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Title: The Personification of Big Data
Abstract Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1761505
PAR ID:
10121534
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design
Volume:
1
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2220-4342
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4019 to 4028
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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