Introduction

It is only recently that personas have been discussed in the literature as a valuable tool to use when teachers are designing for learning (Baaki & Maddrell, 2020; Garreta‐Domingo et al., 2018; Zagallo et al., 2019). Personas are suggested here as one useful part of user-centred design for teachers, where the use of personas in design has been widely theorised as an ‘efficient mental tool’ (Cooper, 1999, p. 123) for engaging empathy, aiding communication, supporting reflection, and determining and evaluating design goals (Chapman & Milham, 2006; Cooper et al., 2014; Floyd et al., 2008; Pruitt & Grudin, 2003). Personas are understood to be fictitious, composite archetypes that represent possible users of a design, and that are developed through some form of research into users’ socio-cultural context, goals, and behaviours. Personas are already recognised for their use in design and technology education (Blanco et al., 2017; Haag & Marsden, 2019) yet are rarely used by teachers working together to design learning for students.

This paper addresses the research question: what is the value in using personas when groups of teachers are co-designing learning? The paper addresses the question through a literature review on the value of personas and an exploratory case study and suggests that this well-known method serves a valuable role in co-design workshops with teachers where students cannot themselves be a part of the co-designing.

The ambition of co-design is to include those who hold a stake in any particular design problem as designers within the team addressing it, as genuine collaborators (Kerr et al., 2023; Penuel, 2019). However, there are many valid situations in which one group of stakeholders may not be able to participate in co-design. These can be characterised as situations where it is dangerous, impossible, counterproductive or expensive to include a group in the co-design process (where these categories are drawn from Bailenson (2018) in discussing use cases for virtual reality). A common situation in education is where a group of teachers are designing learning for a group of students, yet, in these cases, it is often expensive and often counterproductive (particularly in terms of equity issues if only some students partake) to include students in the co-design process.

This paper is focused on an exploratory case study of co-design with a group of teachers (n = 15) and design facilitators (n = 5), all of whom were also researchers, and two of whom are the paper authors), designing for a cohort of absent students who were studying Year Nine design and technology. The research could be described as an example of a researcher practitioner partnership (Coburn & Penuel, 2016). The lens of co-design has been used because it places the focus upon the design practices, the major contribution of this paper (Penuel, 2019). The use of the term ‘co-design’ to describe teachers collaborating does serve a purpose—it is not merely another educational buzzword. This is still an emerging space of research, but the practice of designing for learning changes when a team of teachers conceive of themselves as designers, adopt designerly methods, and work together to collaboratively create a user-centred learning experience (Penuel, 2019; Kelly et al., 2019). The paper is focused upon the practice of using personas as a part of co-design and the value that these personas bring.

The paper suggests, drawing on theory and the case study, that using personas when teachers are co-designing can be effective for: (1) engaging empathy with absent students; (2) setting a collective norm for the group as a culture in which the needs of these absent students are a priority; (3) bringing the group of teachers into a designerly frame of mind through the need to perform a composite cognitive/creative task involving developing a visual persona; and, (4) providing an epistemic artefact representing the humanised student that can be referred to in subsequent co-design activities.

Background

Co-design

Co-design is a process that merges the roles of designer and user (Sanders, 2002) in an open innovation process (Steen, 2013). It is an approach of designing with, rather than for, people and is closely related to co-creation and participatory design (Zamenopoulos & Alexiou, 2018, p. 12). Co-design occurs when “people come together to conceptually develop and create things that respond to certain matters of concern and create a (better) future reality… despite, or because of, their different agendas, needs, knowledge, and skills.” It has now become commonplace to accept that users are valuable sources of information and that when they engage in the design process, novel approaches and creative solutions can occur (Wheelwright & Clark, 1992).

Co-design often occurs in the context of multiple stakeholder groups, where one stakeholder group is considering the experiences of another during design activities (Kerr et al., 2022). A domain where this situation often occurs is in education (e.g., Kyza & Nicolaidou, 2017; Zhou et al., 2022) where teachers are co-designing for their students’ learning without those students being present. In such situations, there is a need for design approaches that facilitate empathy for the group of people who are not ‘in the room’ during designing. The activity of developing personas early in the design process, and the sustained use of these personas throughout co-design—taken here as collaborative design with teachers working together or with specialised learning designers—is an effective way to address this need.

