Another class exercise that I completed in my Visualization class was “ideation” – where we would work on some kind of document to apply later in our work. For instance, one of the things I worked on was the development of personas. These are basic, one page documents that outline a character that you could use in future work when you need to tailor something to a particular character. So, if I had to develop some kind of visualization in the future about a affordability in the Durham Region, I could ground the work in an existing persona to humanize the research and the story behind the output.

For our group assignment, we used the persona of our group member, Jun, because we were specifically focusing on international students, for which I did not yet have a persona created. But now that it has been, I can keep it for the future.

The biggest hurdle that I had with creating these personas was fictionalizing enough of it that I am not straight up writing about people that I know. The temptation is there to describe someone from my life. But these should be fictional, so some traits/characteristics have been altered so that no one person has been directly represented in these sheets.

I am sharing four personas that I now have for future work.