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A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

Authors:

Daniel G. Cabrero,

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus,

José Abdelnour-NoceraAuthors Info & Claims

AfriCHI '16: Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction

Pages 149 - 154

https://doi.org/10.1145/2998581.2998595

Published: 21 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people's own terms support the design of technologies by truly satisfying users' needs and drives. Examining the experiences of those working "out there", and our practises, we conclude persona is a vital designerly artefact to empowering people in representing themselves. A persona-based study on User-Created Persona in Namibia contrasts the current persona status-quo via an ongoing co-design effort with urban and rural non-designers. However we argue persona as a design device must ease its implicit colonial tendency to and impulses in depicting "the other". Instead we endorse serenity, mindfulness and local enabling in design at large and in the African context in particular.

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Hinze AYeo AParuru D(2024)Ethical Participatory Design: collaborative app development as indigenization of software engineeringProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops - Volume 210.1145/3661455.3671014(160-165)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024
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Index Terms

A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design
1. Human-centered computing

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AfriCHI '16: Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction

November 2016

279 pages

ISBN:9781450348300

DOI:10.1145/2998581

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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University of Pretoria: University of Pretoria
University of Cape Town
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 21 November 2016

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AfriCHI'16: African Conference for Human Computer Interaction

November 21 - 25, 2016

Nairobi, Kenya

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Cited By

Henriques APiedade PRocha FNeto INicolau H(2024)Ethical Concerns when Working with Mixed-Ability Groups of ChildrenProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675648(1-9)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675648
Hinze AYeo AParuru D(2024)Ethical Participatory Design: collaborative app development as indigenization of software engineeringProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops - Volume 210.1145/3661455.3671014(160-165)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661455.3671014
Jellema PTutenel PHeylighen A(2024)Rigorous and always from the heart: what personas did in the process of designing a youth care facilityCoDesign10.1080/15710882.2024.2427014(1-19)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2427014
Patil MCila NRedström JGiaccardi E(2024)In conversation with ghosts: towards a hauntological approach to decolonial design for/with AI practicesCoDesign10.1080/15710882.2024.2320269(1-22)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
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Veling LVilling R(2024)Assistive Robotics Needs for Older Care: Using Authentic Citations to Bridge the Gap between Understanding Older Persons’ Needs and Defining SolutionsInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-024-01118-016:4(775-790)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
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Adamu M(2023)No More “Solutionism” or “Saviourism” in Futuring African HCI: A ManyfestoACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/357181130:2(1-42)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2023
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Salminen JŞengün SSantos JJung SJansen B(2022)Can Unhappy Pictures Enhance the Effect of Personas? A User ExperimentACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/348587229:2(1-59)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2022
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