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Personas

This note is about the concept of personas as representations of client groups in design and beyond, as representations or ways to communicate with nonhuman stakeholders and further, as ways of modelling and coordinating more-than-human creative, constructive, cognitive, co-learning collectives.

Personas Across Scales

Existing nonhuman personas mostly stand in for a species.

The Level Problem

Biology forms a multiscale competency architecture, where each level solves problems in its own space: metabolic, transcriptional, physiological, anatomical, behavioural.1, 2 A persona at "the species" therefore skips the cell collectives that navigate anatomical morphospace below it and the community that navigates a feasibility domain above it.

Therefore, personas need to specify the bounds (how to specify it is an open problem with established taxonomies only partially useful and biased; e.g., cognitive light cones might be one such way, cf. the boundary of self). A persona for a tree differs from a persona for the cambium, for the rhizosphere partnership, or for the stand.

The Scale Problem

No single natural scale exists for describing an ecological phenomenon, and every organism observes its environment through a perceptual filter.3 Choosing a scale therefore decides which patterns appear and which causes become visible.

It is therefore necessary to treat the observer/analyst's own scale/goals as one more filter.

What a Persona Is Doing Formally

A persona approximates ϕi\phi_i, the lossy reconstruction through which an agent builds its Umwelt, described in Design Potential (Private). Personas therefore inherit the three sources of loss: sensing, processing, and memory. They also inherit the failure the model names, since an Umwelt contains conditions absent from the possibility space, so a persona can encode a confident picture of something impossible.

A Schema

A more-than-human persona should record:

  1. Level of organisation. Which collective the persona speaks for.
  2. Problem space. Which space that level navigates, and in what units.
  3. Umwelt. Sensory, spatial and temporal ranges, with what falls outside them.
  4. Competencies and goals. What the agent pursues, over what horizon. Cf. cognitive light cones in Design Potential (Private).
  5. Provenance. Which evidence supports each claim, and who interpreted it.
  6. Known losses. What the compression drops, and which errors it invites.
  7. Status. Whether the persona scaffolds participation or substitutes for it.

Two Failure Modes

Interpretation fails in opposite directions, through anthropomorphism and through reductionism.4 Personas sit exactly where both risks land, because they require narrative coherence that evidence rarely supports.

Personas and Participation

Representation occupies the first tread of the participation stair, which runs recognition, solidarity, autonomy, conviviality, commoning.5 A persona performs recognition. It cannot deliver autonomy, which requires nonhuman agents to influence outcomes directly through feedback from behaviour or ecological systems rather than through human interpretation.

Treat personas as scaffolding that should be dismantled as direct participation becomes possible. Ask what would replace the persona if the agent could act on the process itself.

Open Questions

  • Can a persona represent a collective whose members disagree, and what would internal disagreement look like in the format?
  • Who counts as a candidate for a persona? Definitions of life form a continuous landscape rather than a binary, so the boundary stays contested.6
  • What does a persona cost, in labour, data, energy and upkeep, and when does a simpler commitment do better?4

References

Borthwick, Madeleine, Martin Tomitsch, and Melinda Gaughwin. ‘From Human-Centred to Life-Centred Design: Considering Environmental and Ethical Concerns in the Design of Interactive Products’. Journal of Responsible Technology 10 (2022): 100032. https://doi.org/10/gqgzfv.

Demir, Berre Su, and Aykut Coşkun. “Rethinking Representation in Design: Towards Constructing Parameters for Representation Tools in More-than-Human Design.” Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (New York), 2025, 178–94. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735680.

Fieuw, Walter, Marcus Foth, and Glenda Amayo Caldwell. ‘Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice’. Sustainability 14, no. 2 (2022): 948. https://doi.org/10/gn7k62.

Frawley, Jessica Katherine, and Laurel Evelyn Dyson. ‘Animal Personas: Acknowledging Non-Human Stakeholders in Designing for Sustainable Food Systems’, 21–30. ACM Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10/gfsqh6.

Hernandez-Santin, Cristina, Marco Amati, Sarah Bekessy, and Cheryl Desha. ‘Integrating Biodiversity as a Non-Human Stakeholder Within Urban Development’. Landscape and Urban Planning 232 (2023): 104678. https://doi.org/10/grwwhh.

Jensen, Rikke Hagensby, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Anne-Marie Hansen, Daisy Yoo, and Eva Eriksson. “Provocations and More-than-Human Perspectives in Human–Computer Interaction.” Interacting with Computers 1, no. 12 (2025): iwaf020. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwaf020.

Robinson, Charlotte, Clara Mancini, Janet van der Linden, Lydia Swanson, and Claire Guest. ‘Exploring the Use of Personas for Designing with Dogs’. Helsinki, 2014.

Talgorn, Elise, and Helle Ullerup. “Invoking ‘Empathy for the Planet’ through Participatory Ecological Storytelling: From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered Design.” Sustainability 15, no. 10 (2023): 7794. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15107794.

Tomitsch, Martin, Cara Wrigley, Madeleine Borthwick, Naseem Ahmadpour, Jessica Frawley, A. Baki Kocaballi, Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, and Karla Straker. Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat. A Handbook of Methods. Amsterdam: Bis Publishers, 2018.

Tomitsch, Martin, Joel Fredericks, Dan Vo, Jessica Frawley, and Marcus Foth. “Non-Human Personas: Including Nature in the Participatory Design of Smart Cities.” Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal (IxD&A), no. 50 (2021): 102–30. https://doi.org/10.55612/s-5002-050-006.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. McMillen, Patrick, and Michael Levin. “Collective Intelligence: A Unifying Concept for Integrating Biology across Scales and Substrates.” Communications Biology 7, no. 1 (2024): 378. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4.˄

  2. Chis-Ciure, Robert, and Michael Levin. “Cognition All the Way down 2.0: Neuroscience beyond Neurons in the Diverse Intelligence Era.” Synthese 206, no. 5 (2025): 257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05319-6.˄

  3. Levin, Simon A. “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture.” Ecology 73, no. 6 (1992): 1943–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/1941447.˄

  4. Giaccardi, Elisa, Stanislav Roudavski, and Martín Tironi. “Participation and the Troubles with Intelligence.” PDC ’26: Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026 (New York) 1 (2026): 385–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796632.˄

  5. Roudavski, Stanislav, and Alexander Holland. “Are You Blocking Nonhuman Leadership? Five Questions to Find Out.” PDC ’26: Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference (New York) 2 (2026): 372–81. https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796416.˄

  6. Bender, Reed, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Michael Levin. “What Lives? A Meta-Analysis of Diverse Opinions on the Definition of Life.” Biological Theory, ahead of print, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-026-00544-9.˄

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