Personas

Personas have been theorised since at least the work of Alan Cooper (1999) who recognised that designers often have only an abstract, elastic understanding of the users that they are designing for, leading to self-referential design and/or excessive focus on edge cases. To counteract this, Cooper proposed that “the best way to successfully accommodate a variety of users is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs” (Cooper et al., 2014, p. 62, original emphasis), with personas serving as representations of specific types of individuals. From a cognitive perspective, personas leverage the fact that humans have an extremely well-developed capacity to create mental models of other humans and to reason about hypothetical situations using those models (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003). Design tasks such as empathising with a user, mentally imagining design scenarios, and communicating design ideas can all be made easier through use of personas as points of reference.

In the literature, personas are described as ‘fictional characters we create that typify different types of stakeholders’ (Liedtka et al., 2014, p. 56). Personas are fictional in that they are not a representation of a real person. They are composite archetypes (Cooper et al., 2014) that are grounded in research about users within a specific design problem—which is distinct from being either a stereotype (stemming from cliché) or an average (over a dataset). Archetypes bring together these ideas about specific people into a rich character with nuance, rather than a stereotypes as a broad generalisation. By analogy, this is the difference between referring to a landmark on a map (an archetype; a specific location) and a reference to a region of a map (a stereotype; a broad description). Their value lies in the fact that “well-crafted personas are generative: once fully engaged with them, you can almost effortlessly project them into new situations” (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003, p. 12). For this reason, they are widely used for communication within design teams.

Three distinct advantages of personas, when compared to other user research techniques, are summarised by Chapman and Milham (2006) as being: (1) the ability to easily engage teams to think about users, thanks to memorable constructions that evoke empathy; (2) the possibility for designers to extrapolate from the personas to make design decisions; and (3) freedom from problems that arise when a full spectrum of user data is presented, such as paralysis or inappropriate generalization.

A comparative treatment of different approaches to personas is provided by Floyd et al. (2008) in order to show the broad affordances of personas as a tool to be used during design. They distinguish a number of variables that capture the different ways in which personas are used in design, through differences in: (1) the empirical source of the data (e.g., ethnographic observation, anecdotes, qualitative data, quantitative data, intuition/anecdotes); (2) the way that fictional components are used (i.e., use of fiction to elaborate on empirical data); (3) the level of detail and included characteristics for personas (e.g., long and descriptive or short and concise); (4) the way that personas are developed (multiple methods have been proposed); and (5) the way that personas are used within the design process.

This variability in what people mean when they say that they have ‘used personas in the design process’ is important for understanding critiques of personas. Three main critiques have been levelled at personas in the literature on the bases of validity, utility, and senescence. Firstly, as described by Chapman and Milham (2006), it is quite plausible that sometimes designers create personas that contradict real-world data. In developing personas there is reliance upon the skill of the designer; intuition is required, and there is no foolproof methodology for developing personas. This problem of validity is compounded by the fact that personas are very difficult to verify once created and, typically, ‘we have nothing more than assertion of validity by persona creators and advocates themselves [as a basis for trusting that personas are valid]’ (Chapman & Milham, 2006, p. 635). Secondly, personas can be wielded within a design team as a way of justifying decisions that have already been made. Rönkkö et al. (2004) describe a case study in which the power structures present within a design team lead to personas being used as a way to reinforce existing ways of viewing the world, rather than challenging them through research. And thirdly, often the lifecycle of personas is not considered: once they have been developed by designers and communicated throughout a design team (with significant investment of resources) they become something of an institution, ‘creating significant cultural resistance to the idea of refreshing them…’ and becoming ‘…a new truth that can blind us from seeing the real world’ (Portigal, 2008, p. 73).

These critiques all point to the potential for misuse of personas: they can be created badly (in a way that does not reflect the real world or reflect the true focus for the design work); they can be used badly (to justify bad design decisions); and they can outlive their usefulness. Yet despite this potential, their widespread usage over at least two decades suggests that their benefits seem to outweigh any potential for harm. This view, and the concomitant debate, is summed up by Floyd et al. (2008) who demonstrate the broad affordances of what they refer to as persona-based design and suggest that ‘it all depends on which kind of persona you are using, how you are using it, and what you are using it for’ (p. 14).

