The case for using non-human personas in design

Why it is time to move beyond just designing for humans.

Image by Ilias via Adobe Stock

This article is based on a recently published academic paper with the title Non-Human Personas: Including Nature in the Participatory Design of Smart Cities, which appeared in the Journal of Interaction Design & Architecture(s). I’ve also included a link to a short video based on the paper at the end of the article.

If you work in UX or interaction design or have done a course on design thinking, you will likely be familiar with personas. First introduced by Cooper as hypothetical archetypes [1], personas are an effective way to make sense of and synthesise research data [2, 3], to communicate user needs within the design team [3] and to keep the perspective of users and other important stakeholders at the forefront throughout the design process [4].

Despite criticism, for example, for being seen as a “universal fix to issues within the product design process” [3] and issues associated with interpreting personas [4], they are an effective way to “guard against basing design decisions on our own preferences and biases” [5], and to build empathy for the users [6] and make assumptions explicit [2].

Since its initial conception, the personas method has been extended to capture different kinds of stakeholders beyond the end user, including negative personas to communicate which stakeholders are outside of the scope of the project [7].

This article makes a case for adding non-human personas to the repertoire of personas considered in design projects. Without knowing you have likely already been designing for a non-human stakeholder. But more about that later.

When animals “interact” with digital applications

Through my work at the Urban Interfaces lab, I first started paying attention to non-human stakeholders a few years ago when we were field testing an interactive urban application. We originally designed and deployed the TetraBIN prototype for the Vivid Sydney Light Festival—an urban but highly regulated exhibition setting.

The TetraBIN installation at Vivid Sydney

To further test our hypothesis that creating playful urban experiences could address issues like littering in cities, we obtained permission from our university to install the prototype on one of its main avenues. One morning, not long after we installed the prototype, I received a distressed call from the campus maintenance team. Ibises, which are common in Australian cities, decided to “interact” with the installation, pulling out and spreading the contents of the bin across the otherwise pristine avenue.

Ibises “interacting” with city bins

Turns out that we hadn’t considered how our digital intervention would interact with urban wildlife!

I wrote about this experience in my book on designing interactive urban applications, adding a principle for taking into account not only unexpected human use (like people randomly throwing dockless shared bikes into rivers or leaving them in creative places and arrangements!) but also urban wildlife interactions.

A few months ago, I found out that we weren’t the only ones being caught out by Australian urban wildlife and their interactions with digital applications in the public space.

One of our industry partners from Daktronics emailed me about an interesting challenge they had encountered. Daktronics are a manufacturer of digital billboards based in South Dakota in the US. As they began to install more of their billboards across Australia, the email explained, they realised that cockatoos really enjoyed taking their LEDs apart, causing significant damage.

Cockatoos having fun “interacting” with LED billboards (Photo provided by Daktronics)

The stories didn’t end there. One of Daktronics’ technicians was surprised finding an iguana that climbed up on the mesh structure and was hanging out on the top of the building, 25 metres up in the air. They’ve even encountered large snakes using the media facade structures to climb up buildings, dismantling cables along the way.

These kinds of urban wildlife interactions at first may seem very unique to the work we do in the Urban Interfaces lab and to geographical locations that are home to cockatoos, iguanas and large snakes.

But they point to more systemic issues in design:

• Treating urban space “as separate from nature, and for human inhabitants alone” [8], and
• Promoting human comfort and convenience over broader ethical and environmental concerns.

The rise of more-than-human concerns

For a long time, the field of interaction design and related fields like human-computer interaction (HCI) and UX were not overly concerned with how to consider non-human species and ecosystems as their outputs were mostly limited to the virtual sphere of ‘cyberspace’.

Arguably the ‘digital turn’—while leading to the proliferation and uptake of interaction design—has shaped its current identity, i.e., what is included as part of the body of work and its methods.

The growth and popularity of interaction design and industries like UX have been tied to advancements in digital technologies and a drive to address human problems in order to maintain the supremacy of humans over the world.

