Your next persona will be non-human — tools for environment-centered designers
Because…why not? Mitigating the effects of climate change, dealing with water shortages, and securing future food crops are all in our greatest interest, aren’t they? We, the design community have failed to properly address these wicked problems earlier, but let me try to spark a little pragmatic optimism with this article. I say: environment-centered design tools can do the same for the environment we inhabit, what user-centered design tools have done for the people we deliver design solutions to. It’s time to level up and start practicing environment-centered design, no matter which industry you work in. Non-human persona is one of the tools that can help shift your mindset towards this new design framework in the making.
This is the third article in a series about environment-centered design (ECD). To get familiar with my vision for ECD, start with the introductory article, entitled “The time for Environment-Centered Design has come”.
Also, check the second article where I describe “actant mapping canvas”, a tool which is great for starting to embrace your non-human stakeholders/actants.
You are reading this article soon after Earth Overshoot Day 2020, which landed on August 22nd this year. “What is that?” you might ask. Earth Overshoot Day is a sort of a “holiday” that aims at making people wake up and act, rather than pause and celebrate. It marks the date when humanity has used up nature’s “budget” for the year, exceeding what Earth can regenerate in one year. Still a bit vague? Ok, imagine if Earth was a legal entity interested in securing its own economic interests above all else. In this scenario, Earth would cut off humanity’s access to its natural resources — drinking water, breathable air, food crops, wood, fish, everything it produces during biological cycles — right after the overshoot date and not return the access until next year. How does that sound?
When designing stuff, maybe we are focusing on humans too much and on the environment too little?
Already feeling a bit worried? I hope that feeling worried may be your first step towards becoming more aware and — ideally — acting upon the threat that is facing us. My own actions towards spreading environmental consciousness among the members of the design community is a manifestation of that realization.
I can perfectly remember my own “wake up call”. It was 2018, my father just died and I came to the conclusion that life is too short not to support causes that are important to us. I took a test and measured my individual environmental footprint. Honestly, I was terrified with my 1.9 score. But — thanks to that experience — I later joined NGO that promotes plant-based eating, deepened my understanding of environmental and climate crisis, and today you are reading this article about environment-centered design.
Back then I have realized something else also: I was living this lifestyle, using products and services to meet “my needs”, and generating this footprint respectively because those products and services were designed in a way to generate it. And this problem requires more than individual action. It requires more systematic approach, like switching to environment-centered design.
Why am I writing these articles? First of all, because I care. Secondly, because as a pragmatic optimist I strive to mix fact-based way of thinking with being hopeful and confident about the future at the same time. Speaking of facts. Have you read the bestselling book entitled “Factfulness”? If not, go grab it. It’s perfect reading for building up your fact-based and data-driven mindset. After reading it, I can’t stop asking people that I’m working with “Where is the data that supports this claim?”.
Anyways, the book leaves the reader with a rather optimistic conclusion: each decade the world is becoming a better place. However, there is one thing that sticks out on this positive development curve — the climate crisis and the level of pollution that well-developed countries produce each year. The authors pointed out that “talking” about it is not enough. We need to start DOING something about it, both individually and systematically:
To be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned about climate change because I am convinced it is real — as real as Ebola was in 2014. (…) Most people already know about and acknowledge the problem. Insisting on its existence is like kicking at an open door. It’s time to move on from talking, talking, talking. Let’s instead use that energy to solve the problem by taking action — action driven not by fear and urgency but by data and coolheaded analysis.
My attempt to introduce the environment-centered design tools is exactly this: it’s an optimistic action driven by data and coolheaded analysis. And I’d love to invite you to do just that by creating your first non-human persona for a product or a service that you help to build.
The non-human persona explained
Think of a non-human persona as a tool that can help you better understand the environmental context in which both our target audiences and our products/services function (or will function). Without understanding it well, you might not be able to spot design opportunities to address the “needs” and “concerns” of your non-human actants. You can create non-human persona based on:
- Secondary data analysis: visual documentation, pollution statistics, data and reports delivered by the UN or other respectable organizations with no political/economic affiliations, internal data gathered by your company (eg. water usage during the production process, or amount of energy needed to secure the office running).
- First-hand research: interviewing representatives of NGOs working in the environmental sector, scientists with expertise in a field, internal employees, or coolheaded and fact-based activists.
Ok, so how can a non-human persona look like?
Let’s imagine I’m a service designer at one of the food delivery platforms operating in various European countries, like France, Poland, Germany, Sweden, or Estonia. During the actant mapping canvas workshop that we had with various company stakeholders few weeks ago, we realized that heavily promoting meat-based fast foods in our mobile app may cause a huge negative environmental impact. Why?
One of the business analysts pointed out, that by looking into the sufficient scientific literature and into the supply chains of different foods we have available on the platform, she learned that meat production and consumption results in antibiotics, manure, and fertilizers flowing down rivers and into the Baltic Sea (or any other sea), adding to its dead zone effect. And we, as a tech company, are partly responsible for that when we promote meat-based foods in our mobile app. Based on this and other insights, together with company stakeholders, we decided that we want to minimize our negative environmental impact, as more and more of our target users start to care about the environment too (market intelligence team’s input). Ok, what’s next?
As UX and product design practitioners agree, successful personas are first and foremost believable and convincing. That means you are going to turn the collected insights/data into specific action items. Unlike the traditional human persona, all the data about your non-human persona is real and scientifically proven or was gathered first-hand based on a rigorous scientific methodology. Check your data well, because — trust me — you want to win the debate with climate change deniers during important company meetings!
Once the right data and convincing storytelling are in place, you might want to communicate personas to your co-workers (fliers, newsletter, show and tell roadshow, etc.). At the same time, remember personas should never be imposed on anybody, so if you are starting to introduce more environment-centered thinking in your company, make sure you will either co-create them with your co-workers during a team workshop, or you will be able to re-evaluate them together afterwards.
Last but not least, make non-human personas usable. How? Take them to a product feature demos and ask your coworkers how different features or a product itself would answer this persona’s needs and limitations. Send out an internal survey using the “How Might We?” design exercise to find out what are your coworkers’ ideas on addressing the challenge spotted with a non-human persona. These are of course just some ideas, and you are welcome to come up with your own!
Let’s go back to our imaginary food delivery platform that I’m assumably working on. After doing all of the above exercises, together with my team members, we came up with some ideas on how to redesign our existing mobile app to try to address the problems faced by our non-human persona without compromising our business goals. We did that by advocating for more environment-friendly food options to our audiences. An example of such an environment-centered redesign process’ outcome can be found here. What do you think, what else could this food delivery platform do for their non-human personas?
Feeling a bit weird or insecure with the idea of advocating the environment’s rights and creating non-human personas with your team for the first time? Let me try to awaken your courage. Did you know that there are hundreds of lawyers who do not hesitate to use their professional skills to fight for climate justice and protect natural resources at risk? Check the magnificent work done by lawyers from Client Earth or Earth Justice. Or, did you know that the ecosystems are now being granted legal rights? Not in a form of national wildlife parks, but as in legal personhood which can use their human advocates to sue other human violators of their rights! Lake Erie is one of them.
And finally, different design professionals are also awakening and using their creative and problem-solving powers to promote more environment and climate-friendly solutions. You can find them at Climate Designers. I truly believe design is first and foremost about problem-solving. If you think that the climate crisis, species extinctions, and environmental pollution are some of the most urgent problems of our times, try to act as the designer, as the problem-solver, and as the earthling that this planet desperately needs in the era of the Anthropocene.
