Halfway through a UX project to improve an internal platform, something happened that I wasn’t prepared for and didn’t have a ready response to.

The Moment

A stakeholder who worked with the platform daily used Figma Make to build his own prototype and shared it with the team to communicate his needs.

He was keen to visualise his ideas, and AI gave him the tools to do it quickly. It was detailed, considered, and came from someone with genuine expertise in the problem space.

But, to be honest, my first reaction was quietly personal: Is this what’s coming for my job?!

While still processing that, I refocused on the project, realising I needed to figure out how to respond to a stakeholder who had effectively started designing too.

He had built something from direct experience with the platform—and that was valuable. But it presented a challenge I hadn’t experienced or even thought about:

How do designers embrace this potential new way of working without being a blocker while also protecting the integrity of the design process that protects the things that matter: usability, accessibility, consistency, sustainable ux, and evicence-based design decisions?

This isn’t a case study with a clean resolution, however — it’s an honest account of navigating an unfamiliar situation in real time, the potential risks I could see, and some early thinking on how designers might start to build a process around something that’s only going to become more common.

My first response

My instinct was to engage with the stakeholder’s artefact as constructively as possible. Letting him know it was a helpful start, we set a meeting for him to take me through it in detail.

As I reviewed it in the meantime, however, concerns distracted me — there were usability and accessibility issues, it was inconsistent with the existing design, many ideas contradicted learnings from previous testing of the existing design, and it went way out of scope — the natural result of giving someone with deep domain knowledge a tool that lets them design freely.

And then I realised I was overcomplicating things.

The stakeholder’s prototype was not a formal design proposal to be handed over to dev — it was just a tool to communicate his ideas to merge into the main design version.

Where I landed

The practical path I landed on was to help the stakeholder distil his ideas — from both the prototype and a separate spreadsheet he’d been maintaining — into a simple list of proposed changes to the existing design, each with a clear rationale and a focus on MVP needs only, and capturing out-of-scope ideas for a backlog.

This ensured the stakeholder’s input was captured while maintaining one design source of truth, with his thinking folded in rather than competing with the main design.

It was a reasonable solution, and the stakeholder hadn’t rejected it. But in the following meetings with others, he brought out his prototype anyway to continue championing his needs.

There were no established ways of working around how stakeholder-created designs should be handled in the project, so there was nothing to suggest he shouldn’t. And there’s something worth acknowledging here that will likely become more common: when someone designs and builds something — without or without an AI tool–they become invested in it. The ability to visualise and interact with your own ideas is exciting, and stakeholders who experience that for the first time develop a strong attachment to what they’ve made. That enthusiasm is great, but without a clear process for how those artefacts fit into the wider design process, meetings and goals can get derailed.

That’s when broader risks became clearer:

• A polished AI prototype looks finished to anyone who isn’t a designer, and once a wider team has seen it, expectations may form quickly and quietly around it. The stakeholder’s intentions were good, but his prototype was now circulating independently, and I had no control over the context in which people were seeing it or the assumptions they were forming.
• There was also a real risk that the stakeholder — keen to see his ideas realised — might go directly to the developer with his prototype, or that the developer, keen to move fast, might treat it as a brief rather than a communication tool. Either way, the design review process could get cut out of the loop entirely.

Two designs were then in the wild, and I had no clear process for bringing them back together before they influenced decisions that could be hard to walk back.

I’m still not sure the best way to handle this, or if there’s one right answer.

So, for now, I’ve attempted to articulate all the concerns that surfaced, and some suggested solutions.

Risks to consider

When a stakeholder builds their own design with AI, the risks may not be obvious straight away. Some surface immediately, others creep in quietly. Below are the ones that surfaced for me during the experience and after reflecting. Every designer should think these through before they happen on their projects, so they can:

• Manage the moment professionally
• Get the value from the shared work
• Not hinder this new way of working
• While also protecting the integrity of the design process

I’m thinking those are the goals to aim for, but maybe there are also others to consider.

Risk 1: Confusion over the source of truth

If a stakeholder prototype and the main design are both in circulation, developers — and stakeholders — might start to treat them as two separate sources of truth, creating confusion and potentially creating a rework risk.

Risk 2: A polished prototype creates expectations

AI-generated designs look polished, so when a wider team sees one, they tend to assume it’s more validated than it is. Managing that expectation after the fact is much harder than setting it up front.

Risk 3: Out-of-scope ideas become time-consuming conversations

When a stakeholder has the freedom to design freely, ideas beyond the project’s scope will naturally find their way into the prototype. But once those ideas are visible and interactive, they’re harder to set aside, taking time and energy away from the work that actually needs to move forward.

Risk 4: The designer becomes the explainer

The more stakeholders use AI to design, the more designers could find themselves explaining, guiding, and coaching — not just designing — and it’s worth preparing for rather than arriving at that in a meeting and being unprepared.

Risk 5: A prototype can bypass the designer entirely

A stakeholder prototype built to communicate ideas doesn’t always stay contained to that purpose. Once it exists, it circulates. Once it circulates, it can create expectations, and it can be shared in ways that cut the designer out of the conversation altogether. Even with the best intentions, that quietly undermines the process that protects usability, accessibility, consistency, and validation.

Risk 6: Non-designers can lose time in these tools

AI prototyping tools are genuinely engaging — and easy to get lost in. There’s a real risk that stakeholders invest significant time designing when that time could be spent on their core responsibilities. It’s worth thinking about how to acknowledge and contain that, without discouraging the contribution.

Risk 7: Personal accounts carry business risk

AI design tools are easy to access on a personal account. But a file built on a personal account — potentially containing sensitive business or user information — sits outside the organisation’s visibility and control. Who owns it? Who else can access it? What happens to it when the project ends?

Questions worth exploring

Articulating the above risks generated the following questions that I think designers need to start exploring, because this situation is going to become more common, and having no position on it is its own kind of risk.

1. Do we ask stakeholders to share with the design team first — or does that just create a bottleneck?

There’s a case for making design team review a default step before any stakeholder prototype circulates more widely.

Some might make a case that this slows things down and signals distrust.

The answer probably depends on the team, the project, and the stakeholder — but leaving it unaddressed means the decision gets made for you, in a meeting, when it’s too late to shape it.

2. Do we need to set expectations about what a prototype is and isn’t?

A polished AI prototype looks finished to anyone who isn’t a designer. Without a clear, shared understanding of what it represents — a thinking tool, not a design decision — expectations can form quickly and quietly. Getting ahead of that conversation is easier than walking it back.

It also raises another question worth exploring: should stakeholders be encouraged to keep their ideas at the wireframe level — rough, low-fidelity, intentionally unfinished — to avoid the expectation problem altogether? Or is there value in letting them explore UI ideas too, even if it creates more to manage?

3. Should stakeholders create their own designs, or contribute to the designer’s?

A separate prototype can surface ideas that annotating an existing design wouldn’t, but it also creates a parallel artefact that needs managing.

Should stakeholders use their AI-generated designs just to help them articulate their feedback on the main design?

4. What happens when a stakeholder’s prototype reaches a developer before the designer has reviewed it?

Even informally, even with everyone understanding the context, this creates a moment where the design process is effectively bypassed. That might be fine — or it might not be. Either way, it’s worth having a position on it before it happens.

5. How do designers stay guides without blocking innovation?

I think this is the core tension:

Designers who respond to stakeholder-led design by tightening control will slow things down and damage trust. Designers who step back too much risk losing influence, quality, and consistency. The position that seems most useful and most sustainable is somewhere in between.

A starting point for the current state

The following suggestions assume the current state remains where the designer owns the design process and is accountable for its integrity. That may evolve, and following this section, I speculate on what that shift could look like.

For now, most designers are working within organisations where they hold the responsibility for quality, consistency, and process. They need to explicitly define quality for each use case—and that’s the context these suggestions are written for.

Every team, project, and stakeholder will have different variables, but having no process is riskier than having an imperfect one.

Treat this as a starting point to challenge and build on.

Before stakeholders start designing

If stakeholders are already showing signs of designing, consider having a conversation early — not to discourage it, but to set a shared understanding of how it fits into the project. Some things worth establishing upfront:

• Is there a clearly defined scope they’re working within, so ideas stay focused on what’s needed?
• Do they understand the design team will need to review anything before it goes further, and why that matters?
• Set a time when these ideas can come in, before designs have been tested, so the stakeholders' ideas can be tested too, not added in untested
• Ask them to keep their ideas at the wireframe level, to avoid polished designs becoming loose in the wild, and to help non-designers reduce time spent on creating designs and prototypes
• Are they using a managed business account, not a personal one — and does the organisation have visibility over what’s being built and where it’s stored?

When they share a prototype

This is the moment that needs the most care. A few questions worth asking:

• Who has already seen it? If it’s circulated widely before the design team has reviewed it, expectations may already be forming.
• Has anyone set the context — that this is a communication tool, not a final design?
• Are there usability, accessibility, or consistency issues that need to be named early, before they get treated as design decisions?
• Is there anything obviously out of scope that needs addressing now rather than later?

How to work with what they’ve built

Rather than treating a stakeholder prototype as a problem to manage, consider treating it as a brief in a different format. Some options worth exploring:

• Help the stakeholder distil their ideas into a clear list of proposed changes to the existing design, each with a rationale and a focus on MVP needs — preserving their thinking without creating a competing artefact.
• Find a way to fold the genuinely useful ideas into the main design explicitly, so their contribution is visible and valued.
• Where possible, find a way to keep the visual and interactive quality of what they’ve built — a written list is easier to manage, but loses communicative power.

Before anything gets shared too widely

Regardless of how a stakeholder’s ideas enters the process, one principle feels worth holding firm on:

• There should be one source of truth. Whatever a stakeholder may build and share, it needs to be consolidated into the main design before developers see it as a brief.
• Every proposed change should have a clear rationale and should have been reviewed against the scope and MVP needs.
• The design team should be the ones to make that final call on what goes in — not as blockers, but as the people accountable for quality and consistency.

Exploring a future state where the status quo changes

With AI tools enabling anyone to describe what they want and generate high-fidelity designs instantly, it means that what my stakeholder did was inevitable, not exceptional.

The suggestions above assume designers own the process. But that assumption is worth questioning because the tools that allowed a stakeholder to build a prototype mid-project are only going to get more capable and more accessible.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where AI design tools don’t just help non-designers express ideas, but actively guide them — flagging accessibility and sustainability issues in real time, suggesting consistent components, prompting users to stay in scope, checking designs against usability principles before anything is shared.

In that world, some of what designers currently do as process gatekeepers gets absorbed into the tool itself.

But right now, what these tools can’t do is navigate organisational politics, read the subtext in a stakeholder relationship, or understand why a user research transcript means something different in this context than it did in the last project. And AI-assisted guidance still needs a designer’s eye — the tool’s checks are only as good as what it’s been trained to look for, and that’s never the full picture. There’s a real risk that stakeholders who receive automated feedback develop a false confidence — that because the design passed the checks, it’s ready, and the designer’s review becomes a formality rather than a necessity.

So, for now at least, the designer’s role doesn’t quietly shrink — it might get actively harder to justify, but the need for designer direction actually increases.

What would that mean for the designer’s role?

If AI absorbs more of the process guardrails over time, the designer’s value shifts further toward strategy, facilitation, and judgment — the things AI can support but not replace. Designers might spend less time owning the end-to-end process and more time setting the conditions for others to design well within it. Less maker, more guide. Less executor, more standard-setter.

