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The use of personas to design sustainability into new products
from the early concept stage
Margaret Carey
Department of Design & Manufacturing Technology, University of Limerick
Margaret.Carey@ul.ie
Abstract
With an ever increasing need to design and
manufacture sustainable products there are
increased demands put on product and
industrial designers to ensure that their
concepts and designs are environmentally
stable. At present there are only a handful of
tools created for Design for Sustainability and
many of these can only be applied at the
manufacturing and end of life phase of a
product. The purpose of this study was to
investigate whether personas can be used as a
tool for sustainable design at the concept
stage of the design process. Personas have
been widely proven as a usability design tool,
but little has been done to test if they are
suitable in a sustainable design context.
Personas are hypothetical archetypes of an
actual user. Although they are not real people
they must be based on data from real people
in order to represent the target markets needs
and goals. A total of 521 Irish adults
participated in a study investigating
environmental attitude and environmental
behaviour patterns. The objective was to study
how people felt and behaved towards the
environment and environmental products.
Based on these data participants were
segregated into nine different attitude and
behaviour groups. These groups were based
on a positive, neutral or negative
environmental attitude combined with a
positive, neutral or negative behaviour
pattern. The four extreme combinations of
positive attitude-positive behaviour, positive
attitude-negative behaviour, negative attitudepositive
behaviour and negative attitudenegative
behaviour were the focus for the
second stage of the research. The second
phase focused on the development of personas
targeting the environmental attitudes and
behaviours of the four groups.
72
Interviews were conducted with 16
participants from each of the four specific
attitude-behaviour combinations. These
interviews focused on purchasing behaviour
patterns, purchasing goals and emotions,
identity and attachment to products, and
purchasing patterns relating specifically to
environmental and sustainable products in
order to provide realistic goals and ideals.
This data was used to develop environmental
attitude/behaviour specific personas, which,
when applied in product development are
proposed to result in products with appeal to
the respective groups but each with high levels
of sustainability.
These personas were applied through a series
of design workshops with Product Design &
Technology students at the University of
Limerick to test whether the personas can
provide designers with the information needed
to design sustainable and user specific
products which will appeal to their targeted
attitude-behaviour combination.
Findings to date suggest that the use of these
environmental personas increases the ability
of the designer to create more sustainable
design concepts at the early stage of the
design process when compared to designers
who were not given personas. Current
research is focused on validity testing of the
personas through testing with consumers.