A pragmatic understanding of personas

Personas are typically captured within one- or two-page descriptions that include behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and some contextual background, combined with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a more realistic character. Following Cooper et al. (2014) and Floyd et al. (2008), the essential characteristics of personas are the presence of a name for the persona, a visual representation of the person, and a description that walks a line between telling enough of a story to make the persona feel ‘real’ while also keeping the focus upon design-relevant details.

Along with specifically recommending both a name and a picture of a face, Brunello (2018) suggests it is also effective to provide a persona with a quote, which summarises her or his attitude or expectations in relation to a design problem/outcome. This serves to capture the ‘authentic voice’ of the fictional character. To further enhance descriptions, commonly an image or images of the character may be included, using either photography (often drawn from stock or ‘creative commons’ photography) or other image-making techniques (for example, sketching). Cooper et al. (2014) suggest a strategy of choosing photos wherein the subject looks like an everyday person rather than a model, and that a level of appropriate facial and/or body expression should be on display to further capture the persona’s attitude.

In terms of application, Turner and Turner (2011) state that advocates of utilising personas within design processes favour them being constructed at an early stage, if not the very first step of a design lifecycle. Mulder and Yaar (2007) note that as personas are then used throughout the design process they increasingly feel more like ‘real’ people. Garrett (2002) observed this process occurring in practice through personas being printed out and posted around offices and studios, ‘so that when we have decisions to make, we can ask ourselves, “Would that work for Janet? How would Frank react to it?”’ (p. 56). Martin and Hanington (2012) similarly emphasise the use of personas throughout entire design processes, stating their worth in ‘developing, discussing and presenting product or system design’ and that in scrutinising designs they serve a strong purpose in ‘highlighting positive experiences’ and ‘potential breakpoints’.

Personas in co-design

Personas have been used widely within participatory and co-design projects yet are typically mentioned in passing rather than being a focus of the research. There are, however, a series of examples in which personas have been used within co-creative design processes with positive results, and which demonstrate potential use in the field.

One study led by a Denmark-based design team used co-design of personas in the design of a new plastic waste management system for an Indian village (Vestergaard et al., 2016). Similarly, in the HealthMap project for People With HIV personas were developed through project designers facilitating a ‘collaborative rapid persona-building workshop’ with health researchers (Williams et al., 2014). Within this process, both data and the participants’ own domain knowledge were drawn upon to identify general patient characteristics, behaviours and contextual features relevant to design, and from these different fictional personas were drafted.

Albrechtsen et al. (2016) demonstrate how personas can be applied effectively to design in educational contexts through their development of a ‘persona-sketching workshop’. This process of co-designing personas with users was seen a valuable design strategy as it assisted in the ‘believability’ and ‘validity’ of personas used by the design team, in comparison to the type of personas developed independently through data only by researchers and consultants. Further, a series of case studies have used personas successfully with children as one component of a co-design process, yet do not focus upon personas (as surveyed by van Doorn, 2016).

Summary and rationale for a case study

The literature suggests that personas are widely used for evoking empathy within a design team, and for communicating within and outside of a design team. There are pitfalls to be aware of in terms of the creation, use, and lifecycle of personas. There is no one, single method of developing and using personas within the design process, but rather many approaches that require expertise to know how best to use personas within a design situation.

Case study of creating visual personas with teachers

Method

An exploratory case study method is appropriate for the aims of the research, as it supports theoretical development and formation of research questions (Yin, 1998). The theoretical notion being explored is that personas are useful for groups of teachers co-designing for learning and where students are absent. The case study provides an empirical proof-of-concept and a basis for refining research questions for future investigation.