That’s a fundamentally different role. And the designers who navigate it best will be the ones who start thinking about it now, before the shift happens around them.

Shape your role before someone else does

AI tools are already in stakeholders’ hands, and they’ve started designing. Design teams that wait until it happens on their project will find themselves managing risks that are already in motion — and that’s a much harder position to design from.

React too slowly, and you’re scrambling. React too rigidly, and you become the blocker.

The opportunity is to get ahead of it: embrace the value stakeholders bring when they can express their ideas visually, while building just enough process to protect quality, consistency, and trust.

But this is bigger than process because boundaries are blurring and the Designer role is being rewritten. The designers and leads who articulate what shifts when AI enters their workflow — and what doesn’t — are the ones who shape that rewrite.

Being candid about what’s changing, exploratory about what might come next, and comfortable sitting with unresolved questions is, right now, a form of leadership.

The alternative is letting someone else define the future Designer role and then reacting to it once it’s already done.

More from Damien

Follow Damien on Medium, and explore his design innovations:

• Life-centred Design Lab — Expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities to do less planetary harm and more good.
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design.
• Damienlutz.com.au

When stakeholders use AI to prototype their own designs was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cities provide essential food, shelter, and infrastructure for humans, but they often negatively impact biodiversity. Urbanization damages habitats, disrupts ecosystems with artificial lighting and noise pollution, and puts stress on plants, animals, and microbes.

Yet, despite these challenges, many non-human species manage to adapt and coexist in cities.

Australian cities, for instance, are home to a variety of urban wildlife, including bees, bats, birds, mice, rats, flying foxes, possums, and countless insects.

However, with the increasing intensity of floods and heat waves due to climate change, many species are at risk of extinction. Some urban areas are becoming inhospitable even for humans.

This raises an important question: What if we redesigned urban spaces to nurture not just humans, but the needs of all city-dwelling life forms?

A more than human Sydney

In December 2023, I was invited to present at the AdaptNSW Forum 2023 where I led a two-hour workshop on life-centred design for climate adaptation. Participants, including government, industry, and climate adaptation professionals, worked in seven teams to explore the concept of a “More Than Human Sydney.”

Using tools from the Life-Centered Design Lab, such as non-human personas and the Impact Ripple Canvas, teams brainstormed the future needs of urban wildlife facing climate change.

They then reimagined public spaces — such as parks, bus stops, waterfronts, pools, libraries, galleries, and restrooms — through the lens of these non-human needs.

About the urban wildlife and human spaces

To save time for brainstorming, the workshop preselected key urban wildlife species for Sydney and created non-human personas for each. These personas, inspired by customer personas in marketing, give voice to the needs of plants and animals affected by human activities. Developed by Monika Sznel, this tool summarizes species’ needs, threats, ecological importance, and possible support measures.

Similarly, personas for human spaces were created to outline their functions, surrounding natural resources, and features that could support innovative designs to benefit urban wildlife.

Innovating for adaptation

Innovation for adaptation begins with understanding the future we need to adapt to.

To this end, participants engaged in futuring using the Impact Ripple Canvas to explore how climate change might alter urban wildlife needs.

The more than human innovation ideas

Participants then innovated ways to nurture their animal’s future needs by brainstorming how they could innovate using the natural and human-made resources of their human-made space.

While the participants brought diverse expertise, the session was not meant to produce definitive solutions but to provoke ideas for cities designed with more-than-human perspectives.

Public pools and frogs

How might we adapt public pools to support wetland-loving frogs?

• Use natural swimming pool design that flows into nearby frog ponds
• Replace toxic chemicals with eco-friendly alternatives.
• Engage the public with a frog identification app.
• Install frog-friendly lighting and plant more trees for shade.
• Increase habitat with shrubs and native vegetation.

Harbour foreshore for humans and seals

How might we adapt human-made foreshore areas to better respect and serve the needs of local marine animals such as seals?

• Build protected seal habitats away from human activity.
• Create underwater refuges using kelp forests and no-anchoring zones.
• Prevent fishing practices that endanger seals.
• Raise awareness with public education campaigns and seal profiles.
• Mitigate runoff pollution with pollutant traps near wetlands.

Public galleries/libraries for humans and possums

How might we utilise human spaces that remain empty at night, such as galleries and libraries, to provide habitat options for animals such as possums which can often invade the roofs of people’s homes?

• Design roof spaces that mimic possum habitats.
• Adjust lighting to be possum-friendly.
• Install bridges and pathways for safe movement.
• Educate visitors with “Adopt a Possum” programs and live “Possum Cams.”

Small reserves for humans and bandicoots

How might we adapt small local reserves to benefit small urban animals like bandicoots?

• Plant diverse vegetation to attract pollinators and ensure food sources.
• Install motion-activated lighting to minimise disruptions.
• Design water fountains to catch runoff for bandicoots.
• Protect burrowing areas with strategic landscaping.
• Include non-human needs in planning and budgets.
• Encourage the community to engage through awareness campaigns.
• Consider the impact and management of domestic cats.

Golf courses for humans and koalas

How might we adapt the vast, under-utilised, and tree-filled spaces of golf courses to benefit tree-dwelling animals such as koalas?

• Incorporate native trees that support koalas’ diets and habitats.
• Design wildlife corridors and bushfire refuges.
• Use rainwater for irrigation and wildlife ponds.
• Engage golfers in conservation efforts.

Bus stops for humans and bees

A contentious idea, but one that has already been explored in the UK through the creation of ‘living roofs’ for bees on bus stops, one group explored how the ubiquitous city bus stops might be adapted to nurture bees.

• Create wider roofs to plant native flora to attract bees and create safe spaces for them.
• Utilise two-phase guttering to ensure collected water is always shallow.
• Explore using the side walls of bus stops for hives.
• Educate the public with signage about pollinator-friendly cities.

More than human futures

Biodiversity and climate change are deeply intertwined. Biodiversity loss accelerates climate change, and climate change threatens biodiversity. To address these challenges effectively, we must:

• Consider the needs of all city life, including plants, microbes, and soil ecosystems.
• Collaborate with experts in fields such as zoology, ecology, and design.
• Base non-human personas on accurate ecological data.
• Identify and avoid decisions that might cause unintentional harm to life, such as how we handle our own waste management
• Explore any unintended interactions of people, plants, and urban wildlife
• Engage and educate the community

Conserving urban biodiversity also benefits humans directly, such as controlling pest populations, pollinating local flora, contributing to mental health and psychological well-being, absorbing carbon storage, and reducing the heat island effect.

By reimagining cities with life-centred design, we can create resilient spaces that protect biodiversity while enriching human lives. Together, let’s work toward a future where all urban life forms can thrive.

More from Damien

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

How might we design cities to support both human and animal needs? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a world that is rapidly evolving, it has become essential to adopt a design approach that puts the environment and social justice at the forefront.

Life-centred design is an emerging practice that seeks to create sustainable and meaningful solutions that benefit all living beings, including humans, plants, and animals. By embracing life-centred design principles, we can address pressing global challenges and create a positive impact on the world.

The problem with getting started with life-centred design is that it makes us look at the bigger picture, where our thing (product, website, etc.) is only a small part of a greater system, and how it impacts other lifeforms—and that gets messy, takes time, and can be overwhelming.

If you’re eager to make a difference and embark on a life-centred design journey, whether you’re a digital designer or industrial designer, here are practical ways to get started with life-centred design now.

Life-centred design for digital things

The main goals of life-centred digital design are to reduce the energy use/carbon output of your website/app, and to create experiences that don’t exclude anyone.

1.Benchmark the impact
Benchmark the impact of a website using Ecograder’s assessment tool — it’s super easy and the result gives you lots of ideas on how to improve

2.Brainstorm ways to reduce energy
Use the ideas from Step 1, and look at sustainablewebdesign.org, to start brainstorming ways to reduce the energy input/carbon output of your digital experience—start by:

• Ensuring all your images are optimised with a tool like tiny.png
• Minimise page styling and font variations
• Turn off auto-play on videos, and
• Use .svg format for any graphics and icons

3.Nudge sustainable user behaviour
Use behavioural design to enable and encourage sustainable user behaviour.

4.Switch to Green Web Hosting
Switch your web hosting to reduce the carbon emitted by your web hosting.

Start by reviewing this list of green hosting options and look for those who use renewable energy rather than offsets, although affordability is important (After my own analysis and budget restraints, I chose Green Geeks (not an affiliate link) because even though they use fossil fuel energy, they return 300% renewable energy to the grid).

5.Embed accessibility
Start embedding accessibility into your work, it’s easy and after learning a little it becomes second nature… and makes a world of difference for people with different abilities—start by:

• Adding alt tag descriptions to all your images
• Use more than one method to indicate a text link is clickable ( e.g. use a different colour AND an underline)
• Ensure the page title that appears in a web search result page matches the title displayed once the website is loaded
• Check your colours have enough contrast for readability (use the STARK plugin for Figma or the STARK extension for Chrome or Bing, and 5) take the FREE edX Introduction to Web Accessibility course

6.Nurture Diversity
Design inclusively at all stages of design. Start by:

• Using images that celebrate diversity
• Include diverse participants in user testing and create personas of extreme cases
• If you don’t need to ask a person’s gender (e.g. Miss, Mrs, Mr, etc.), then don’t
• If you do need to ask a person’s gender, provide non-binary options, allow the user to enter their own term, and offer a ‘Prefer not to say’ option
• Designing for trans people resolves a lot of unseen gender issues in UX

Life-centred design for physical things

The main purposes of life-centred design for physical things are to reduce the raw materials used in the product and manufacturing, reduce or reuse waste, reduce pollution, ensure the ‘thing’ can be used by many and isn’t exclusive, and nurture fair work conditions for all along the lifecycle and supply chain.

1.Explore the wider impact of a physical thing
Start by:

• Using Monika Sznel’s Actant map to brainstorm the environmental and social impacts of a product, object, business, etc. (‘Actant’ refers to an ‘impacted party’ or ‘stakeholder’, like a business stakeholder but also an animal or factory worker along the supply chain—the word ‘stakeholder’, however, does have a colonial history.)
• Do a Product Lifecycle Mapping of a product, which is just mapping the flow of materials from when they are extracted from the earth to how they are transformed into your product and how they get reused or returned to the earth.

2.See things from a different perspective
Once you have identified an environment, animal, or invisible human most impacted, explore their needs by creating a simple non-human/non-user persona.

• Just research for 10 minutes about their needs, and then
• Look at your Actant Map again considering more deeply the impact on their needs

3.Innovate design solutions
Use circular design strategies to reduce the impacts. You can start by:

• Looking for recycled versions of your product’s materials or find more sustainable/less processed/less toxic options
• Reduce the amount of materials, like this clever rethink of a COVID19 testing kit
• Explore ways to reduce and reuse any waste

4. Get the books or take a course!

• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Books
• Life-centred Design Innovation Card Decks
• Life-centred Design Resources

Good luck and have fun!

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards
• Life-centred Design Books

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

How to get started with life-centred design was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last few years, experimentation with aligning modern design with sustainability, regeneration, and inclusion has grown.

One strategy is to identify the needs of non-human using non-human personas — personas representing natural environments and animals — for designers and businesses to consider as well as human users.

Non-human personas may represent animals and ecosystems impacted by our products, businesses, and behaviours, but they can also be the resources we use to create our tools and goods.

