Persona

“Blending celebrity and international diplomacy in a near-future Paris, Valentine crafts an intimate thriller than unmasks the players in the game.” —Publishers Weekly When Suyana, Face of the recently formed United Amazonia Rainforest Confederation, is secretly meeting Ethan of the United States, a potential ally for her struggling country, the last thing she expected to be was a victim of an assassination attempt. Daniel, a teen runaway turned paparazzo hoping to make a name for himself, witnesses the first shot targeted for Suyana. Without thinking, he jumps into the action telling himself it’s not selflessness, it’s the scoop. Now Suyana and Daniel are on the run—and if they don’t keep themselves one step ahead, they’ll lose it all.

Long held to be among the world's greatest filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman shaped international art cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. Among his many works, Persona is often considered to be his masterpiece and is often described as one of the central works of Modernism. Bergman himself claimed that this film 'touched wordless secrets only the cinema can discover'. The essays collected in this volume, and published for the first time, use a variety of methodologies to explore topics such as acting technique, genre, and dramaturgy. It also includes translations of Bergman's early writings that have never before been available in English, as well as an updated filmography and bibliography that cover the filmmaker's most recent work.

In this limited edition, French makeup legend, beauty mogul, and esteemed photographer François Nars unveils his long-awaited collection of more than 300 new photographs—dramatic and provocative portraits of creative figures of all ages that capture the beauty and essence of each persona. Persona reveals an extraordinary production of cinematic, avant-garde portraits of an exclusive list of contemporary creative icons. The celebrities, artists, designers, musicians, and actors featured include Tilda Swinton, Naomi Campbell, Kyle MacLachlan, Sharon Stone, Bella Hadid, Isabelle Adjani, Cindy Sherman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Marina Abramovic, Liv Tyler, Christian Lacroix, Tadao Ando, and Marianne Faithfull. Nars has never sought to hide the imperfections and oddities that give faces their personality, but rather to accentuate them in dramatic and surprising ways—think bold, dark, painstakingly crafted eyes offset by clear, almost bare skin. The arresting images in this volume, shot in color against a rich black background with dramatic lighting, explore themes of provocation, sharp humor, and unconventional beauty, always with an edgy dose of glamour. This undoubtedly unique and gorgeous volume, printed using specialty inks to produce images in ultrarich vibrant colors with high gloss, is a true collector’s item for style, culture, and photography enthusiasts alike.

There is a lot of interest in today’s culture about the idea of Persona and the psychological mapping of one’s inner world. In fact, the interest is so strong that the superstar Korean Pop band, BTS, has taken Dr. Murray Stein’s concepts and woven them into the title and lyrics of their latest album, Map of the Soul:Persona. What is our persona and how does it affect our life’s journey? What masks do we wear as we engage those around us? Our persona is ultimately how we relate to the world. Combined with our ego, shadow, anima and other intra-psychic elements it creates an internal map of the soul. T.S. Eliot, one of the most famous English poets of the 20th Century, wrote that every cat has three names: the name that everybody knows, the name that only the cat’s intimate friends and family know, and the name that only the cat knows. As humans, we also have three names: the name that everybody knows, which is the public persona; the name of that only your close friends and family know, which is your private persona; and the name that only you know, which refers to your deepest self. Many people know the first name, and some people know the second. Do you know your secret name, your individual, singular, unique name? This is a name that was given to you before you were named by your family and by your society. This name is the one that you should never lose or forget. Do you know it?

Traces the life of the Japanese author who went from sickly youth to dedicated student of the martial arts, looking at his family life, the wartime years, and his career as a writer who advocated for traditional values.

Data-driven personas are a significant advancement in the fields of human-centered informatics and human-computer interaction. Data-driven personas enhance user understanding by combining the empathy inherent with personas with the rationality inherent in analytics using computational methods. Via the employment of these computational methods, the data-driven persona method permits the use of large-scale user data, which is a novel advancement in persona creation. A common approach for increasing stakeholder engagement about audiences, customers, or users, persona creation remained relatively unchanged for several decades. However, the availability of digital user data, data science algorithms, and easy access to analytics platforms provide avenues and opportunities to enhance personas from often sketchy representations of user segments to precise, actionable, interactive decision-making tools—data-driven personas! Using the data-driven approach, the persona profile can serve as an interface to a fully functional analytics system that can present user representation at various levels of information granularity for more task-aligned user insights. We trace the techniques that have enabled the development of data-driven personas and then conceptually frame how one can leverage data-driven personas as tools for both empathizing with and understanding of users. Presenting a conceptual framework consisting of (a) persona benefits, (b) analytics benefits, and (c) decision-making outcomes, we illustrate applying this framework via practical use cases in areas of system design, digital marketing, and content creation to demonstrate the application of data-driven personas in practical applied situations. We then present an overview of a fully functional data-driven persona system as an example of multi-level information aggregation needed for decision making about users. We demonstrate that data-driven personas systems can provide critical, empathetic, and user understanding functionalities for anyone needing such insights.

Fiction. A novel/"autofiction" about the complexities of being a woman, an artist, a mother, and a wife; a novel about persona and obsession and loyalty and repression; an exorcism. Told in four volumes over seven years, with emails, g-chats, and an "interview" with Lydia Davis (and a nod to Ms. Davis's "The End of the Story"), the style of PERSON/A is often experimental, pushing the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, obsession and mental instability, female independence and a loyalty to current and former lovers, but with the ultimate loyalty being to oneself or one's writing, and is there a difference? and should we be ashamed?

The Persona Lifecycle is a field guide exclusively focused on interaction design's most popular new technique. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the "how" of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn’t just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. The authors developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals. This book explores the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. It includes a running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. It also presents recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods and contains hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries. This book will be a valuable resource for UCD professionals, including usability practitioners, interaction designers, technical writers, and program managers; programmers/developers who act as the interaction designers for software; and those professionals who work with developers and designers. Features* Presentation and discussion of the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development.* A running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. * Recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods.* Hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries.

The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused. This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one. The book discusses the five phases of persona lifecycle: Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help one get organized Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about ones personas out to ones your teammates at the right time Adulthood — Specific tools that will ensure that ones personas are used by the right people at the right times and in the right ways during the product development cycle Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools to you measure the success of the persona effort and prepare for the next one Practical and immediately applicable how-to reference guide for building and using personas – from planning, creating, launching, evaluating, and determining ROI Invaluable guide that gives you a quick reference for incorporating personas into a product development process Features all the essential how-to material from its parent book, The Persona Lifecycle, as a quick, at your fingertips companion

The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them. But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows. Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona. While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.