Grazie a un amico la settimana scorsa ho ritrovato un testo che ho scritto 13 anni fa come piccolo contributo a “The Methods Lab”, uno dei volumi che hanno raccolto il lavoro svolto dal DARC assieme a molti partner internazionali nel progetto Presence.

A Presence sono seguiti molti altri lavori interessanti, ma quei tre anni sono stati il miglior inizio che si potesse desiderare.

User screenplays
Storyboards and user profiles can help designers through the use of a “filmic” point of view: what will my character do now? and how, and why? Defining a sequence of actions
requires clarification of each single step, according to the needs and personality of an imaginary user. The user profile isn’t built just on statistic/objective data: since it’s not a description of a normotype, it requires the transposition of personal judgement and experience about people’s habits and attitudes.
Seeing things as a child does help in finding new solutions: playing with concepts, merging them or splitting them in small parts, considering a single aspect of a problem as if it could be isolated from the whole thing, looking at things as if their use were mysterious – just trying not to have rules, to define new ones.