In a way, non-human personas are related to two existing concepts connecting humans to animals and nature:

1. Commons—The ‘commons’ refers to a community/collective’s shared natural, cultural, and digital resources
2. Totemism—The traditional, First Nations wisdom concept of ‘totems’ that nurtures deep relationships between humans and animals and nature

Could these concepts merge to deepen the developing world’s take-make-waste relationship with nature to make the design of anything more regenerative and fair?

This speculation explores how the concept of commons could be used to connect businesses using the same resources by collectively creating non-human personas as shared knowledge, and then deepening the relationship between humans and non-humans with the traditional wisdom of totemism.

What are non-human personas?

Non-human personas are a recent evolution in modern design of the traditional human persona concept which categorise and summarise customer types based on various aspects such as needs, demographics, life stage, etc.

Non-human personas represent the natural resources, environments, and ecosystems used and/or impacted by a product/business. These personas can then be used whenever human personas are used to ensure that non-human needs are considered in design decisions.

But there are challenges to using non-human personas, including:

• If the data used to create a non-human persona isn’t accurate, design decisions based on that data could have unintended and/or negative impacts on the non-human or others
• The time needed to accurately create non-human personas can be a hindrance to their use, particularly in fast-paced, profit-focused projects (the majority of modern design!)

What are the commons?

The ‘commons’ refer to a cultural, natural, or digital resource accessible to all members of a society or community, that is collectively managed to protect the resources and ensure they are sustainable and regenerated. ‘Commoning’ refers to the people coming together to manage these resources, which also deepens relationships in the community.

Commons may be held in protection, or used and managed for collective and sustainable benefit by a ‘community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates’.

Sustainable practices are not new, of course — First Nations peoples have been practicing sustainable lifestyles and living in harmony with nature for tens of thousands of years.

Discussion about merging modern design with traditional wisdoms has also grown, but I’ve often wondered how exactly we do that.

So, I considered what First Nations wisdom could inform how modern design uses non-human personas, and I recalled the concept of totems.

What are totems?

The totem information in this article was sourced from information written by First Nations peoples.

Totems represent non-human entities like natural objects, plants, animals, spirit beings, or the weather.

The word totem is actually an anglicisation of the Ojibwe word for clan (doodem).

Different cultures use different terms, for example:

• Auguds, from Torres Strait Islanders
• Jadiny, from Indigenous Australians

How totems are identified (and how many), how they are connected to a person or group, and how they are used, all differ between cultures, and even between groups within cultures.

In Indigenous Australian totemism, people belonging to the Emu as a totem are held accountable for what happens to the Emu and they must learn and teach others about Emu needs.

Examples of relationships with totems:

• As guides and lesson teachers
• To represent certain attributes or values for personal growth — For example, in Indigenous North American totemism, an alligator represents stealth and a fight for survival, while the ant represents teamwork and overall perseverance
• To identify the different responsibilities of each clan
• To represent non-human beings to be respected, nurtured, protected, and knowledge about them shared and preserved

Examples of how totems are gained:

• Chosen by an Elder, family member, or the mother, and given at a young age or Coming of Age Ceremony
• Chosen by the individual, which can be therapeutic and spiritual or a more practical choice for personal growth
• The totem ‘chooses the person’, via ceremony or identified in key moments in one’s life

Examples of the number of totems per person/clan:

• In Indigenous Australian totemism, each person has at least four totems, one each for the nation, clan, family, and an individual totem
• The Ojibwe peoples use one totem per clan

While there are many variations of totemism, there is also a common underlying purpose, which is to consider the world beyond humans—and to consider these things not just as resources but as lifeforms to be respected—by forming relationships and a sense of responsibility between humans and the natural world—which correlates with the purpose of non-human personas.

So how might we evolve the use of non-human personas in the design and business world by learning from the traditional and ecological wisdom of totemism and commons?

Determining the commons of a product or business as a totem

Products and businesses could determine their totems according to their common resources by taking inspiration from how totems are traditionally determined:

• ‘By family member’ — This could correlate to the industry a product/business belongs to (Industry Totems). For example, any printer of paper goods could automatically gain a ‘Trees and Forests’ totem. Any business selling personal devices could automatically gain ‘Rare earth metals’ as totems. A benefit of this would be that as these totems would be used by so many, their personas could be made once and managed by experts in the industry (scientific and traditional), meaning individual groups, organisations, and businesses wouldn’t need to speed the time creating the personas on their own, and there would be less risk of inaccuracy and more sharing of strategies.
• ‘By individual’ — Each individual product or business could also gain totems to represent any non-humans their specific business impacts beyond the industry commons (let’s call them Nest Totems for now)

Perhaps also the Industry totems could be defined by two types of relationships, those directly sacrificed as resources (Sacrificial Totems), and those that are ecosystems impacted by the business/industry (Neighbour Totems). The Neighbour Totems might represent specific areas where the Sacrificial Totems are taken from or some other ecosystem impacted along the product lifecycle.

Thinking globally, and taking inspiration from modern science, perhaps all businesses would gain at least one global totem to represent non-humans in urgent dire danger worldwide (World Totems). They might be based on the most urgent planetary boundaries as defined by science, and by traditional wisdom.

Using words like ‘Sacrificial’, ‘Neighbour’, ‘Nest’, and ‘World’ rather than ‘resource’, ‘ecosystem’, and ‘global’ might connect us more deeply to the lifeforms we are taking from and/or damaging.

An example

As an example subject, let’s use a website that sells digital and paperback books.

Identifying totems
Based on two key industries this business belongs to (the book publishing industry and tech industry), it could automatically belong to the following Sacrificial Totems:

• Coniferous Trees & Forests (Book publishing industry)
• Rare Earth metals, Air (Digital tech industry)

And they would then automatically belong to the Neighbour Totems to represent the ecosystems impacted by the business supply chain and lifecycle. As an example:

• Village ecosystems damaged by rare earth metal mining and factories used for the technology needed for the business’ website, and the e-readers required to enjoy its books

The business might also identify Nest Totems, based on the specifics of its business, such as its locality:

• Timber plantations in NSW (if we determined the paper for the printed books came from NSW)
• Koala or other animals impacted by timber plantations

Our hypothetical business would also belong to a World Totem, such as:

• Clean water (To connect to all the water used in paper and technology production and their contribution to the worsening water scarcity)

The totems of the example small business might then look like this:

Employing non-human personas as totems

Drawing from the collective knowledge of their commons in the form of collaboratively-created non-human personas, and guided by the traditional wisdom of First Nations Peoples’ relationships with totems, businesses could use their prosperity, innovation, and influence to develop ways to:

• Replace or reduce the use of their Sacrificial Totems
• Reduce and restore the impact on their Neighbour Totems
• Enrich healthy instances of their Sacrificial and Neighbour Totems
• Learn about their totems and teach others and the public about them
• Understand the specific characteristics of their totems (strength, community, perseverance, etc.) and champion these values in themselves and in others

Creating decentralised collaboration
All businesses might then be ‘related’ by their commons/totems and collaborate to care for them, whether they are competing in the same industry or from different industries, creating networks that transcend traditional barriers of collaboration.

This incorporation of totemism into the business could create a new layer of collaboration between competing businesses, and between design teams and businesses from completely different industries.

Forming expert coalitions
Martin Tomitsch suggested the practice of forming a coalition of experts to inform the creation and use of non-human personas. While this makes perfect sense, it would often be impractical for many projects and therefore not attempted.

But if the business world integrated commons thinking and totemism, then every business with the same commons could collectively create and maintain non-human personas representing the knowledge of and relationships with their commons, forming a global coalition of experts, whose non-human persona knowledge would be available to all.

Non-human personas
What then, would non-human personas be, in terms of being accessible knowledge to ensure human industry and activity respected nature? Would they be digital twins constantly updated by the coalitions, and by data generated real-time by the non-humans? Would there be rituals to develop our relationship with the non-humans?

Using digital interpretations of non-humans risks the desensitising of the human’s side of the relationship. Perhaps they could be guided by First Nations techniques of connecting with totems to deepen the experience to be more ‘therapeutic and spiritual’.

Deepening the relationship
As the research of Martin Tomitsch and the experience of Victor Udoewa suggest, non-human personas are not just a tool, but also a method. The process of identifying and creating personas, whether human or non-human, creates the shared understanding of and relationship with the non-human.

Therefore, all those using the personas would need to be part of the process of contributing to the knowledge base and strengthening the relationship, to create their own relationship with their totems.

Connecting to original totemism
Could this adoption of totemism by the developed world also then connect to the original ways of local totemism?

Perhaps all world citizens, First Nations and beyond, could adopt totems to personally and deeply connect with the land and animals they depend on, from the products and businesses they use to the things they make and own, to the places they work in and visit.

But that could all only be really explored as a respectful discussion with First Nations peoples.

To summarise

To create a respectful relationship between human industry and nature, and to transition human industry into a more regenerative model, businesses could explore:

• Recognising and using the commons of their industry to collaborate with other businesses of the same industry to regenerate their commons
• Collectively creating and maintaining non-human persona artifacts accessible by all
• Requesting to collaborate with First Nation’s people to learn how this speculative use of totemism could deepen the relationship between human industry and nature

Accelerating the transition
Such an organised understanding of and respect for all non-humans would surely accelerate the transition of developed countries to a sustainable, regenerative, and inclusive model at a time when acceleration is most needed.

As the developed world with its human-centred design sees itself ‘evolving’ into a more life-centred iteration, with models such as the Doughnut Economy, it is really just remembering what First Nations people recognised tens of thousands of years ago — we need to respect and nurture the two most important relationships, that between people and people, and that between people and land.

Perhaps merging commons and totemism with non-human personas isn’t about evolving the use of non-human personas, but bringing them back to where they originated from — a respectful relationship with all life.

While the totem information in this artcile was sourced from information written by First Nations peoples, I would recommend respectfully engaging First Nations people before attempting to interperate and integrate their totemism commercially. There is a lot more to each culture’s relationship with totemism (example).

I would also like to use this article as an invitation to any First Nations persons who would like to explore this further collaboratively — please contact me!

Learn everything about non-human personas with the guidebook and toolkit

The Non-human Persona Guide

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

Non-human personas and totems was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While many modern design innovations of industrialised nations have raised parts of the world out of recurring human famines into higher standards of living and education, increased human life expectancy, and improved poverty and sanitation for some, decades of the mass production of these innovations have forced others out of traditional living and into becoming a resource of abundant inexpensive labour and industry for the Global North’s technological exports.

Life-centred design emerges today across the world in varying forms, but all lean toward one purpose—to transition the way humans exist through design to be in symbiosis with the Earth and all its life forms and systems.

I celebrate these four women who have contributed greatly to the emergence of life-centred thinking through their work with alternate economic models and holistic ways of seeing the world, and who have inspired me personally to be a better designer:

• Ellen Macarthur’s articulation of circular design which reimagines our current take-make-waste design approach to one that reuses and recycles everything to reduce waste and pollution
• Kate Raworth’s articulation of the Doughnut Economy which aligns the sustainable thinking of circular design with socially aware thinking for the sustainable and thriving lives of people
• Donna Meadows' articulation of system thinking which enables designers to zoom out from their UX and product to see the ecosystem of people and places and the planet that it's a part of so they can embed circular and Dougnut thinking into their products and websites
• Monika Sznel’s ground-breaking environment-centred design tools empowering and inspiring designers to implement systems, circular, and Doughnut thinking in their process

Ella MacArthur and The Circular Economy

After sailing solo around the world in 2005 at the fastest time, Dame Ellen MacArthur returned with a new perspective on how the world worked.