The case study was carried out in the context of a government-funded research project titled Co-design for Curriculum Planning (Kelly et al., 2019), with institutional ethical approval granted. This was a year-long project that involved a series of co-design workshops with two schools. Teachers from each school who were teaching into the middle school Digital Technologies subject (N = 15) were invited to participate in these workshops on the basis of developing a single student project that could support an entire term (10 weeks) of student learning. The Digital Technologies syllabus was, at the time, a new part of the Australian national curriculum. Participating teachers were only partly familiar with the content and had never previously designed for, or taught, the subject. Teachers all had at least three years of experience in teaching a range of other subjects: predominantly ICT, graphic design, and art. Three workshops were carried out in the broader study, and a summary of the process is shown in Fig. 1, where the focus of the case study in this paper is the persona development in Workshop A:

  • Workshop A: a 3-h kick-off workshop, in which 15 teachers from two schools collaboratively developed personas and brainstormed initial ideas for a term of work. Following this workshop, one of the two schools left the project due to other priorities.

  • Workshop B: a two-hour workshop with a focus upon refining the ideas from Workshop A into a workable idea and developing a student experience/journey map for it.

  • Workshop C: a two-hour workshop focused upon the pragmatic necessities of resourcing, teaching, and assessing this term of work.

Fig. 1
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Context for persona development within a broader co-design study

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Personas were selected from a range of potential user-centred design techniques for the goal of focusing teachers on the absent group of students and their potential engagement. Design methods of journey mapping or experience mapping are candidates for evoking empathy and setting up a creative, designerly space, but these serve a different role within the design process, typically used later in the process once a design focus has been selected (we used these in Workshop B). More traditional design research methods such as surveys, observations, or interviews with students ahead of designing would be desirable but is in many cases infeasible for ethical reasons (inappropriate use of class time) and a lack of time (for teachers). The research thus focused on investigating co-design workshops that commence with a student persona activity, using a theoretical basis as summarised in the Background.

The research team was composed of five designers, four of whom also had significant research experience (at least a PhD): a visual designer, an interaction designer, an engineering designer, an interior designer, and a learning designer. The team collected all design artefacts from teachers: personas, butchers’ paper and post-it notes from brainstorming, and recordings of group discussions. Following the co-design sessions, semi-structured interviews with six participating teachers (who opted in to this part of the study) were conducted, in which those teachers reflected upon their experiences. The methods used in the overarching study are described in Kelly et al. (2019).

This case study focuses upon two forms of analysis. Firstly, understanding the personas that were developed by teachers in Workshop A (using artefacts from the workshop) and then used in Workshops B and C. Secondly, understanding teacher reflections upon the experience of using personas (from post-design interviews).

A significant limitation of this work is that it relies upon a single case study (one workshop with multiple participants). The claims being made are primarily theoretical, with the case study serving as a basis for exemplifying the relationship between theory and practice, clarifying pertinent questions, and establishing methods for use in further study.

Creating personas

The creation of personas was the first activity in Workshop A and took up approximately one hour of the three-hour workshop. Fifteen teachers from two schools participated in the co-design, all of whom had extensive experience in teaching and curriculum planning (with other curricula but not for design and technology, the focus here). The workshop was facilitated by five designers in the research team. Teachers were given time away from their normal duties to attend the workshop, which was held at the University campus in a flat room with teachers in four separate groups around four tables.

Teachers were able to choose from eight separate visual persona templates, reflecting eight different types of student ‘characters’ (Fig. 2). Along with a cartoon-like student image, the templates consisted of the simple heading text, ‘Who are your students?’ and the visual persona was surrounded by blank space for text to be added. Multiple copies of all 8 visual personas were included to allow for the potential selection of the same student persona by multiple teachers. An equal range of male and female visual personas were included, and these were designed to reflect diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Fig. 2
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Examples of four of the eight persona images used by teachers to represent students

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Teachers were creating personas of students from memory of their ‘lived experiences’ as teachers, rather than doing new research. They were initially guided in creating fictional personas by a prompt to think about students they had taught who had been difficult to engage. They were asked to consider, for these students: What were their interests? What issues did they have at school? What kinds of things did they find engaging? What were their motivations and goals? Time spent considering these questions gave teachers the conceptual substance that they needed to develop personas as a fictional, composite archetype. Personas were then externalised by selecting a visual persona template on an A3 page and writing down ‘who this student is’.

