“My flow is my heartbeat”
Hear the River Systems speak…
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Non-human and non-user Personas
Designers and businesses can create personas for nature and vulnerable humans to represent their needs during design and decision-making.
Non-human and non-user personas represent the animals, environments, and ‘invisible’ humans (factory workers, miners, farmers, communities, etc.) impacted by our product lifecycle so that we may design to protect and respect them.
Non-human personas may include:
- Threats to the stakeholder’s current condition
- Where and when the stakeholder is impacted by the product life-cycle
- Use of first-person narrative and verbatim to personify the non-human persona to assist empathy among the team
Non-users are the people indirectly impacted at any stage of the product lifecycle and could include victims of:
- Forced labour
- Marginalisation created by the use of your product
- People or communities affected by pollution from the supply chain
- Other
Non-user personas may represent a real person or a persona group. They may be a combination of fictional representation and scientific data.
Learning options
Guide Book
Learnings from designers from around the world have been combined into methods and tools for identifying, creating, and working with non-human/non-user personas.
- Digital Design Method & Tools
- Industrial Design Method & Tools
- Design Principles
- Interviews
- Interspecies Design
Online Course
How to research and create standard and multi-media non-human/non-user personas with tips on applying them in design and decision-making.
- 10 Lessons
- 6 Tools
- Instructional videos
- Community Space
Persona Library
A collection of personas created by designers, students, and workshop participants created in different mediums.
- Documents
- Journey Maps
- Audio
- Video
Journey Backpack
Working with non-human personas is a journey of learning, connecting, confronting, and transforming… and every journey needs a backpack.
The online journey Backpack contains persona examples and templates, tools, and more to aid you on your journey into the world of more-than-human needs.
- Tools
- Project examples
- Persona library
- Persona templates
- Innovation resource links
