Life-centred design expands today’s focus on the needs of target-users and business actors to also include all the life our project’s ecosystem impact.

Anthropologist, UX researcher, and environment-centred design advocate, Monika Snzel, wrote about non-human personas in 2020, with a focus on environmental personas, as being visual characterisations of the environments impacted by a product’s lifecycle.

Combining Nielson Norman Group’s user persona and Snezl’s non-human persona guidance, the purpose of a non-human persona could be defined as:

A realistic and fact-based representation of non-human entities to ensure their inclusion in all stages of design and design-making by fostering human empathy, awareness, and respect.

Non-human personas, however, only represent two of the life-centred design stakeholders—animals and environments.

• 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.

Both non-human and non-user personas can be fact- and image-rich documents, as well as videos, audio files, web pages, etc.