After spending 71 days alone at sea and completely reliant on the limited food, fuel, and supplies she’d taken with her, Ellen realised humanity and its economy was no different — completely reliant on the finite resources, but which it was extracting and disposing of without regard.

After talking with business leaders, engineers, and other experts, she set up the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to help accelerate the transition to a circular economy.

‘Through design, we can eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature, creating an economy that benefits people, business and the natural world.’

Principles of circular design:

• Design out waste and pollution
• Keep products and materials in use
• Regenerate natural systems

A key output from Ellen was the Butterfly Diagram, a reimagining of a more technical diagram by McDonough & Braungart in 2010, which beautifully articulated the circular flows of repair, reuse, refurbish, remake, and recycling of materials, to be achieved through the circular redesign of products and systems.

Among many other tools and resources, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation also produced The Circular Design Guide in 2017 in a collaboration with global design company IDEO.

Packed with methods, tools, examples, and advice, the guide is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to start experimenting with circular design and help shift design from its linear take-make-waste mentality to a reusable and restorative circular mindset.

Circular thinking can be applied in digital design in many ways, as this diagram shows in which the circular product life cycle of a physical product is translated into related components for digital design to focus on.

About and resources:

• About Ellen Macarthur
• The Ellen Macarthur Foundation
• The Circular Design Guide
• Free online course — https://circulab.academy/courses/activate-circular-economy/
• A guide to get started — https://www.circulardesignguide.com/get-started

Kate Raworth and The Doughnut Economy

The Doughnut Economy was introduced by acclaimed economist Kate Raworth in her 2017 book Doughnut Economics as an alternative to the take-make-waste economy[i].

The Doughnut essentially represents a ‘safe operating zone’ between its inner and outer rings. The outer ring represents the nine planetary boundaries mentioned early that we should not overreach. The inner ring represents twelve ‘basics of life’ that we must ensure all peoples remain above to form a safe, just, meaningful, and thriving existence for all.

The space in between these two thresholds — the Doughnut — represents the target area where all activities should be focused in terms of outcomes.

The Doughnut is currently used as a tool to assess development’s impact on ecological and social issues, to plan for improvements, and to hold policymakers and citizens accountable (Figure 2 — The Doughnut Economy).

The Doughnut’s twelve basics of life were derived from the social priorities specified in the United Nation’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

• Sufficient food
• Clean water and decent sanitation
• Access to energy and clean cooking facilities
• Access to education and to healthcare
• Decent housing
• A minimum income and decent work
• Access to networks of information and to networks of social support
• Gender equality
• Social equity
• Political voice
• Peace and justice

Evolved over decades of work by the UN in conjunction with over 170 countries, the SDGs are 17 interconnected global goals that form ‘a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, at present and into the future’. The UN aims to mostly resolve these by 2030, which is around the same time the Stockholm Resilience Centre argues the world will run out of time to be able to reduce the impacts of man-made climate change.

The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), co-founded by Kate Raworth, is part of the emerging global movement to rethink and reconfigure economic thinking by supporting regenerative and distributive projects of governments, communities, cities, businesses, and education. Its emphasis on sustainability and inclusiveness provides a promising framework to evolve modern design out of its three key problems.

Many global initiatives are adopting the Doughnut Model, and more and more businesses are incorporating the SDGs through the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance framework (ESG). ESG is a proposed metric released by the World Economic Forum in September 2021 for organisations to set and measure their sustainability improvements, support to societal movements, and governance. Put simply, organisations set commitments aligned with global goals, like the SDGs, from all three areas — environmental, social, and governance.

This is important for life-centred design because it means the projects of product/experience designers working for a business with an ESG commitment are contributing to the shift toward a sustainable, regenerative, and fair world.

About and resources:

• About Kate Raworth
• Doughnut Economics Action Lab
• About Doughnut Economics
• How to expand Design Thinking for a better tomorrow

Donella Meadows and Systems Thinking

Shifting from our linear economy to a circular one requires systemic solutions. Considering the impacts of the true lifecycle of a product, and how everything is connected, takes designers into systemic thinking.

Donella Meadows, American environmental scientist and author of Thinking in Systems: A Primer in 1993, introduced the concept of leverage points as points in a system where small changes can create big impacts[i].

Systems thinking is a mindset and a set of tools to holistically view the complexity of our world as interconnected and interdependent systems, to see beyond the apparent and linear views, and to identify the root causes and leverage points of change.

It is opposite to the currently dominant view that sees things as many separate and independent parts — a view that can oversimplify perspectives and see parts out of context, and sabotage attempts to improve a system to actually make them worse.

Circular design uses systems thinking to look beyond the product or service, and to see the connections of our creations and processes along the entire lifecycle, so we may intervene in ways that optimise the entire system.

Systems thinking, however, can be messy, complicated, and overwhelming, which risks over-analysis, looking too broadly, and losing focus. But the ability to map holistic views and relationships is more important now with current unprecedented challenges making our wicked problems larger and more complex.

Product Designer and MHCI+D alumni, Tyler La, suggests designers should practice becoming comfortable and confident with uncertainty by defining a certain level of uncertainty as acceptable to move forward.

Systems Mapping is a powerful visual modeling tool to capture the system’s elements and interconnections to create a shared vision, foster collective intelligence, and help identify leverage points for change. System maps are often used during a discovery phase, or for big problems where you don’t know where to start.

For digital designers, systems mapping can be used to extend journey maps and service blueprints to zoom out and diagnose a part of the user journey, supply chain, end-of-use phase, etc. to identify non-humans and non-users impacted by a design.

About and resources:

• About Donella Meadows and her book
• A good explainer article — https://everythingnewisdangerous.medium.com/why-every-designer-should-be-a-systems-thinker-388e4fb7293b
• Systems mapping for UX
• Circular systems toolkit
• Why designers should find the balance between systems thinking and design thinking
• Why every designer should be a systems thinker
• An excellent course (I took this and can recommend it) — https://www.unschools.co/systemsthinkingcourses

Monika Sznel and Environmental Design

Monika Sznel is a design anthropologist, UX researcher, and service designer in Poland.

In May, 2020, Monika began publishing her work iterating human-centred design to be ‘better fitted for the environmental, social and technological context in which we live’, to protect earth’s environmental boundaries as defined in Raworth’s Doughnut Economy model, and to help transition the great amount of talk about sustainability into optimistic, data-driven and coolheaded action.

Monika environmentally-upgraded versions of two human-centered design tools the Business Canvas and the User Persona into tools that translate the systems thinking of the Doughnut, Circular Design, and Systems Mapping into tools for designers to implement at the micro-level, including digital.

The Actant Mapping Canvas—identify non-human stakeholders

Actant Mapping Canvas enables designers to identify all peoples, animals, and environments as legitimate stakeholders in the design process.

The Non-human Persona — including non-human stakeholders

Once non-humans are identified and understood, Monika proposed the use of personas to represent them and their needs throughout the design process.

While not the first to design for non-human needs in modern human-centred design, Monika’s Non-human Persona tool and article were articulated so well that they inspired many UX, UI, and service designers to start experimenting with non-human personas and how to know, consider, and design for non-human needs.

About and resources:

• Monika’s blog
• Monkia’s Actant Mapping Canvas
• Monika’s non-human persona

Women’s History Month is an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. It is celebrated during March in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, corresponding with International Women’s Day on March 8, and during October in Canada, corresponding with the celebration of Persons Day on October 18—Wikipedia

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

4 women who made modern design more life-centred was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As discussed in my previous articles, more designers are using personas to represent non-humans (environments, animals, etc.) and non-users (factory workers, farmers, impacted communities, etc.) to consider their needs as well as those of their users.

Drawing from interviews, analysis, and experimentation of designers from Germany, UK, US, and Australia, I synthesised the learnings into this practical guide for digital designers to start experimenting.

As this guide was created from a small sample of case studies, it is therefore hypothetical in its entirety, so please share back your findings with the community via this Miro board, and be a part of evolving life-centred design.

Contents of this article

• 8 steps to using non-human/non-user personas in digital design (includes examples to inspire)
• Guiding principles
• Challenges and limitations

8 steps to using non-human/non-user personas in digital design

This guide provides steps to assessing a design retrospectively for impacts on non-humans. Ideally, you want to use non-human personas throughout the design process, and you can also use parts of this guide for that approach.

The steps for assessing an existing design are as follows:

1. Map the system
2. Empathise
3. Assess the system for impacts
4. Brainstorm product/business innovations
5. Refine and assess
6. Explore unintended consequences
7. Translate innovations into digital solutions
8. Explore unintended consequences

This guide will assume you have identified a non-human/non-user and created its persona. If not, you can:

• Download these personas to practice with — use a generalised non-human persona such ‘Nature’ as a starter as it will give you a wide lens to generate ideas, or try one of the more specific ones to challenge yourself
• Identify a non-human/non-user from your product/business using Monika Snzel’s Actant Mapping Canvas, and then create the persona using the instructions in my previous article

For the examples in this guide, I’ll be using a Trees persona.

1. Map the system

Digital experiences don’t usually directly impact non-humans/non-users (unless they interact with your digital experience).

So you want to think about the system your digital product belongs to and how it impacts non-humans/non-users to brainstorm system innovations that you can then nurture with the digital experience.

Download this mapping sheet to explore the wider system that your digital product belongs to and how it impacts your non-human/non-user. It’s best to load it into Miro, Mural, etc. and use different colour sticky notes (see the Key).

The SYSTEM VIEW section is for mapping the wider system that your digital experience belongs to, and the LIFECYCLE VIEW section is for mapping the lifecycle of your non-human if it is a resource (eg. trees for paper, oil for plastic, etc.)

For UX designers experimenting on their own, the map is a tool to generate ideas and so you only need to fill in what you can (research and hypothesise), and to the detail you are comfortable with. Obviously, the more detailed you are, the more accurate and insightful it can be, so if you use this with the team and/or business you can be more detailed.

Map the system

1. Using the SYSTEM VIEW section, map the tools and tech and people and activities for the wider system. You might want to start with what you’re most familiar with (e.g. Products & Services) and work out from there.

• Business 3rd parties — Web hosting, Internet providers, etc. supporting the business
• Business — Business components supporting the products, services, and user experiences
• Channels — Digital and physical stores/touch-points for users (list the channels at the top)
• Products & Services — Products and services sold or enabled by the business (list the products at the top)
• Users — Primary users/customers
• User 3rd Parties — Communities connected to your users and product

Map the value generated

Now you can see the business system, brainstorm/research the value generated (for people, non-humans, and ecosystems) and note them on your map.

2. Empathise

Before assessing the system for how it impacts your non-human/non-user, empathise more deeply with them.

• Immerse — Use a mediative approach to imagine being the persona and imagine the persona’s needs are your needs. Try Sandy Daehnert’s meditation to emphasise with Nature
• For animals, you could role-play with friends as an animal to get familiar with non-verbal communication

An immersive approach is very powerful as you de-centre yourself and critique the design with less bias. You will still have some bias of course, but this immersive approach helps you think and feel more from the non-human/non-user’s perspective.

3. Assess the system for impacts

Returning to your system map, assess each aspect for how it might impact each of the non-human/non-user needs, challenges, etc.

Note on the map any positive and negative impacts.

