An avatar, in this case, is a projection of someone’s own identity or their experimentation with a new identity. We see them online in places like Second Life, where they take the shape of a 3d character, and on messageboards where each user has their own small icon. It turns out, these digital representations might reveal some useful information about their creators.

I sat in on a presentation a couple weeks ago titled Avatar-Based Design Research. An advisor for our Samsung sponsored design studio was making the case that Avatars can express someone’s authentic, or maybe desired self. This could make them useful in discovering the invisibles about a person- specifically what they desire, how they see themselves, or how they wish they were. When people create avatars, they do so without limitations in place for how they present themselves. In online virtual worlds like Second Life, users can assume a much wider variety of personalities and materiality with their avatars than is possible in their real lives, and with less of the risk typically associated with being different, or expressing yourself.

It sounded interesting to me, and even though we didn’t use this method for our project (we did a lot of other good stuff) we talked about it enough to work out roughly how we would have done it. We would have tried to recruit around 10 people. Ideally, half would already have an online avatar, and half wouldn’t. The participants would create their own avatar with an online tool like Meez. We decided that it was probably best to conduct an interview and user survey before asking the participant to create an avatar for themselves. This would give us a baseline to ask better questions once we have their Avatar.

More recently, I realized I already had a project where I was doing something really similar. I did an interactive project sophomore year where we were taking a bunch of data collected from our class and building an interface to hold all of it. My group created kaleidoscopes for each student based on the data they gave us. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was really making their avatars.