One-step closer to final Goal Trees

It’s starting to come together. Developing agents is difficult. I’m creating agent goals from imagined narratives, only to discard everything just to include goals. Naturally, a legitimate analysis would involve actual interviews with stakeholders.

SCP’s decision support topics are relevant in my communication design interests, and I’m already aware of the need and practice of interviewing stakeholders. I’m also familiar with the continual user research performed by designers, where innovation and concept generation is the greater concern than measures of stakeholders opinions. You might recall a classic quote from our generation’s most notable innovator, Steve Jobs:

“…in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” As quoted in BusinessWeek (25 May 1998) [Wikipedia]

With that in mind, I feel my output is valid at least to the extent I familiarize myself with my own bias, context, and opinions. What I don’t know yet is, Where to draw the line between Personas [1] and interviews with actual agents? Outside of actual professional practice, is there a theoretical line? I look forward to answering this question for myself as the course continues.

“We Brain Storm”

This leads me to recall something Prof. de Haan said in the Week 2 Webinar, “It’s endlessly trying”, “We brain storm” (~24:20). This is exactly what I’m discovering in the process of working through these assignment.

Listening to the week three video, ‘Causal Diagram’ I was struck by something T.A. Elianne said,

“Now you have your causal diagram, do one more thing. List the alternatives your actor wanted to implement. You know, the ones they have so much discussion about!” (09:08)

I wasn’t thinking of my actor’s goals (especially the one’s on the peripheral) as goals ‘to be implemented’–they’re just background noise for me right now. For example, my Actor Table included one or two customer personas simply because I felt to exclude customers was to ignore the principal framework of the business context–no customers, no business. I’m going to have to think more carefully about whether these goals are relevant to the problem context I wish to pursue. In other words customers are part of business, but do they contribute to the feedback dilemma which is the focus of my complex problem?

Job Seeker

Small Business Operator

Corporate Human Resources

Working…

Customer

Current Employee

Working…

Competitor

Working…

Government Organization

Working…

Commercial Third Party

Working…

Footnotes

[1]: Personas: “marketing persona represents a group of customers”, “fictitious characters in order to help solve design questions.” [Wikipedia]

Goal Tree Notes:
[1]: WFTO Certification [Wikipedia]

[2]: 1933 Buy American Act (U.S. Government purchases) [Wikipedia]

[3]: Carbon Credit [Wikipedia], Kyoto Protocol (1997) [Wikipedia]

[4]: Certified Organic [Wikipedia]

[5]: Benefit Corporation [Wikipedia] and B-Corp Certification [Wikipedia]