Teachers were instructed to consider naming the student and to document specific learning challenges, interests outside of school and any other aspect about the student they felt was relevant to understanding them, though no specific format or approach for describing each student was given. Faciliation emphaised that these personas would be used in future curriculum activities. In small groups the teachers then shared their personas with each other to make up the ‘class’ that they had to consider in their design work.

A cartoon-like/comic style was chosen for the visual personas, rather than photographic representation, based on the theoretical work of Scott McCloud (1994), which highlights the appeal and impact in using iconic illustrations to communicate even serious themes. McCloud observes how a more simplistic or abstracted illustrated image can create a greater level of engagement and connection than more realistic representations, through a process of projection. An aim in the art style was to capture unique characters of possible students, that were engaging and distinguishable, while also allowing the simple form to be such that it was a ‘canvas’ through which a user could create a series of characteristics and backstory for the character with flexibility and based on their own experiences and creative impulses and insights. The versatility of this visual approach and its ability to reflect more possibilities in a co-creative process with a user is demonstrated in Fig. 3. As the viewer moves from left to right the image becomes more abstract and can be seen to represent more potential characters. Within this project, the illustrative style, third from the right, was seen as preferable for a visual persona. A similar style and crop were used, and unusual angles and exaggerated expressions were avoided, to ensure consistency across the persona set (Cooper et al., 2014).

Fig. 3
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Spectrum of portrait styles from realistic to abstract art in terms of ability to project representation onto actual people (following McCloud, 1994)

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Sustained use of personas

In Workshop A, following development of personas, teachers continued to work in small groups to brainstorm ideas for curriculum design for the subject Digital Technologies They did this through an ideation ‘30 ideas in 10 min’ activity, and then selected an idea to rapidly refine and present to the whole room. Groups were encouraged to refer back to personas during the stage of refining, as a way of ‘checking in’ to see if their ideas were likely to be engaging for users (the students). The group of teachers ended up using the idea “It’s not fair when…” as their focus, with students doing research and creating websites on an example of injustice that they perceive within society. For example, one group found the price of public transport in their city to be unfair so created a website comparing it to other cities around the world (see Kelly et al., 2019, for a description of these outcomes).

In between Workshop A and Workshop B, personas were formalised by the research team through creation of a set of laminated cards. This enabled personas to be re-used during Workshops B and C as a ‘deck’ of student personas that could be used for testing out design ideas in a range of scenarios—teachers could refer to this as a fictional ‘class’ of fifteen students (displayed in Fig. 4(a) and (b), column 1). This was particularly important throughout Workshop B, where teachers were moving from a rough sketch of an idea (from Workshop A) through to a refined idea for a teachable term of work.

Fig. 4
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a. Persona design analysis. b Persona design analysis (cont.)

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Analysis

The personas developed by teachers were analysed to provide an understanding of the different approaches employed, Fig. 4(a) and (b). The examination occurred iteratively, firstly by digitising the hand-written persona developed by teachers (column 2) and then, by identifying key traits of each persona/character (listed under in column 3) which reflect emerging student archetypes (Boyatzis, 1998).

From the template options, teachers selected and utilised all of the eight different illustrated templates to develop personas, and in cases where a template was used multiple times by different teachers (for example, ‘Maxton’, ‘Reggie’, ‘Saul’ and Thorin’) these were used to craft distinctly different student characters.

Across all personas, teachers focused on capturing what could be regarded as both positive and negative behaviour traits in the students. As well, teachers referred to both environmental and personal background factors influencing student behaviour, which served to identify potential areas of engagement and interest that could then be considered in unit design. In this way, the personas were able to function as ‘believable people’ to serve the purpose of allowing teachers to imagine them in different scenarios. Of the fifteen personas, only one (‘Jo’), lacked a level of detail that allowed for such potential use throughout the design process.

Of the emergent archetypes, which are defined by dominant traits that distinguish their type of participation within classrooms, only one student archetype (a sports focused student) was repeated across workshop outcomes. While this occurred with both ‘Geof’ and ‘Jakob’, additional details within each persona design led to further differentiation. This related to the level of classroom disruptive behaviour each exhibited (one being disruptive, the other not). The volume and variety indicated richness within the activity, with a diverse and unique student created by nearly every teacher.

