Against User Personas: Towards a New Design Anthropology for India
One cursory look at User personas tends to overstate demographic information. What makes this problematic is that it encourages a superficial comprehension of human behaviour, which can result in prejudiced preconceptions based on gender, race, age, and economic status. As Design is being increasingly taken over by data-led design research, what is being ignored is that designers do not have training in psychology, anthropology, and semiotics and are thus unable to engage with the data they are confronted with critically. https://medium.com/ethix/provocations-towards-an-inclusive-design-thinking-process-1-b5f59e57e986
In an era that claims to prioritize human-centred design and empathy, the widespread adoption of user personas and profiles as ethnographic tools in the design process may appear harmless at first glance. However, a critical examination reveals that personas are anything but neutral artefacts, mirroring the limitations of anthropological tools that attempt to encapsulate the multifaceted nature of human cultures within simplified archetypes.
The use of personas in design perpetuates the reductionist tendency to categorize individuals into predefined groups based on demographic information, reinforcing preconceived notions and societal stereotypes. By condensing the complexity of human experiences into static and generalized profiles, personas fail to capture the fluidity of identities and the diverse range of perspectives that exist within a target audience.
The act of assigning characteristics, behaviours, and motivations to hypothetical users is often shaped by the designer’s own subjectivity and biases. This subjectivity can inadvertently result in the reinforcement of dominant cultural norms and marginalization of underrepresented groups, all while maintaining the illusion of objectivity and universality.
The uncritical adoption of personas within the design process also reflects a larger issue of cultural imperialism. By relying solely on techniques and methodologies developed within Western design contexts, designers overlook the unique cultural nuances and local knowledge systems that should inform the creation of more contextually relevant personas. This disregard for indigenous perspectives perpetuates a one-size-fits-all approach to design that fails to account for the diverse needs and cultural contexts of global users.
To overcome these limitations, a more critical and reflexive approach to the use of personas is imperative. Designers must question the assumptions inherent in persona creation and strive to incorporate a broader range of perspectives and experiences. This can be achieved through inclusive and participatory research methods that actively engage with diverse communities, allowing for co-creation and a more nuanced understanding of user needs.
Additionally, critically analyzing the societal and cultural biases embedded within the persona creation process can lead to the development of alternative tools and methodologies that challenge the dominant narratives and power structures at play. It is crucial to position personas as emerging from anthropological traditions that are tainted by colonial baggage. The origins of anthropology as a discipline lie in Western intellectual fascination and fetishization of the cultural ‘other’ through practices of cataloguing and classification that reinforced hierarchies between the ‘civilized’ colonizer and the ‘barbaric’ colonized. Contemporary design anthropology, including the use of personas, cannot be extricated from this legacy of epistemic violence and othering. When deployed in Indian design ecosystems, personas must be scrutinized as artefacts that perpetuate vestiges of colonial power asymmetries.
This is abundantly evident in the superficial persona archetypes that abound in Indian design projects. The ‘naïve village woman’, the ‘tradition-bound elderly man’, the ‘tech-savvy urban millennial’ — these cardboard tropes reflect skewed outsider impressions rather than grounded cultural insights. Such personas impose simplistic stereotypes and homogenize the intricate diversity of Indian socio-cultural realities. Far from capturing multiplicities, personas penalize differences and masquerade consumer fantasies as user representations.
Personas often manifest as instruments that reinforce pernicious biases rooted in caste, gender, race, religion and class. Model personas are overwhelmingly skewed towards reflecting elite, upper-caste and metropolitan subject positions, amplifying only a thin slice of premium users. Moreover, in replicating problematic stereotypes of marginalized identities, persona-based research methodologies reproduce existing hierarchies and exclusions instead of exposing them. This severely constrains their ability to generate insights into the needs of subaltern, oppressed and vulnerable populations.
This elision of subjectivity reinforces existing social hierarchies and inequities. As researcher Lin Lefevre argues, personas impose “regimes of representation” upon heterogeneous users to render their experiences intelligible and actionable for design and marketing agendas. The persona format moulds the messy diversity of human identities into tidy archetypes that perpetuate stereotypes satisfying commercial interests.
Ultimately, personas should be recognized not as benign design ethnography tools but as technologies of power that impose disciplinary regimes of knowledge and representation. Personas classify users into knowable, governable categories that design can regulate, optimize and assimilate into its logic. Consequently, personas serve as alibis for the exercise of design hegemony rather than instruments for genuinely democratic participation. Only by problematizing the tyrannical power fantasies that underpin the persona artifice can Indian design cultures evolve more emancipatory, ethical and empowering models of understanding their users.
In inhabiting complex worlds marked by flux, ambiguity and interdependence, people continuously negotiate shifting subjectivities and contexts. Users cannot be reduced to immutable marketing segments or anthropological prototypes. Rather than reifying personas, Indian design must instead pursue new metaphors and technologies of participation that illuminate the radical uniqueness of every situated being. Only then can design move towards crafting possibilities that liberate rather than colonize.
Exotic Tropes versus Embodied Realities
Personas are advertised as meticulously crafted based on rigorous ethnographic research. However, in practice, constructing personas relies predominantly on designers’ distant observations and impressions of user communities. Consequently, personas often embody distorted stereotypes rather than grounded cultural insights. As researcher Rashmi Singla argues, persona workshops are characterized by “fly-in fly-out research” where designers with limited lived engagement in contexts blithely distil exotic tropes.
For instance, rural user personas tend to embody metro-centric assumptions of villages as reservoirs of traditions devoid of modernity. Consumer personas might draw upon Orientalist portrayals of Indian culture as mystical, chaotic and pre-rational. The veneer of data cannot wholly conceal the artifice underlying persona construction that exoticizes users as cultural others. In contrast, ethical design requires rejecting superficial personas and embracing radically reflexive, rooted cultural immersion.
