One of my graduate courses required a group project as part of a block about the Learning Design Studio. Our project developed a Google Site for our work. This is a copy of my contributions to the group effort, reformatted for this website. The project starts here.
Museum staff persona: Chris Washington
Photo by See-ming Lee is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
- Gender: Not cisgender. Gender is not restricted to biology, and male/female are artificial constructs maintained by Western culture that are too simplistic to express the full range of human experience. Check your privilege, people! Not all of us can just tick off one of these boxes and we shouldn’t be made to feel like we have to. Nature loves diversity!
- Age: 28
- Lives in Houston.
- Likes hookah bars, high energy modern art and black-and-white photography, people watching at Houston’s Galleria mall , putt-putt golf, volunteering at the Covenant House homeless shelter for runaway youths in Houston… on Lovett Blvd.
Education and experience
Chris is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. Chris has a bachelor’s degree from Xavier University , which is an expensive, private, Roman Catholic, HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) that regularly falls high on the list of top schools. After going through the pre-medical school program and earning a degree in biology, Chris came out as queer to the parents and was disowned. Crushed, Chris abandoned dreams of going to medical school and instead moved to Houston to befriend more accepting and like-minded people.
Role and responsibilities
Chris is the Exhibit Graphic Design and Media Coordinator at the museum. This role involves creating graphics and multimedia components for museum exhibits, helping the Exhibit Coordinator and Exhibit Developer with conceptual development, feasibility assessments, production, and estimating budgets for graphic productions. It also involves maintaining the museum website and provides staff with technical support for the website and for multimedia. Chris manages all digital assets – file storage, naming conventions, and ensuring copyright issues are addressed in multimedia outputs and usage. Chris also specifies, procures, and maintains the software and hardware needed for digital media.
Technical skills
Chris had always had an artistic eye, and is self-taught in graphics arts software. Jennifer was the first person to overlook Chris’s lack of formal education in the specific field, and give Chris a chance anyway (just as someone had done for her), so Chris is fiercely protective of her, working very hard to learn the latest software and techniques to prove that she was right to take that chance. Chris prefers to work on a Mac, and to use Adobe’s suites of software. If there is a multimedia software package out there, Chris probably knows it.
Subject domain skills and knowledge
Chris is mastering the art of visually communicating complex concepts to a wide range of audiences.
Motivation and desires
Chris works hard and takes great pride in the outcome of that hard work. Chris’s greatest motivator is recognition.
Goals and expectations
Chris would like increased levels of responsibility.
Obstacles to success
If Chris is made to feel like the graphic design work is being outsourced or in some other manner going off to some ‘lowest bidder’, Chris will no longer have motivation to stay with the museum. Chris’s current pay with the museum is below the national average for people with similar skills.
Unique assets
Chris has a wide range, and large number, of friends and gets them all together several times a year for big parties that always huge hits – most especially the annual crawfish boil. Chris is one of those people who knows a lot of people and loves to introduce people to each other. Chris is very well liked and influential around the office.
Next: Mary Lovett