Monteiro argues that designers should act as the gatekeepers “to make things better than they are,” calling out the tech industry for prioritising shareholder primacy over what is good for the world [9].

It is time for interaction designers to reflect on their complicity in driving digital consumerism and technological solutionism [10], which in turn are accelerating the planetary ecocide.

Given the widespread penetration of digital technologies, their negative effect on the environment can no longer be neglected [11]. Digital technologies and ubiquitous computing have reached almost all aspects of people’s lives, and they have changed the way people relate to each other and interact with their surroundings. The increased use of digital services like search engines, the reliance on mobile devices and the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies have an overwhelming effect on energy use [12, 13] and resource exploitation [14].

Forlano suggests that it may be necessary to decentre the human, particularly as design moves from the studio into the city [15]. DiSalvo and Lukens raise similar concerns, extending them to other domains and applications like farming robots [16]. Drawing on the work of philosophers like Deleuze and Actor-Network Theory, they propose to position humans as “a single factor in a larger system of relations and interactions between humans and nonhumans”.

As Mancuso, who is a botanist and professor at the University of Florence, reminds us in his At A Distance podcast interview, “Life is not a human-centred affair but a complex network.”

Quote from the At A Distance podcast / Photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash

How non-human personas work

The personas method has previously been applied to represent non-human species in the form of ‘animal personas’ to consider non-human stakeholders in designing sustainable food systems [17]. Its extension to include non-human stakeholders in a design process has also been proposed by and for the user experience community [5, 18].

Extending the persona method to non-human species aligns with the critical perspectives and practice in law, philosophy and animal studies that extend the sociocultural and legal construct of personhood from human to non-human animals as a counter to human exceptionality [19]. The method has further been adapted to demonstrate how an entire ecosystem can be represented, using so-called ‘ecosystemas’ [20].

In practice, non-human stakeholders that should be considered in a design process may incorporate representatives from flora, fauna and habitats. Like personas, non-human personas are based on research data — collected from secondary and/or primary sources (e.g., contextual observations or interviews with experts).

Just like conventional personas, non-human personas represent the character, attributes and needs of others within all stages of the design process. They expose and challenge assumptions and provide a means for the design team to represent or speak on behalf of another species or biosystem.

Evaluating designs from alternate perspectives may reveal both symbiosis and conflict (e.g. prey/predator, farmer/farmed). Even if conflict is not resolvable, these insights can feed into each stage of the design process and ideally lead to a more environmentally considerate solution.

You are likely already designing for a non-human stakeholder

Some non-human stakeholders are closer and more obvious than one might think. As Sznel points out, over the past few years, a tiny virus was the “most important non-human stakeholder of every business and public service around the world” [21].

The COVID-19 virus has influenced how we design interactions, services and systems—for example, avoiding touch-based input controls in public interfaces, prioritising an online delivery first approach for providers of goods and enabling employees to work from home.

There are likely other hidden non-human stakeholders that influence the design decisions we make, or are directly or indirectly affected by them. The non-human personas method helps us to render those visible.

Getting started with non-human personas

To start building non-human personas for your own design projects, you can download a free PDF template along with examples and other resources from the companion website of our book Design Think Make Break Repeat. There is also a Miro version of the template.

The non-human personas template on Miro

In the next article I will introduce a framework for developing and employing non-human personas in design projects. Follow me on Medium or other platforms (links via my Linktree) to get notified when the article is available.

In the meantime, here are some pointers for where to learn more about non-human personas and their role in design projects:

• A short video presentation in which I cover some of the points and examples from this article.
• Our academic paper published in the Journal of Interaction Design and Architecture(s).
• Monika Sznel’s excellent article on non-human personas.

Acknowledgements: This is an abbreviated version of the first part of our academic paper on non-human personas, which I co-wrote with Joel Fredericks, Dan Vo and Jessica Frawley from the Design Lab and Marcus Foth from the More-than-Human Futures group. Parts of the article are based on the non-human personas description published in our book Design Think Make Break Repeat.