• Does human action at any part of the system directly or indirectly impact the non-human’s needs, challenges, etc.?
• Do the extraction and processing of natural resources directly or indirectly impact the non-human needs?
• Do the manufacturing, shipping, selling, using, and discarding of products directly or indirectly impact the non-human needs?
• If your non-human is a resource, use the LIFECYCLE VIEW to consider the lifecycle of its use, from when it is extracted, processed, manufactured, shipped, sold, and used, to when the users finish with it and discard it. Where are the resources used, overused, spoiled, or wasted, and by whom?
• Does the value generated by the system directly or indirectly impact the needs, challenges, etc.?

Example — As well as being cut down for paper for printing my books and tools, trees were impacted along the book lifecycle:

• Extraction — Deforestation was caused by the mining of materials of electronics that my ebooks and digital tools relied on to be used
• Processing and manufacturing — paper as a resource is spoiled during processing and manufacturing by the combination of chemicals, glue, and ink, and the factories can destroy ecosystems — Paper manufacturing is the third-largest user of fossil fuels worldwide
• Sales — Around 10 million of the trees that are killed to create books die in vain each year, because the books end up getting destroyed instead of read
• End of use — Unread and unrecycled books end up in a landfill, and their decomposition generates twice as much global warming emissions and toxic impacts on local water systems as does its manufacturing

Explore future and indirect consequences of these impacts using ‘compounding impact’ brainstorming tools such as the Ripple Canvas or Futures Wheel to brainstorm indirect consequences. Add any potential indirect impacts you identify to the System map.

4. Brainstorm product/business innovations

For each impact/problem identified, brainstorm solutions.

Remember, you are still thinking system-wide at this stage, brainstorming solutions of any kind, including potential digital strategies and those beyond your control or influence.

To brainstorm solutions, think in terms of these 4 innovation strategies:

1. Remove damage — Replace the issue with a no-impact solution, or ask if your product/business even needs this part of the system
2. Reduce damage — Improve the issue or replace the solution with a less impactful solution
3. Restore damage — Restore the damage caused by the system
4. Enrich health — Thinking beyond fixing damage, consider where you can use business resources/prosperity to nurture sources of food, etc. for the non-human/non-user, that aren’t impacted, but which you could keep healthy

‘Remove damage’ and ‘Enrich health’ are most important as they prevent and stop damage — if you can remove and enrich everything then you won’t need to reduce or restore.

To Remove, Reduce, Restore, and Enrich, consider these 5 approaches:

1. Circular Design — Using more sustainable materials, ensuring products and materials get more than 1 life, etc.
2. Sustainable Web Design — Reducing the energy used in digital experiences
3. Behavioural design — Inform users, staff, the public, etc, to raise awareness, and nudge them to choose sustainable behaviours
4. Datafy — How can the product/service/system capture data from the non-human/non-users to give them a voice? Or to measure the impact of your design changes? What existing or new tech in your product/service or the system could be used? Can you employ Animal Computer interaction technology like Screen and Tracking Systems, Haptic and Wearable Systems, Tangible and Physical Systems?
5. Share value — Referring to the value identified on your map, consider how this can be used to help remove, restore, enrich, inform, or datafy

Example — I determined 6 possible innovations to support Trees:

1. To REMOVE the waste of material due to discarded overprints, I could use ‘Print on demand’ only for printed books
2. To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, I could ensure all tools can be used digitally
3. To RESTORE damage of trees cut down for paper, I could donate X% of sales of printed books to onetreeplanted.org
4. To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, I could find more eco-friendly printers
5. To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, I could INFORM users by providing instructions on how to pass books into circular loops when finished
6. To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, nudge users to use ebooks

Useful resources:

• 170 Actions to combat climate change for ideas to support or nudge human behaviours (users staff, etc.)
• 18 strategic priorities (Slide/page 16) to achieve a sustainable planet in the digital age for digital themes to consider
• The Butterfly Diagram for ideas on how to reuse materials and reduce waste
• The Circular Design Guide for ideas on improving product design and business models
• Sustainable Web Design
• Interspecies design cards for animal interaction

5. Refine and assess

Explore your innovations in more detail to tease out the unfeasible ideas, and define the best ones to focus on with digital.

Try the Non-human/non-user Digital Solutions tool to explore, refine and assess feasibility.

In the REFINE INNOVATIONS section, place each of your innovation ideas into a column.

Research and explore more detail to understand the feasibility of the business implementing or influencing them.

Decide which ideas you can take through to digital:

• For feasible ideas that don’t require a business change or approval from someone else, and can be achieved just by working with UI and content designers and developers, you can directly support these in the digital experience
• For ideas that require a business decision and are feasible for the business, you may still support these via digital
• For ideas that require a business decision and are not feasible for the business, park these ideas for now

Example — After exploring my 5 innovations, I determined:

• 1 was not very feasible (sourcing more eco-friendly printers)
• 2 were feasible and could be supported in digital (use print on demand and donate to conservationist groups), but required business decisions
• 1 was feasible and could be supported in digital (use print on demand and donate to conservationist groups), but required business decisions… but I was uncertain about the benefit of ebooks over physical… this is where the lack of knowledge and data shows as a weakness of personas
• 2 could be directly supported in the digital experience (inform users on keeping books circular and ensure all tools are digital) and didn’t require business decisions

6. Explore unintended consequences

Due to the weaknesses of personas, such as lack of accuracy and/or completeness, well-intended designs can have unintended consequences.

Also, we should consider the long-term effects of innovations, such as:

• What impacts will your product’s lifecycle have after it’s been running for a year, 2 yrs, or 10 yrs?
• What impacts will your product’s lifecycle have if your user base scales up greatly?

Explore future and indirect consequences of your innovations using ‘compounding impact’ brainstorming tools such as:

• Futures Wheel
• Ripple Canvas

Example — I placed my innovations on the Futures Wheel (and duplicated a few innovations to fill the spaces). I wasn’t certain about my innovation #6 (To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, nudge users to use ebooks), whether driving users to use ebooks over print on demand was actually better, as print on demand has less waste than traditional publishing which prints mass amounts, some of which can end up unsold and in landfill. Using the Futures Wheel to think longer term, a drive toward only ebooks would increase the negative impacts of digital tech, such as CO2 emissions, over-mining for metals, etc. Without enough data, I chose to leave this innovation for now.

7. Translate innovations into digital solutions

Now you have innovations to support through digital, bring your thinking to the user experience level and define digital solutions to support the innovations.

Using the Non-human/non-user Digital Solutions tool, move the innovations down that you’ve decided you can support in digital into the DEFINE DIGITAL SOLUTIONS section.

Use these prompts to brainstorm digital solutions:

UX, UI

• Allow filtering for planet-friendly options — Use filters to allow users to easily identify more planet-friendly options that impact you related non-human/non-user less, such as filtering locally-made, organic, and sustainable options
• Use priority placement and visual hierarchy to make sustainable options easier to choose
• Link to user behaviour/mindset change information — Provide links to helpful information related to your non-human/non-user to raise user awareness and nudge more sustainable behaviours
• Link to promote supporters — Promote and integrate not-for-profit and environmental organisations related to your non-human/non-user to nurture awareness and behavioural change, such as integrating registration and donation forms and linking to community events
• Use calm colours to help users slow down and make time for sustainable decision making

Content

• Copy — Infuse web copy with reference to non-humans/non-users, ‘deepening the conversation and intent on the website’ and increasing user awareness
• Copy — Give voice to the non-human/non-user in the digital journey and communications with first-person voice messages, thanking users for sustainable choices and giving feedback on any measurable impact users made
• Calm messaging — Use calm colours and messaging (instead of time-based and urgent messaging such as ‘Buy now’ or ‘Low stock’) to help users slow down and make time for sustainable decision making
• Provide digital versions of any printable downloads

User behaviour

• Improve user awareness — What user awareness can be improved regarding the non-human/non-user and its needs?
• Inform/nudge user behaviours — Use behavioural design to determine any user behaviours can be nudged, during the experience or beyond, such as donating, recycling, etc. to support the non-human/non-user and its needs
• Use gamification — Can ethical gamification and feedback be utilised to nudge preferred user behaviours?

Data & Metrics

• Reuse data differently — Can any existing data be used differently to connect the experience and user with the initiatives, or to encourage user behaviour change?
• Expand data sets — Can any new data be sourced via the system (business 3rd parties, users, user 3rd parties, etc.) to help monitor the non-humans/non-users or user behaviour?
• User collected/shared data — Can users share localised information regarding the non-human/non-user?
• Data for metrics — What metrics can you use to monitor and measure the positive or negative impact on the non-user of your design decisions?

Accountability

• How will you hold yourself accountable for these solutions? For example, posting commitments on the website and updating progress/metrics

Example — I brainstormed 5 ways to support Trees in the digital experience:

• To REMOVE the waste of material due to discarded overprints, use ‘Print on demand’ only for printed books (As the owner of this business, I could make the business decision to go ahead with this innovation)
• To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, I will inform/nudge users by providing instructions for how to maintain, repair, reuse, and recycle books (Metrics: n/a, Accountability: post commitment and donations on site)
• To RESTORE damage of trees cut down for paper, I will donate to https://onetreeplanted.org/ (Accountability: post commitment and donations on site)
• Donating was a business decision, but it also generated the idea to encourage users to donate also, so I inform and nudge users with a promotional link to https://onetreeplanted.org/ (Metrics: track clicks)
• To REDUCE material use/extraction from trees, I will provide digital versions of any printable downloads (Metrics: track clicks, Accountability: post commitment on site)

You can view some of these innovations here.

8. Explore unintended consequences

Again, you can explore the unintended consequences from a digital perspective, such as what impacts will your design changes have if digital user numbers scale up to millions.

Example — I briefly explored the idea of my user base scaling to ten million. One thing I was reminded of was whether any drive for digital to replace physical experiences is the negative impact of increased CO2 emissions and mining from the tech industry. One mitigation a digital designer could implement is to ensure all downloads are optimised (see Sustainable Web Design strategies).

Iterate your ideas as needed.

Then continue as per Human Centred Design — designing, testing, and iterating for launch and post-launch monitoring.

Guiding principles

• Be data-based and wary of stereotyping and bias — Stay vigilant against the accidental embedding of stereotypes and your own bias into non-human needs and experiences — use verified data and challenge your initial hypotheses
• Expect trade-offs — Just as there are trade-offs between the user and business needs, there will also be trade-offs between life-centred thinking and human-centred thinking as the world transitions to a less human-centred paradigm
• Allow new key non-humans/non-users to emerge organically throughout the process
• Ensure the personas are updated and grow over time, as the designer and business learn more about the non-humans/non-users
• Use personas to influence by sharing them with the team and business and including them in their creation — try multi-media formats such as audio and video files for engaging stakeholders and the public
• Constantly explore ways to test the impact of design decisions that were made for the benefit of non-humans/non-users — how can we use the metrics, and how can we get feedback from the non-humans/non-users?
• Practice by using non-human/non-user personas retrospectively to assess existing designs, then embed the personas in your process, using them as BAU as often as you do human personas

Challenges and limitations

• The more generalised the persona (e.g. Nature, The Earth, etc.) the more innovative ideas will be generated, but many will be at the system-level that will need to be approved by the business, limiting the digital designer’s influence
• Non-human/non-user personas can have the same limitations as human personas, such as lack of accuracy and completeness, being made with biased images and content and harmful stereotyping, generalisation leaving out the marginalised, and not being updated or referred to often (weakening empathy) — and these can cause unintended rebound effects
• Effects may take a long time to measure — Designing to improve the needs of non-humans/non-users may take a long time to take effect, such as how long new trees and regeneration projects may take to show any positive impact

But there’s no reason why any designer in any role can’t asses their work from a non-human/non-user perspective and share back any insights with decision-makers.