Teacher reflections on creating personas

The project that had been co-designed by teachers across the three workshops was used with students across an entire school term. At the end of these workshops, but prior to the school term of work (two months after the initial workshop) six of the teachers present in workshops were interviewed in relation to the co-design project. The interviewer (a project researcher) conducted semi-structured interviews. Responses to all questions were analysed for references to personas.

Teachers were asked to reflect upon the experience of developing personas through two questions. Firstly, implicitly (“Do you think taking a student-centred focus impacted on the outcomes of the workshop and if so, how?”) and secondly, explicitly (variations on “you created a series of student personas. How did you find this process?” and “Did you feel it changed the way you approached curriculum design in the session? If so, how?”). Each of the six teachers had different perspectives on personas.

Quantitatively, four teachers had solely positive things to say about the activity of developing personas. The other two teachers had mixed views, where one teacher (Jane) said that “I think the exercise is just good to take a step back and just consider the kids that are in your class. I had my main doubts that, ugh this is stupid, I know this too well, that kind of thing. But yeah I think it is useful” which we interpret as being initially critical of the exercise but deciding that on the whole it did have value. Another teacher (Fred) said that he “didn’t get as much out of it as I probably should have” but went on to talk about the activity being interesting in getting him to focus on “recalcitrant” rather than “go-getter” students, saying that “I think in that way the personas allowed us to really think about that type of student. Yeah, there was some value there.”

We are cautious in reporting these quotes, as the intention of asking teachers to consider “difficult to engage students” in creating personas is not to intended to support the use of a deficit model for students. Words such as ‘recalcitrant’ can imply a pathologizing of students, rather than recognition of differences (Harry & Klingner, 2007). This suggests that such a warning may need to be included when personas are used in the way described here to avoid teachers interpreting the instructions in this way—the goal is for teachers to consider students who they find it difficult to engage in class, as a way of spurring learning design activity to focus on engaging these students.

Of the four teachers who had only positive responses, their quotes are illustrative of different aspects of the personas activity. Firstly, there were mentions of the way that using personas had shifted the priorities during the design for learning:

It probably reminded all of us that we have different students in the classroom. Like, such a complex range. If you've got a class of 28 students, you've basically, potentially got 28 different students who learn in different ways, and to have different motivations et cetera. So looking at that and really, I guess, narrowing down into what motivates those students, how they learn, what engages in the classroom. What's their expectation of digital technologies? That really sort of helped me find direction… That was the full transformation moment for me, was putting [student engagement] into the forefront. (Deborah)

Deborah saw the strengths in the approach in that it helped to design for learning by considering student motivation and what they find engaging. She stressed this approach, based around personas, allowed her to “find direction for the new course” rather than simply being led by curriculum. Similarly, John noticed that:

…Because sometimes when we go into the notion of creation, it's simply getting the job done, we're not really thinking about the notion of that student, the individual person, in terms of what we're trying to do with that, with the curriculum. So, yeah that was powerful. (John)

Secondly, there were mentions of the ways that personas helped to explicitly design for different types of users and their interests:

I enjoyed that process. I think that the nature of the subject is very suited to that style, and it's very suited to differentiating the different types of students and learning capacities and all of that because of the discovery nature of the subject and the process that we went through as well. (Rosa)

I thought a lot of our ideas started to actually link a lot more closely [to student interests] than they would have if we just thought of - if, you know, the question was think of cool ideas for the classroom. (Scott)

In highlighting the benefits of the persona activity, teachers also identified the advantage in identifying and then discussing a range of students who they found difficult to engage, rather than rehashing ‘old’ problem student tropes in discussions. Through the process of developing personas, Fred was able to identify a student whose learning, while competent, could be improved, and then focus on addressing curriculum design from this perspective as well:

So for the rest of the workshop it was all - like in the back of my mind it was okay, well - you know, how can I get someone that needs direct instruction and will work hard and everything, but needs to be told what to do all the time, how can I get that person to start thinking by themselves [authors’ emphasis]. So that was really good. I thought that was awesome. (Fred)

This change in mindset and problem definition can be seen encapsulated in the creation of personas such as ‘Indira’ and ‘Sarah’. Both are compliant students who perform well but have difficulty with specific aspects of learning.