Positivist Prototypes versus Intersectional Complexities
Personas classify users into tidy categories like demographic attributes, buying preferences and psychographic traits. However, this pursuit of positivist prototypes contradicts the irreducible complexity of human identities and cultures. As researcher Shiv Visvanathan expounds, personas penalize difference and flatten intricacies by cramming multi-dimensional Indian societies into neat little boxes.
Caste, class, gender, religion and other identity markers intersect in dynamic, fluid ways. For instance, a rural woman farmer’s needs may vary vastly depending on her caste or class positionality. However, personas erase these nuances by projecting reductive representations. Furthermore, the predetermined persona categories reflect designers’ worldviews rather than enabling user self-identification. In Visvanathan’s words, personas are the “zoology of forgotten dreams” — cataloguing tools that fail to grasp cultures on their own terms.
Prescriptive Archetypes versus Creative Subjectivities
If we let go of the dead ‘icon’ and attempt more creative modes of user visualisation we might be able to feel more empathy for our users. Design Thinking is understood to be a key creative problem-solving tool. For creativity to occur, the images generated in the mind must have been intentionally motivated and express a solution to a problematic situation that is judged to be novel, of high value, and significant. Moreover, unusual thoughts, activities, and outcomes — which can be attained in a variety of ways — are indications of creativity. It is not constrained by earlier presumptions, desires, resources, or behaviours. The current modes of persona mapping and user visualsation do not allow for that. https://medium.com/ethix/provocations-towards-an-inclusive-design-thinking-process-1-b5f59e57e986
While projected as tools for understanding users, personas also act as prescriptive stencils shaping users’ aspirations toward designer-approved archetypes. Personas work through normative power by subtly directing consumers toward culturally sanctioned identities. A mother is expected to desire products that align with nurturing, home-centred tropes. Personas thus manoeuvre users into stereotyped roles that serve design and capital’s ends.
In reality, users creatively navigate fluid subject positions and subvert stereotypes. A mother may cherish her work identity over motherhood. Rural youth may flout traditional expectations. By coercing people into conforming to rigid personas, design forfeits its role in expanding human possibilities. Liberatory design must abandon personas to midwife citizens’ untamed dreaming and world-building.
Individualistic Constructs versus Collectivist Values
Personas envisage users as atomized individuals with little recognition of the profound ways Indian selves are shaped by socio-cultural ecosystems. While individual autonomy is valued, user personas ignore the primacy of collective ties like family, caste, and religion in influencing user behaviours and decisions.
Constructing each persona profile as though users exist in social vacuums strips away the dense networks of interdependence that characterize Indian sociality. Moreover, persona goals focus on me versus we aspirations — achieving individual gratification rather than shared gains. This flies against the cultural grain of prioritizing collective advancement in many Indian communities. Deploying personas without adapting them to more collectivist indigenous paradigms raises ethical dilemmas.
Ultimately, personas enable design’s complicity with capitalism by constructing user representations that serve commercial imperatives. Researcher Lin Lefevre argues that beneath the lofty rhetoric of empathy, personas mainly aid user segmentation and conversion optimization. The guise of human-centred design shields the appropriation of people’s data into proprietary persona databases that augment corporate coffers and surveillance capacities without empowering communities.
An ethical stance requires transcending this extractive logic and exploring how design research can nurture collective aspirations on community terms. Open, participatory tools controlled by people themselves are vital. Personas must be radically reinvented or even abandoned in favour of frameworks that resist commercial co-optation and genuinely put human needs before profit.
Way Forward: From Tyranny to Empowerment
When creativity always has to seek validity, it runs scared. One of the social uses of creativity has been to constantly challenge the glass ceiling of validity. As design schools and workspaces further erode design’s relationship with humanities and visual arts and as the neo-liberal socio-economic structure makes it harder to create inclusive workspaces it is harder for designers to unweave the dynamics of inequality that keep us away from designing sustainable, inclusive futures.https://medium.com/ethix/provocations-towards-an-inclusive-design-thinking-process-1-b5f59e57e986
Personas in their current form represent unethical design practices that must be contested. However, viable alternatives will need rich exploration. Some promising threads include participatory design, new metaphors like design characters that encourage creativity, and digital tools enabling user-controlled self-representation. Fundamentally, transforming personas is contingent on transforming the politics that shape design’s complicity with dominant power structures. The path ahead demands unflinching critical reflexivity, sustained community dialogue and daring to decolonize design.
More foundationally, decolonizing requires transcending the persona construct altogether in favour of new metaphors and models. I have been proposing ‘design characters’ — playful, creative profile-making unrestricted by expectations of accuracy or consistency, allowing for complex emergent expressions. Other promising directions include digital tools for self-representation, reflexive narrative methodologies, and even playful metaphorical personas created by users.
Crucially, decolonizing design anthropology ultimately demands transforming the politics and purposes underlying design practice, querying market-centric goals, re-centring ethics and social justice, and building solidarity with indigenous, subaltern struggles. The diversity of research techniques matters little if the design imagination remains captive to existing power structures. Decolonization demands nothing less than ethical and epistemic rupture.
Personas promise predictable discovery of knowable users, satisfying design’s saviour complex. But design cannot save others; it can only tyrannize. Decolonization summons design to a more humble yet hopeful role — midwifing communities’ own liberatory dreaming. This difficult but vital process begins by renouncing colonial anthropological tools like personas designed to dominate and daring to co-create as equal partners.
