After Personas

Personas are the ghosts that haunt design. They are the marker of the hole at the centre of user-centred design.

Conventional design methods are often implicated with modelling, of productively reifying homogenizing abstractions like "the user." Outmoded anthropological and scientistic myths, like the idea that a design researcher can be an objective, impassive observer of real-world practice, and that their primary role then is to expertly synthesize, extract, essentialize, and then model the people they observed into fictional characters. But what kind of clarity can be really gained by taking many people—people in motion, from different cultures, living in different environments, people with different needs and perspectives and stories, and trying to boil them down into a quick, fictional snapshot? This kind of abstraction is storytelling cliché—it is retelling the same story over again. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

A persona stands in for the people who design erased—those with their own specific stories who actually use and live within our designed spaces. So if a persona reinvokes, via design and marketing abstractions, the absent particularities of use, then where are they, really? Can we imagine other ways of designing that can include those people, and their lived experiences, directly? Can we let them tell the stories themselves, in their multiplicity and dynamism?

Designing Places, Not People (or their experiences)

Exploring stories that elaborate issues of interest to our communities. A place that might serve as a shared meeting place for these individual stories, and a location from which new stories may be told. 

This might be where, in other contexts, we’d think of personas—borrowing from conventional HCI practice to create fictional or abstracted people to tell our stories as researchers (not necessarily their stories), in an environment where we control the representation. But what if, instead, we saw our role as not to design fictional people, but to design places in which a diverse range of activities, peoples, and goals might intersect? When we consider places, we open up the possibility that many stories, and different stories, may be told simultaneously. A space where conflict or disagreement may arise, a place where multiple conversations may happen separately or adjacently. When we think of a place, we might also think of the complex network of objects that we are entangled with—technologies, materials, tools that may play an essential role in the lives and work of the communities who are there. And we might think what roles, responsibilities, and scales of investment different people might have in the place—how much they can change it, govern it, or make it their own.Â