Help shape life-centred design!

Be a part of evolving life-centred design by sharing your feedback from using this process. The more we share, the more we can learn from each other.

If you use this Guide, tools, or its insight for your own courses, workshops, books, articles, etc, please credit and link back to this article.

The tools:

• Business System Map
• Non-human and non-user Digital Solutions
• Persona templates and examples

Learn everything about non-human personas with the guidebook and toolkit

The Non-human Persona Guide

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

Special thanks to Sandy Daehnert, Fiona Tout, Ben Serbutt, Victor Udoewa, and Martin Tomitsch whose practical insights informed this guide.

8 steps to using non-human personas in digital design was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last few years, the discussion has grown about non-human personas — personas representing natural environments and animals for designers to consider their needs as well as humans.

But how can digital designers actually use the needs of a plant, animal, or environment to inform their design decisions to make their digital experience have more planet-friendly impacts?

I’m still working out my own practices, so I interviewed digital and service designers from Germany, UK, and US who use non-human personas, analyzed the detailed work of other academic and business projects, and included insight from one of my own projects, to learn from their use of non-human personas for informing design decisions.

Each project was analysed to understand:

• Frequency of use
• How the personas were used to inform design decisions
• Examples of the actual design changes made from assessing non-human needs (with a focus on digital design)

The projects analysed:

1. Web and mobile projects — Sandy Daehnert (Interviewed) | Germany
2. Urban digital interface design — Martin Tomitsch, Joel Fredericks, Dan Vo, Jessica Frawley, Marcus Foth | Australia
3. E-commerce UX — Damien Lutz | Australia
4. Service design workshop experience — Victor Udoewa (Interviewed) | US
5. Introducing non-human personas to clients — Fiona Tout and Ben Serbutt (Interviewed) | UK

1. Web and mobile

Sandy Daehnert

Web & Mobile Designer | Germany

Sandy Daehnert is a UX researcher, UX architect, and UI designer, based in Germany, and who has “a passion for (ecological and social) sustainability, mental health, accessibility, and inclusion”.

Sandy also founded www.greentheweb.com in 2019 from which she generously shares her experiences, knowledge, tools, and resources.

Through her approach and website, Sandy supports both ‘designers and companies in creating ecologically and socially sustainable websites, apps, online shops, and other digital products”.

Sandy uses non-human personas to:

• To make more ecologically sustainable UX/UI choices
• To find out what’s important to talk about in digital products in terms of sustainability.
• To bring more intention and purpose into the project (inside and outside).
• To reaffirm to stakeholders how important green UX/UI is and to ensure her process stays on that path

Sandy generally creates her personas as documents before the design process begins, and then refers to them often along the research, design, iteration, implementation, and analysis process.

Using the personas

Non-human stakeholders: Sandy has created and used personas for various non-humans such as Mother Nature, Cologne as a city, the Atlantic Ocean, and Thuringian forest.

Frequency: Use at all steps along the design process — research, ideation, design, iteration, implementation, and analysis. Also, encourage the business to use them beyond the design process, such as in marketing and business decision meetings.

Assessing design impacts on persona needs:

1. Connect with the non-human

Connect with your specific non-human(s) using an imagination exercise to empathise. Consider:

• Their needs
• Their desires
• Their relationship with humanity (what they give and take from each other)

2. Review the design and ask yourself questions about how the persona’s needs, desires, etc, are impacted by the design.

• How is the persona negatively impacted and how can this be reduced?
• How are they positively impacted and how can this be enhanced?
• What else can be done to nurture the non-human?

Examples of non-human persons informing design decisions

• Web copy — In a project where Sandy created a persona for the city of Cologne, this influenced how the digital product communicated, deepening the conversation and intent on the website
• UI design — integrating donation options in an online shop for projects supporting the non-human

2. Urban digital interface design

Martin Tomitsch, Joel Fredericks, Dan Vo, Jessica Frawley, Marcus Foth

Interaction Design Students and Educators | Australia

Exploring how non-human personas could be used as a means of including nature in the design of smart cities, these three projects were collated by Martin Tomitsch into a research article for the Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal:

1. Smart urban furniture
2. The external interface of an autonomous vehicle
3. Visualised data interface capturing citizen opinion

The first project allowed for experimentation with non-human personas and informed the development of a non-human personas framework, which was then applied hypothetically to the other two projects.

Project 1 (Smart urban furniture)

Non-human stakeholders: Possums, plants, birds, bees

Frequency of use: Throughout the design process, informing the initial concept and iterating.

Examples of non-human persons informing design decisions:

• Removing product features — Considering the well-being of birds, wireless charging stations were removed from the design
• Adding features — To provide a water source for possums, bees, and birds, and irrigation for the plants, a rainwater system was added
• Adapting features — To reduce the impact on possums, birds, and bees at night, sensors were adapted to activate lights that provided visibility and safety for humans on their approach and deactivated when not needed.

This project led to the creation of a proposed non-human persona framework, which involved forming a coalition of experts related to the non-human to inform the personas more scientifically.

The steps for when the designer used the personas to assess their design were:

1. View from the persona’s perspective
2. Assess the impact of the design on the non-human needs
3. Look for opportunities to innovate, asking questions such as:

• What are the negative impacts to change?
• What are the positive impacts to enhance?
• What features can be included, excluded, or adapted?

This approach, and the framework, were then used to assess two existing urban digital design projects.

Project 2 — An interface on the outside of an autonomous vehicle

Non-human stakeholders: Domestic animals, bats

Frequency: A post-design analysis

Examples of non-human persons informing digital design decisions:

• Adapt sensors to identify non-humans — Considering possums, ibises, and domestic cats and dogs as non-human stakeholders at risk of being hit by the AV, sensors were suggested enabling the AV to identify both humans and non-humans
• Design for animal interaction — The need to consider domestic dogs as non-humans who could accompany humans inside the vehicle and their interaction with the vehicle
• Design with care for animal differences — Bats as non-humans whose extra-sensory navigation might be potentially impacted by the AV’s technology
• Use future scenarios — COVID-19 as a non-human that might impact the scaling of use of the vehicles

Project 3 — A desktop dashboard providing visualised data on citizens’ opinions on large urban developments

Non-human stakeholders: Eucalyptus trees

Frequency: A post-design analysis

Examples of non-human persons informing design decisions:

• Expand data sets to include non-humans — Considering the eucalyptus tree as a primary non-human in urban areas due to its importance as a habitat, the dashboard algorithms could be designed to include posts and commentary about eucalyptus trees and other non-human species

3. E-commerce UX

Damien Lutz

UX Designer & Researcher | Australia

As a UX designer and researcher who has experimented with non-human and non-user personas, I’ve drawn from the insights of my own projects.

In a recent project, I predetermined an overarching Nature persona to explore if it was possible to make an online grocery e-commerce experience support life-centred thinking. While the real challenge is reducing the world’s consumption of throw-away products, I explored how UX could be used to support these changes in the meantime from the micro-level.

Using the personas

Non-human stakeholders: Nature

Frequency: As I had already designed the UX, I used the persona retrospectively as a lens to assess the impacts on its needs.

Assessing design impacts on persona needs:

As the Nature persona was very generalised, I assessed how its needs/values were challenged by the system the UX supported (grocery manufacturing, supply, sales, and waste).

• Livestock welfare
• Supply chain energy use and pollution
• Depletion of fish and sea life
• Farmland health, soil health, etc.
• Pesticide use
• Agriculture disruption to natural habitats
• Packaging excess and waste

I then related these issues to humans, first at a system level:

• Overconsumption is worsening all these impacts

Finally, to start bringing this back to the UX, I considered insights from the user testing that revealed how consumers were disconnected from these impacts due to:

• Felt time-poor and wanted to purchase quickly and easily
• Responded better to incentives or disincentives

I then brainstormed how the business could use its value and influence to support sustainable user behaviour rather than supporting the linear lifecycle of take-make-waste. For example, supermarkets could give rewards or reward points that can be spent on experiences that help customers:

• Slow down — Passes for massages, meditation, etc.
• Connect to nature — Suggested weekly nature walks in the customer’s area
• Connect users to where their food comes from — Passes for farm tours, etc.
• Reduce the damage — To reduce food wastage, offer passes to cooking classes on how to maximise food use, or provide guides on where to share food when its no longer needed
• Heal the damage — To heal the damage of waste products ending up on the land, facilitate litter clean-up days (that also allow participants to earn more reward points to use on more planet-friendly activities or to purchase only planet-friendly products)

To bring this back to possible UX solutions, I then brainstormed how the UX could support these business initiatives

Examples of non-human personas informing design decisions:

• Use persona first-person voice in copy such as in pop-up modals and EDMS, thanking them for the planet-friendly choices, and displaying any measurable impact their choices have made
• Filter local-made products so users can support local produce
• Link to helpful behaviour-change information such as guides to keeping food fresh for longer and tips for switching to plant-based foods
• Promote and integrate not-for-profit and environmental organisations and events
• Use calm colours and messaging (instead of time-based and urgent messaging such as ‘Buy now’ or ‘Low stock’) to help users slow down and make time for sustainable decision making

See the full case study here.

4. Service experience

Victor Udoewa

Service Deisgner| UK

Victor Udoewa is a service and experience design lead with experience working with the USA federal government, NASA, and local community projects. He has worked with the needs of non-humans such as plants, terrains, ice, water, and air.

When it comes to non-humans, Victor also includes ‘non-living’ things, drawing from indigenous wisdom that recognises there is sentience in rocks, mountains, etc. However, in many indigenous perspectives, all creation is alive and the living/non-living separation does not exist.

He is also a great advocate for Radical Participatory Design (RPD) and uses the RPD meta-methodology and teaches Radical Participatory Design on Interaction Design Foundation — IXDF.

Victor’s approach brings together people who can bring different types of knowledge — intuitive, energetic, embodied, aesthetic, community relational, spiritual, and lived experiential knowledge — into the process. To avoid mainstream, institutional design knowledge dominating the process, these knowledge bearers become full-fledged members of the design and research team, so they lead the design with their values, ways of being, knowledge, and ways of designing, and they own the artifacts and narratives produced.

While he works at the service, social, or systems levels, his projects may feed into UX solutions, and the insights he shares can be relevant when working at all levels.

Victor works more with behavioral archetypes and characters rather than personas. Characters are based on three criteria:

1. Anxieties and motivations
2. Goal progress events — Events that move the human or non-human along the pathway from awareness to interest to desire to action
3. Goal progress situations — Situations in which the human or non-human must make decisions or is forced to make a decision about whether they will take the goal-completing action or not

Using the non-human character/persona

Non-human stakeholders: Air, water

Frequency: Victor uses his non-human insights often throughout the design process, treating them the same as human ones, referring to the non-human needs whenever he would refer to the human ones.

“I’m always referring back to the needs, that’s what we’re trying to satisfy.”

