Abstract

This short study asks how a question set in an invented scene can make its own premise open to being shown wrong, and what its account of where it came from lets it claim. It reads the thirteen inquiries that Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family, files in its qualitative lane and marks as synthetic questions. Each says that the people, organizations, figures and events of its scene were set for the question and are not statements of actual events, and that its source card was a model's draft checked and registered by RISCON. None carries a judgment. Read against two debates, on vignettes in social research and on personas in design, the records show a compressed form: a role of a few words, a short question, and a single line, unique to each record, that is phrased as a test. Seven of the thirteen tests name the result that would weaken the question's own premise. No test names who would run it, and the shape of the test follows the series of source cards more closely than the subject. The study contributes a measured description of this form, moves the old complaint that personas cannot be falsified from the figure to the question, and reads the records' account of their making as a partial datasheet. It draws no fact about the music business from these synthetic records and offers no advice.