Persona #3— Designer

Blane Malczewski

Blane is 35 years old and a lead electrical engineer specializing in lighting and energy efficiency. He works at a top architectural firm located in downtown San Francisco. The firm is a funding partner of the Center for the Built Environment and is interested in learning about the success of its latest projects. Blane is currently working on restoring the interior of the Asian Art Museum, and plans to measure the efficacy of his choice of indirect florescent lighting by surveying the occupants before and after the restoration. Blane uses Excel for most of his analyses and is not a statistics expert.

On his way home from work, Blane will often drive his Aprilla scooter a bit out of the way to stop off at the Orbit Room, where he'll usually order a dry Sapphire martini, and chat with the bartender for an hour or two. On these nights, Blane will return to his SOMA loft around 10:30pm, relax on his black leather couch and eat some take-out sushi while watching one of the movies in his vast DVD collection. Most winter weekends, Blane and his girlfriend Bethany will drive to Tahoe in his BMW z3 to snowboard and relax in the cabin he shares with friends. Other times of the year, a drive up the coast to Mendocino or down to Santa Barbara are the trips of choice, and he most enjoys discovering small wineries and introducing them to his friends and colleagues.

Blane's Goals:

• Support his recommendations to his client with quantitative data.
• Learn from and improve his practices.
• Not spend too much time on non-design work.

Scenario: Blane supports his design decision

Blane is attending a meeting with the owners of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco to discuss his choice of indirect florescent lighting for the museum restoration. He will be making a presentation and needs charts that support his decision.

Steps:

1. He adds three surveys to the view, one for each of the three buildings for which he has designed similar lighting installations over the past few years.
2. He adds a lighting satisfaction question to the row, so that he may compare how the respondents differed across each project.
3. The questions are automatically broken out by response, but he interested in seeing the data in one chart, so he chooses "Hide row responses" from the Options menu. He now sees three charts, one for each survey.
4. He notices that the lighting satisfaction levels are markedly lower for the survey involving the building he designed two years ago. He remembers that this survey took place during the 2001 California energy crisis. He highlights that survey and chooses "Clear" from the menu because he does not want to include this skewed information in his presentation.
5. He selects and exports the images and saves them to disk.
6. He places the saved images and data into his PowerPoint presentations directed at his clients.