Using Personas as Curricular Design Tools: Engaging the Boundaries of Engineering Culture

This innovative practice paper introduces the use of personas as a design technique to guide the large-scale curriculum reform of an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at [University X], a large Mid-Atlantic research-intensive institution. The team has created five personas to explore the potential breadth of the curriculum and expand the faculty perspective on who could be a successful ECE student in the department. The concept of personas originated in the field of human-computer interaction to represent subsets of potential users as abstracted sets of characteristics. Drawing from qualitative data including observations of team meetings and document analysis, this work describes the ethnographic inquiry designers used to develop profiles not solely based on their biases. Responses to personas during implementation show that they can be used to engage the boundaries of culture, bringing to light not only characteristics of students who are not typically present in the program, but also faculty members' assumption about characteristics needed for success.