Discussion

Alignment between theory and practice

The results suggest that there is alignment between the theoretical basis for using personas within the literature and teacher perceptions of the value of this activity in the case study, where key theoretical values were for engaging empathy, bringing students into the room, and maintaining concern with the needs of those students. These results serve as illustrative of the theoretical benefits, where the limitations of small sample size and inductive analytical approach preclude any generalisable claims. Teachers repeatedly referred to the way in which the personas caused them to think about students who might otherwise not be considered in their design for learning: the fact that there are “28 different students who learn in different ways” (Deborah). Teachers were encouraged to think beyond meeting the needs of curriculum or of finding “cool ideas for the classroom” (Scott) and to ask themselves: will this work for my students, when considered as individual users of my design? As described in the literature, the development of personas seems to be a powerful way to evoke empathy with potential users of a design.

Creating personas and emphasising their importance sets a collective norm for the group, a culture in which the needs of the absent students are recognised as the top priority. This is distinct from the previous point: it is not just about empathising with these absent students; it is about prioritising their needs. Here again, this appeared to happen within the case study, as is encapsulated by Deborah in suggesting that she had a “full moment of transformation” in realising that student engagement needed to be “forefront”.

Developing personas brings participants into a designerly frame of mind through the need to perform a creative, collaborative task of developing and sharing a visual persona. This is a way of viewing the creation of personas as serving multiple purposes. It is an icebreaker activity serving as a simple rapport-building experience amongst participants at the start of an initial co-design workshop. It is a creative activity in which participants engage with producing an artefact, serving as a transition into the idea of being in a design studio rather than in the usual space. The development of personas is non-threatening in that it is well-structured and draws upon their core competence. It is also visual in the use of visual persona templates.

Finally, and crucially, developing personas provides an epistemic artefact representing the humanised student that can be referred back to throughout co-design activities. The fact that the co-design group developed them gives them a strong sense of ownership that might not be present if, say, the facilitators of the workshop had developed personas and then shared them with the group. Once each teacher crafted a persona, initial group conversation was able to confirm the validity of each. Through discussion it was determined that each persona reflected a ‘type’ of student that teachers throughout the group were familiar with. This served to set a collective norm for the group to work with to address the needs of students within the core problem of designing curriculum for students who are difficult to engage. Personas, when translated to epistemic artefacts—as persona flashcards in this work—became ongoing tools through which approaches and iterations of the project could be challenged, serving as a set of criteria for ongoing evaluation throughout the process.

Pitfalls when using personas in co-design

As discussed in the Background of this paper, the literature suggests three main critiques for the use of personas in design work: (1) they can be created badly, in a way that does not reflect the real world or the true focus for the design work; (2) they can be used badly, to justify pre-existing bad design decisions; and (3) they can outlive their usefulness. Each is worthy of discussion in the context of this co-design case study.

The project team attempted to ensure that personas were developed as archetypes through use of stimulus material and instructions to the teachers. Avoiding stereotypes requires grounding the creation of personas in research with users in relation to a specific design problem (Cooper et al., 2014). In the case study, the teachers were prompted to draw on their own lived experiences in working with students within their schools, taking the position that their years of experience in the classroom provide a valid understanding of the engagement needs of their students (Corso et al., 2013). These prompts for stories about actual students that the teachers have experienced avoids reliance on clichés or on averages. The personas presented in the case study, Figs. 4(a) and 4(b), are examples of the generative potential of personas that can be projected into new situations to imagine likely outcomes (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003).

The team avoided using personas to justify design decisions that had already been made by making personas the first activity in the workshops, as suggested by Turner and Turner (2011). As discussed, this activity served the dual role of also being an ice-breaker activity for the teachers.

Finally, the limited timespan for the design activities—three workshops preparing for a single term of work—meant that senescence of personas was not an issue. If teachers were to take these personas ‘off the shelf’ in future years when redesigning the learning activities, then they are likely to have outlived their usefulness. The aim is to make personas specific to a design problem, not to hang around within an organisation, thereby avoiding Chapman and Milham’s (2006) issues of validity.

