip: start with behaviour and end with the quote!
If you like it drop me a note and share it with your friends or client.
On a regular basis, I am also conducting workshops in the Netherlands or Germany.
CREATIVE COMPANION
CREATIVE COMPANION for online brand strategy, creative direction and design thinking
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Music Thinking
Music Thinking is an innovative approach to transforming business, society and self.
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Persona-Workshop
We offer persona Knowledge, Skills & Facilitation on three levels: Awareness masterclass (2 hours), Hands-on work session (2 days), Long term programme (some month).
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A diverging and converging blog by Christof Zürn 