Beerbuddies: Using the personality of cartoon characters to define people’s personalities

As a part of my Design for Interaction Master’s degree, I took part of a project called Exploring Interactions, for which I was trying to empower bartenders against unwanted behaviour in their bars.

As a field research, I organized some group interviews with local bartenders and made use of some generative methods (such as collage making) in order to gain more information regarding their context and the interactions involved in their job, specially those regarding the customers and more specifically those involving customers showing some sort of unwanted behaviour. After thorough analysis and fiddling with different ideas, the Beerbuddies were born.

The BeerBuddies are meant as a tool to reflect the personality and mood of bar-goers through the use of beer coasters with cartoon characters on them.

For the bar-goer they appear as a playful publicity campaign, but for the bartender it delivers a quick overview of the clients’ personality traits which he can use to predict how the clients might act throughout the night, for example if they are potential troublemakers, or which individuals from the group are positive leaders that can be approached in case there are any complaints.

The cartoon characters were selected according to the results of an online survey in which over 200 people from different parts of the world rated the personality of different characters in terms of dominancce and friendliness.

You can learn more about the project, the methodologies I used, and the results of both the field research and the online survey, by visiting the following link: BeerBuddies – Empowering bartenders against unwanted bahaviour