The case study has been included for exploring the use of personas to represent absent students when doing co-design with teachers and researchers. It is useful for generating hypotheses by understanding the background theory about personas and then seeing how those theories played out in the present study. The small sample size and the use of an inductive analytical give a richness to the data presented, showing how personas can be used in the co-design process as a proxy for absent stakeholders.

Future research could validate some of the claims being made through methods that have a larger sample size and clear criteria for analysing personas. For example, the success of the designs for learning produced by the design team were not validated in this study (e.g., by students or a panel of experts). The research lends itself to rigorous qualitative methods, which document all steps in the co-design process and attempt to understand the effect that personas had for designer-participants, perhaps through the use of retrospective think-aloud techniques (Nielsen et al., 2002).

Finally, a well-recognised concern in design work is that designers, especially novice designers, can become fixated on solutions early in the design process in a way that stops them from discovering spaces of design that are rich with potential (Purcell & Gero, 1996). The creation of personas serves a theoretical need to ensure that teachers are focused on the students who will be using their designs for learning. The teacher comments from the case study suggest that, in this study, personas were effective in breaking teachers out of their usual ways of working and being more student-centred. However, further work is required to discover whether this comes at a cost of potentially narrowing teachers’ focus to only considering the personas that they have created. The research team was focused on ensuring that personas were valid—were archetypes rather than stereotypes—and they did not focus on ensuring that a sufficiently broad coverage of students was considered.

An activity framework for personas in co-design

An explicit framework for using personas as a cornerstone for co-design can be articulated as a way for future co-design facilitators wishing to replicate the approach. This approach is likely to be useful in circumstances similar to the case study, where one group of stakeholders is designing for another group of absent stakeholders. Figure 5 outlines a framework for this process, as discussed in detail in the case study, with a format of pre-prepared visual persona templates with a style that is open to interpretation, facilitation of the activity through free selection from templates and guidance for participants of a workshop in developing personas, and application through continued use in subsequent activities. The use of comic-like illustrations for persona characters appears to be an effective aesthetic approach, allowing for creativity and freedom in defining personas, while also prompting reflection and engagement in the process.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Activity framework for persona-led co-design

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The framing of the activity prompted a series of unique personas that were well-rounded and provided design opportunities through their richness, believability, and complexity. The activity avoided stereotyping ‘struggling’ learners, which can be common in user representation (Turner & Turner, 2011). The authenticity and nature of the personas were key in the success of this process—challenging traditional curriculum design approaches of adapting curriculum to class activities and designing for the ‘average’ or successful student.

Future work

It is significant that both authors have been inspired by this project to use the development of personas as a valuable activity across a range of current co-design projects that they are leading: one with teenagers on the autism spectrum, another with teenagers exploring strategies to navigate digital relationships and sexting culture, a third addressing food poverty within low socio-economic families, and a fourth working with the finance sector and government to prevent homelessness in older women. These initiatives directly build upon the findings of this study.

There are many further directions that are required for understanding the use of personas. A question that remains pertinent is about the appropriate levels of scaffolding to provide for teachers during the creation of personas. For example, are visual templates, as in the case study, better than a blank sheet of paper?

Conclusion

This paper has presented a case study supporting the creation of personas as an effective initial activity in co-design settings where one stakeholder group is designing for another. The analysis of this case study led to the activity framework that may be useful for other co-design practitioners adopting this approach in future. The notion of using personas for developing empathy, for communicating user needs, for exploring the experience of users in imagined scenarios, and for ensuring continuing consideration of user needs throughout the arc of a design project has already been well established. This case study has shown one more context within which they are useful, with supporting evidence for their efficacy, where the limitations of the work relying upon inference from a single case-study (with just fifteen teachers) should be recognised.

The contribution of the work in reviewing the literature around personas and their use in co-design and then demonstrating through a case study that this activity is particularly effective in co-design workshops where one group is designing for an absent group has culminated in the proposed three-step activity framework for using personas. This represents a strategic foundation for teachers co-designing better learning experiences for students.