Exploring the role of personas as a design method in foresight

A critical feature of design thinking is its user-centric approach and the ability to recognize users’ behaviours and desires in response to present-day needs and problems, when developing innovative solutions. Nonetheless, the notion of how user needs evolve in the future and how to project these needs into scenarios of the future as input into an organization’s strategy remains largely unexplored. Drawing from both design thinking practices and foresight, this paper explores the role and uses of personas in foresight to inform decision-making and strategy when designing for the future. Through an analysis of publishes case studies on the use of personas in futures/foresight exercises, we identify that personas as used in foresight, potentially fulfil diverse roles than those employed in design thinking. In foresight, personas can be a vehicle to generate and shape debates and reflections around complex and wicked problems; or they can be deployed to bring scenarios to ‘life’ by describing how characters might experience futures as part of everyday life. The implications for businesses managers is the need to be aware of the importance of developing knowledge about future users and their expectations, exploring inter alia the unexpected or unanticipated forms of use, rather than focusing on present-day user needs.