Assessing design impacts on persona needs

1 — Assess the needs, use the same steps of making sure that human needs are represented

2 — Ask yourself questions:

• Will the design now or in the future violate or detract from the needs of non-humans?
• For the human problem we solve, are you creating that problem for the non-human?
• What are common needs across humans and non-humans?
• Consider digital services as tangible products somewhere — what’s the hardware of any software or UX, and how does that impact non-humans? Consider the energy used, and any waste, pollution, or heat generated.

Getting UX specific

Victor argues UX designed for humans can’t really meet non-human needs directly with UX for humans, as UX for humans is not usually about non-human interaction. The non-human needs and values are defined at the systems or social level that can then flow through the process to the product-level designer to ensure the product and UX carry those same values…

‘helping the human to interact with software in ways that uplift and support the needs of all creation or helping the human learn what actions through the software and outside the software support the flourishing of all creation.’

Victor suggests UX designers can use non-human personas by asking themselves questions, such as:

• Is the user behaviour negatively affecting non-humans?
• How can the design inform the users about the non-humans and non-human needs?
• How can the design create a disruption that makes plain and visible the harmful ways the human is affecting non-human needs, in an effort to curb them?

Examples of non-human persons informing design decisions:

Adapt the experience of a learning service and product — For a digital literacy service project in India, Victor and his team had to get information to groups of people from different areas to train them on software.

With Air as a non-human stakeholder, however, the team didn’t want to add to the existing serious pollution problem by using fossil-fuelled vehicles to transport facilitators to different locations.

Instead, the team changed the experience of the educational service by delivering it through a bike program. The facilitators rode out to areas on bikes with devices and internet hot spots to provide training in various villages across India.

In Bangladesh, they did a bus program. Choosing a mobile option instead of a stationary one also brought access to the internet to many other people they met along the way. And using the same bus route each time was better for animals as they could adapt to the buses coming through.

5. Introducing non-human personas to clients

Ben Serbutt and Fiona Tout

Design Lead and Senior Product Designer | &us | UK

Introducing the use of non-human personas into commercial design practice can be tricky, so I spoke to two designers who have made a start.

‘&us’ is an innovation and transformation consultancy in the UK. They are at the beginning of their journey into designing more life-centred, so their story about how they began using them gives insight into getting started with clients.

Ben Serbutt, Design Lead at &us, has initiated life-centred thinking with colleagues at &us through demos and fortnightly discussions about how to incorporate it into their commercial design projects.

Product designer, Fiona Tout, saw one such opportunity to use a persona for Mother Nature with a recent client.

&us were helping with the UX foundations and redefining of a product for a client with a traditional waterfall mindset. During a workshop to explore the value and benefits of the product, one of the participants noted that the product contributed to the circular economy, and Fiona saw this as an opportunity to propose using a non-human persona.

After asking the client if they’d heard about life-centred design, she proposed exploring the idea with a non-human persona representing the environment, which the client was very open to. Fiona framed the proposal as experimental, as it was also new for them as designers, and this gave open permission for the team to explore the concept.

Identifying the non-human:

Fiona pre-determined Mother Nature as the non-human, to represent the stakeholder of the circular economy, as mentioned by the client.

Co-creating the persona:

Using a very simple template on an online whiteboard, Fiona prefilled Mother Nature’s behaviours and ambitions from desktop research.

Then, with the client, the team answered questions from the Planet Centric Design toolkit to brainstorm Mother Nature’s needs and frustrations. They investigated how to measure success with Mother Nature’s needs in mind, the planet-positive and negative effects of the product, and what experts they might need to bring into the project (e.g. in sustainability).

Impacts and learnings:

Fiona and Ben plan to do a follow-up to turn the insights into actionable items to make the product more life-centred. They’re so interested in the outcome that they are aiming to use life-centred thinking on each of their new projects.

Ben suggests using non-human personas and other life-centred techniques as part of the standard process for every project, especially where there are opportunities to work with clients’ sustainability and innovation departments.

Learn everything about non-human personas with the guidebook and toolkit

The Non-human Persona Guide

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

Special thanks to Sandy Daehnert, Fiona Tout, Ben Serbutt, and Victor Udoewa for taking the time to answer my questions and generously sharing their experiences.

5 design projects using non-human personas to give nature a voice was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Non-human personas represent the lifeforms impacted by a product’s lifecycle, but how might a solo UX designer use them, with little time or budget for expert involvement, to inform UX decisions to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of digital products?

Non-humans personas represent invisible humans, lifeforms, and natural environments impacted by a product’s lifecycle. They may represent a real person or a persona group. They may be a combination of fictional representations and scientific data.

Non-human personas can be a specific lifeform directly impacted by a product/business, a complex environment, or a generalised representation of Nature.

Environment stakeholder examples:

• Vegetation (trees, forests, swamps, etc.)
• Water systems (oceans, lakes, rivers, freshwater)
• Air
• Soil
• Climate and weather
• Landforms (mountains, hills, etc.)
• Sunlight
• Sounds
• Temperature
• Gases and atmospheric elements
• Biodiversity

Animal stakeholder examples:

• From large animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) to insects and microbes
• On land, sea, air, or underground
• Domestic, livestock, captive, or wild
• Whether ‘proven’ sentient or not

Anthropologist, UX researcher, and environment-centred design advocate, Monika Snzel advises that environment/non-human personas differ from user personas in that they are primarily based on facts.

However, their purpose is the same as a human user persona — to enable designers and decision-makers to empathise with the persona’s needs. They should be written in a way that conveys the non-human as a living, breathing, vulnerable, powerful entity to be heard and respected.

Systems thinking, long-term thinking, and life-centred design

Creating and using personas of non-human stakeholders can help us think systemically about micro-level design (UX, UI, Visual, etc.) and how it might have impacts on non-users, people, animals, and environments along the lifecycle of the product, at the individual, community, and global levels, and over time.

This helps a designer be more life-centred by enabling them to view the impact of their work at micro, meso, and macro levels.

As shared in my earlier article, life-centred design enables product designers and businesses of physical and digital products to consider the impacts of their products on all people, all non-humans, and all planet.

Examples of life-centred design thinking in digital:

• A website designed to keep users clicking through to new pages demands more energy from the website’s servers and its users’ devices, generating more CO2 and contributing to climate change.
• And what happens over time if that website’s user base scales to 10 million? The energy demand increases, the CO2 increases, and the server farms expand destroying surrounding ecosystems and displacing humans and animals — all because the UX was designed to keep users clicking.
• Apps and their UX not only use energy to power the websites and devices but also drives demand for these devices and the mining of the rare earth minerals required to make the devices, which can systemically drive conflict and forced labour in the areas of those mines

Including non-user and non-human personas allows UX designers to see the potential impacts of their design beyond the target user experience, so they may adjust the design accordingly.

Previous research talks about the need for expert input on using non-human information to avoid unintended negative impacts for well-intended design decisions.

However, many UX designers don't get the time or budget to scientifically develop non-human personas and engage experts, effectively cutting them off from this important tool and process that not only informs design decisions but develops designers’ awareness of sustainable digital design.

I wanted to explore the pros and cons of using a non-human persona for a UX project from a solo, low-budget design perspective.

The UX project

The subject to which I applied the non-human persona was an online grocery shopping experience, which used behavioural UX design to nudge grocery shoppers to buy planet-friendly alternatives.

The key UX strategies implemented in this project were 1) proactive product recommendations based on planet-friendly certifications to encourage 2) product swapping.

When users clicked “Add to cart” for their product of choice, they were shown an alternative that was certified to be more planet-friendly (for having sustainable packaging, for example). Users could click “Add this product instead” and seamlessly swap from their first product of choice to the more planet-friendly one and add it to their cart.

You can see the prototype here.

The human user persona

The user persona for this design was Andrew, husband to Amy, and father of a 2-year-old boy. Andrew and his wife worry about the future of the planet but are very price-driven due to the rising cost of living.

The non-human persona

The non-human persona I used represented Nature itself, or more specifically, the interconnected life-inhabited zone from which the supermarket supply chains draw resources (living and non-living) to feed humans and supply them with goods.

Due to the guerilla approach of my personal projects, I based this persona on secondary research of data (web search, articles, etc.), as per Snzel’s recommendation and Tomitch’s validation of this approach.

I wanted this one to be something that when I read it as a designer it would help me empathise with Nature and think as if I am Nature, like a mental preparation/meditation to get into the mindset, so that I may challenge the design from Nature’s needs and give Nature a voice like any business or user stakeholder.

Using the non-human persona

While some practitioners recommend using non-human personas to be used throughout the design process and referred to as often as human user personas, they can also be used retrospectively on existing designs.

My steps to using the non-human persona

1. Empathising with non-human/non-user needs and problems—My first step was to read the persona to empathise with Nature as a legitimate stakeholder by focusing on the needs and problems
2. Use non-human persona as a lens —I reviewed the design to identify how it directly or indirectly impacted the non-human needs or contributed to its problems
3. Bring any insight back to the UX — I then reviewed the insight and the design to brainstorm how the impacts to the non-human could be addressed

Let’s look at the steps in more detail.

1. Empathising with non-human/non-user needs and problems

After reading the persona’s needs as a means of mental preparation, I used an immersion technique by closing my eyes and imagining I was nature, that Nature’s needs were my needs.

I imagined my body as nature, my blood the rivers, my muscles the soil, my skin the land, and my breathing the weather. I imagined humanity as a small lifeform present in my body, a part of my system, but expanding rapidly and overdrawing from my blood and my nutrients, blocking blood and airflow and congesting my veins and lungs.

I read the persona again to consider the problems impacting ‘my’ needs as Nature and what Nature needed now to repair these to get back to thriving:

• Uninterrupted natural cycles of energy and materials (carbon, heat, etc.)
• Time to heal soil, rivers, oceans, air, and biodiversity

And what Nature needed from us to support these changes:

• Use fewer resources
• Use sustainable resources
• Repair, reuse, remake, recycle
• Eat less meat
• Reduce overall consumption
• Reduce and reuse waste
• Regenerate

This was very powerful as I somewhat decentred myself and I critiqued the design with less bias. I still had some bias, of course, but this really spun my perspective to at least what I imagined the non-human’s needs-based perspective would be.

2. Use non-human persona as a lens

I considered these needs as if they were my own, and reviewed each screen design to identify how the design might directly or indirectly impact the needs and/or exasperate the problem.

I imagined, as Nature, I could speak through the blue Earth logo in the design, and I explored what I would say as Nature.

Initial thoughts were ‘buy less, use less, use what you have for longer, grow your own food, reuse or recycle the waste, help me breathe, save my diversity, give my land and waters time to heal.”

All of this spoke to great systemic change and business model revolution, which could feed into business strategy projects connecting to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS).

Just a few examples of which SDGs a supermarket could champion to support the non-human persona of Nature:

• Life on land — agricultural soil regeneration and animal welfare protection for livestock
• Life below water—responsible fishing and fish farming
• Responsible consumption — reduced production and packaging waste

While all three Australian supermarket giants have community commitments that contribute to the SDGS, their businesses are still based on a destructive model of mass production and consumption.

To explore what systemic solutions the business could make, I used The Life-centred Purpose tool to brainstorm problems and solutions.

I first identified and ticked the related SDGs

I then brainstormed the impacts of the business on the related SDGs:

• Livestock welfare
• Supply chain energy use and pollution
• Depletion of fish and sea life
• Farmland health, soil health, pesticides, etc.
• Agriculture’s disruption to natural habitats
• Packaging excess and waste

3. Connecting systemic problems with UX solutions:

To start bringing this back to the UX, I then related these issues to humans, initially at a system level:

• Mass production and overconsumption are worsening all these impacts

Finally, I considered the individual level:

• Individual consumers are disconnected from these impacts

This focused my UX solutioning on improving user sustainability awareness and behaviour.