References

1. Cooper A.: Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Sams Publishing, (2004)
2. Adlin T., Pruitt J.: The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas, Morgan Kaufmann, (2010)
3. Miaskiewicz T., Kozar K.A.: Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes? Design Studies, 32, pp. 417–430 (2011)
4. Chapman C.N., Milham R.P.: The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments against a Popular Method Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. vol. 50. pp. 634–636. SAGE Publications Inc (2006)
5. Tomitsch M., Borthwick M., Ahmadpour N., Baki Kocaballi A., Cooper C., Frawley J., Hepburn L.-A., Loke L., Núñez-Pacheco C., Straker K., Wrigley C.: Design Think Make Break Repeat: A Handbook of Methods (Revised Edition), BIS Publishers, Amsterdam, (2021)
6. Miaskiewicz T., Grant S., Kozar K.: A Preliminary Examination of Using Personas to Enhance User-Centered Design Proceedings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems. AIS (2009)
7. Cooper, A., Reimann, R. (2003). About Face 2: The Essentials of Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons.
8. Heitlinger S., Foth M., Clarke R., DiSalvo C., Light A., Forlano L.: Avoiding ecocidal smart cities: participatory design for more-than-human futures Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial — Volume 2. pp. 1–3. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2018).
9. Monteiro, M. (2019). Ruined by design: How designers destroyed the world, and what we can do to fix it. Independently Published.
10. Morozov, E. (2014). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs.
11. Foth, M., Mann, M., Bedford, L., Fieuw, W., & Walters, R. (2021). A capitalocentric review of technology for sustainable development: The case for more-than-human design. In A. Finlay (Ed.), Global Information Society Watch 2020 — Technology, the environment and a sustainable world: Responses from the global South (pp. 78–82). Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Melville, South Africa.
12. Beardmore, A. (2020). Uncovering the Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing, Earth.org, available at: https://earth.org/environmental-impact-of-cloud-computing/
13. Fadeyi, O., Krejcar, O., Maresova, P., Kuca, K., Brida, P., & Selamat, A. (2020). Opinions on sustainability of smart cities in the context of energy challenges posed by cryptocurrency mining. Sustainability, 12(1), 169.
14. Nassar, N. T., Brainard, J., Gulley, A., Manley, R., Matos, G., Lederer, G., … & Fortier, S. M. (2020). Evaluating the mineral commodity supply risk of the US manufacturing sector. Science advances, 6(8), eaay8647.
15. Forlano, L. (2016). Decentering the human in the design of collaborative cities. Design Issues, 32(3), 42–54.
16. DiSalvo, C., & Lukens, J. (2011). Nonanthropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology. In M. Foth, L. Forlano, C. Satchell, & M. Gibbs (Eds.), From social butterfly to engaged citizen: Urban informatics, social media, ubiquitous computing, and mobile technology to support citizen engagement (pp. 421–436). MIT Press.
17. Frawley, J. K., & Dyson, L. E. (2014, December). Animal personas: acknowledging non-human stakeholders in designing for sustainable food systems. In Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: The Future of Design (pp. 21–30).
18. Sznel, M. (2020a). Your next persona will be non-human — tools for environment-centered designers, Medium, available at: https://uxdesign.cc/your-next-persona-will-be-non-human-tools-for-environment-centered-designers-c7ff96dc2b17
19. Francione, G. (2008) Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, Columbia University Press: New York, NY.
20. Tomlinson, B., Nardi, B., Stokols, D., & Raturi, A. (2021, May). Ecosystemas: Representing Ecosystem Impacts in Design. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–10).
21. Sznel, M. (2020b). The time for Environment-Centered Design has come, Medium, available at: https://uxdesign.cc/the-time-for-environment-centered-design-has-come-770123c8cc61