Personas: New Data, New Trends

Personas has evolved since Alan Cooper coined the term in 1999, moving into new domains, new ways of collecting data, and with novel ways of presenting the persona profiles. From the beginning, personas was linked to software design, expressing the need for empathy with end-users. This is still the case today, but we want to show how this is executed in different domains, not only in software, and how different forms of presentation relate to empathy. Thus, the persona course investigates the relationship between data collection, the representation of data as persona profiles, and empathy.