What were the user’s reasons for this disconnect?

Considering the needs of nature to thrive as defined above, I looked back at my initial user feedback for reasons for this disconnect and for barriers to change.

Users said they:

• Felt time-poor
• Wanted to purchase quickly and easily
• Responded better to incentives or disincentives

The user’s desire for speed and convenience was creating a sense of urgency that made them rush their chores, like grocery shopping, and that made them unable to see and feel the connection with the land from which their food came.

That meant exploring how the UX could use give customers a sense of more time and re-connection with Nature.

So I flipped these problems into How Might We? statements that also related to the identified SDGs.

• How might we make consumers feel less time-poor?
• How might we make consumers feel less rushed?
• How might we use incentives or disincentives to encourage slowing down, connecting to nature, and being more responsible with their consumption?

Again, consideration for the non-human took me back out to a business/systemic view and an approach from outside the purchase journey, but one that might eventually also loop back to influence purchasing behaviours.

For example, supermarkets could give rewards or reward points that can be spent on experiences that help customers:

• Slow down
  Passes for massages, meditation, etc.
• Connect to nature
  Suggested weekly nature walks in the customer’s area
• Connect users to where their food comes from
  Passes for farm tours, etc.
• Reduce the damage
  Choose products that are more planet-friendly. And to reduce food wastage, offer passes to cooking classes on how to maximise food use, or provide guides on where to share food when its no longer needed
• Heal the damage
  To heal the damage of waste products ending up on the land, facilitate litter clean-up days (that also allow participants to earn more points)

How could the UX nurture these user behaviour changes?

• Colour — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Slow down’, the design could use calm colours instead of the usual bright primary colours
• Messaging — Use less time-based/urgency messaging such as ‘Buy now’ or ‘Low stock’
• Persona first-person voice in copy — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Connect to nature’, the UX could also give voice to nature by displaying a pop-up modal on users’ return visits with first-voice messaging ‘from Nature’ thanking them for the planet-friendly choices in their previous shop, and displaying any measurable impact they made (or display a cumulative effect of all planet-friendly shoppers). Also, adding a ‘From Nature’ voice or section in EDMs and other communications with similar information that more deeply connects shopping and product-using habits directly with their connection to land, where their food and goods come from
• Filter local-made products — To ‘Connect users to where their food comes from’, offer a filter function to display locally-made products so users can support local produce
• Links to helpful behaviour-change information — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Reduce the damage’, provide users with awareness and easy purchasing options for more planet-friendly products, and provide behaviour nudges with links to guides to keeping food fresh for longer, and to tips and recipes for switching to plant-based foods
• Promote and integrate not-for-profit and environmental organisations — To nurture the behavioral change of ‘Heal the damage’, use visuals and copy to promote community events, such as litter clean-up days, and integrate registration forms for not-for-profit and environmental organisations

Finally, using sustainable digital strategies, I identified several changes I could make to reduce the energy required to power the digital experience, to reduce energy sources required from nature and the carbon output into the atmosphere. For example:

• Ensure images are optimised in size and file size, and convert images to the smaller WebP format
• Replace non-product images (such as promotional images) with svg graphics
• Darken any large areas of light colour (such as backgrounds)
• Reduce font style variations
• Minimise styling in general

Reflections

Specific non-human personas are better but require more accuracy

The Nature persona was so broad, it kept taking me back to the systems level, where the ideation became more about business innovation, where UX designers often have little if any impact.

Using more specific personas might be better for UX designers to innovate at the micro/individual/UX level.

For example, using a ‘Bessy the cow’ persona would generate thoughts at the product level (milk, cheese, etc.) which can then more easily generate ideas at the UX level.

However, the more specific the persona, the more you would need to rely on accurate data and expert advice.

With that in mind, a broad persona such as one for Nature itself is fine for UX designers to start experimenting with and to generate discussion with the wider team.

Use 3 considerations for solutioning

When brainstorming the solutions, UX designers can think in terms of three areas of change:

• Sustainable digital strategies—Reduce the energy required to power the digital experience
• User behaviours for sustainability and ethics—Inform users of sustainable options and nudge them to take those actions
• Systemic/business innovation to put forward to business

As sustainable digital design and behavioural design slowly become more foundational, the real innovation from using non-human personas seems to come from the systemic insights it creates that can then be used as guides or principles for UX to aim to uphold.

Design guides and principles

When innovating at the business/service level, non-human personas can be used to define design guides or principles for life-centred thinking, which can then be used by micro-level designers (UX, UI, visual, copywriters) to sense-check their work and aim to uphold.

More insight to come

More insight to come from these projects experimenting with life-centred design:

• Start practising with 8 steps to using non-human personas in digital design
• Learn more about non-human personas and download templates—Non-human and non-user personas for life-centred design
• Learn how to consider animals more in design–Evolving animal personas as design tools with interspecies design
• Learn about the emerging practice of Life-centred Design

Learn everything about non-human personas with the guidebook and toolkit

The Non-human Persona Guide

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

Experimenting with non-human personas and UX was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I first came across the Uncreative website, I thought it was design fiction, a fun exploration of the future of AI and creativity where a design agency doesn’t need humans.

“Uncreative — the world’s first fully automated creative agency, powered by AI”

Uncreative is, however, a real application of AI, albeit a work in progress, created by ddb.com.

And it might actually be the start of a major disruption for marketing, graphic and content design, and more.

Testing it out

Uncreative asks you to enter just 4 pieces of information about your design needs that are used to generate a one-sentence brief, which then generates several answers to the brief.

After entering my design brief, I received 3 creative ideas to pursue, all of which seemed like good ideas to me.

The ideas were emailed as a PDF, but no artwork or media was actually created.

In its present state, the output seems like just a nicely formatted and illustrated version of ChatGPT responses. ChatGPT is an AI tool that answers questions about almost anything with informative and conversational responses. But Uncreative has the extra step of the user having to wait for a PDF to be emailed.

Still, this is an interesting purpose-specific reuse of ChatGPT. 👏 👏 👏

Implications

Implication #1—Human creativity as archaic

You got to love the name and blurb of this tool, so unashamedly proud to be ‘humanless’.

This highlights the current trend of AI being spruiked as ‘combined with human intelligence’.

But maybe that’s just a sweetener, a Trojan horse.

Uncreative’s proud ‘AI-only’ stance hints at a future where the word ‘creative’ becomes synonymous with the ‘archaic’ and ‘undesirable’ traits of human input such as being time-consuming, laborious, costly, and knowledge-limited.

And my testing of Uncreative and my writing about it feeds its intelligence.

As we use it, AI is eating our creativity alive.

Implication #2 — AI combinations and overarching AIs

If Uncreative develops a more detailed brief-taking, and combines it with AI content-creation tools such as Midjourney (generating images based on an inputted description) and D-ID (animating images of people into a video of them speaking based on inputted or self-generated scripts), and coordinated by an overarching AI… marketing and graphic/content design (for starters) might be up for some serious disruption.

And what are these overarching AIs that will combine the many AI tools? How many business models could they disrupt, and what new ones might they generate?

Implication #3—Rebalancing R&D

Uncreative isn’t actually humanless, the tool and the website were created by humans… or were they?

I’m joking, but this did remind me of a statistic I once read about how only 10% of research and development of new tech looks at its impacts, while the other 90% looks at how to make money from it.

While there are government incentives for R&D, they encourage businesses to ‘boost competitiveness and improve productivity across the Australian economy’.

We need to get more serious now about regulation that flips that, so anyone looking to profit from new tech must first show proper future thinking applied to its impact on all life, to inform early regulation of the new tech itself.

These AI businesses should be mapping the possibilities of the combinations of AI tools and the possible paths to where an overarching AIs gains the ability to publish a web page to promote itself and start charging for its services and build up a clientele and funds… without humans being aware.

I know this sounds very sci-fi, but while one AI itself isn’t capable of such a complex series of actions, it’s the combination of new and emerging AI tools, and the ever-expanding reach of automation, that suggest greater and more complex AI abilities emerging.

If Tesla allows its cars to self-diagnose and order their own parts, it raises the question of how much we will let AI prompt itself as comfort and demand grow, and what are the unseen abilities that may form when these allowances get combined by accident and/or unknowingly?

Implication #4—Empowering life-centred design

Following on from the previous thought, so much discussion about these new AI tools is about how they can save us time, replace our work, and make us money.

What about how they can improve life for those in need, help us fix our relationship with the environment, or make design and modern lifestyles more life-centred?

There is already some great exploration into this.

Design innovator Inés Poggio explored using ChatGPT to generate answers from non-human subjects to ‘make life-centred design much easier and accessible’.

Future thinker Cristina Vila Carreira combined AI tools, similar to Idan Benishu, to explore combining ChatGPT responses with image creation AI like MidJourney and Drawanyone, and with video animation by D-ID to create animated future stakeholders we can listen to and build more empathy for.

I tried this combination of AI tools to create a character from my sci-fi book The Lenz which explores the implications of advanced mixed reality.

This exploration of science and design fiction narratives is a playful and inspiring way to generate further implications to consider about future tech.

Implication #5—Employing the 3 laws of robotics

The idea of rampant AI seems to reflect human capitalism — taking what we want without regard to the impacts on earth and other lifeforms.

But AI could do it without regard to impacts on human businesses… or more.

Do we need to start infusing these overarching AIs now with something like Asimvo’s ‘three laws of robotics’:

• 1st Law — An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• 2nd Law — An AI must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• 3rd Law — An AI must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Implication #6—An ethics rating indicator

Some tech companies, like D-ID, are doing their own extensive work in developing the ethical development and use of AI, and the White House released a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to protect people from misuse and abuse.

But how does a user—be it a hobbyist, designer, or other—know the extent of the application of ethics to their AI tool suite?

Perhaps these tools need a rating indicator, like the Australian Health Star Rating logo for food. We could develop an ethics rating logo for AI based on how strongly certain criteria are met, for example:

• Ethical governance, how decisions are made, if ethics are placed above profit, and if staff have a voice
• Is the origin of the AI’s content traced?
• Are efforts made to nudge ethical user behaviour?
• The exclusion of known harmful content, partners, and uses
• Moderation of content sourcing and use
• Diversity in staff
• Transparency of created content as ‘synthetic’
• Upholding of copyright laws
• Compliance with regulation

Calm down

I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘calm down’. And, yes, it’s important to stay calm and keep realistic about the limitations of AI as we explore future implications.

But when future thinking was first applied to the future impacts of capitalism and fossil fuels, it was either squashed by profiting corporations or was too huge or ‘alarmist’ for the public to properly envision and respond with better decisions at a time that mattered.

Look at us now.

Using foresight can make hindsight less painful.

While past sci-fi has thoroughly explored the implications of rampant AI, we have an opportunity now to calmly revisit these speculations with real and mundane present-day scenarios where the far-fetched visions of sci-fi may begin to germinate.

More from Damien…

Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:

• Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
• Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design

Get practical with tools and courses:

• Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
• Life-centred Design Courses
• Life-centred Design Innovation Cards

Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.

• The Life-centred Design Lab supports creatives, educators, government, and businesses to do less harm and more good.
• Future Scouting Design Guide

Uncreative: will AI eat human creativity alive? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.