Building sustainability futures: can designing personas help envision future possibilities?

The challenge to achieve a digital, green, and sustainable transition and reach climate neutrality by 2050 requires organizations to explore new solutions and innovate their portfolio of products and services. Today companies are called to rethink their norms and values, embracing digital innovations and harnessing technology’s potential to develop environmental innovations, sustain health and wellbeing and in so doing meet the UN’s sustainable development goals. A sustainability transition may be uncharted territory for many organizations as sustainable development and sustainable futures are often perceived as complex and future user needs are highly uncertain and distant from those of the present day. To navigate these uncertainties, organisations require tools and strategic approaches to anticipate future possibilities, and to understand today how markets will evolve and how customer expectations and needs for future products and services might shift market demand. This research in progress explores the role of personas in anticipating future user needs and in creating future sustainability scenarios to assist strategy building. Personas represent a tool used in design thinking to depict users’ latent needs and target future user groups by creating solutions users are likely to adopt. In recent years, the integration of foresight and design thinking methodologies has received increasing attention as an approach to help companies build strategy and create alternative future scenarios based on people's needs and anticipating new sustainable products or service on the market. However, the notion of user needs, which is a critical feature of design thinking, remains largely unexplored in foresight. Indeed, foresight acknowledges the importance of the context and the signals and drivers in the external environment and their influence on the direction and speed of innovation and change, without sufficiently focusing on people’s desires and needs. It has become important to study how future needs can be identified in a foresight exercise and how to project these needs into scenarios of the future as input for a digital and green transformation. Drawing from both design thinking and future thinking, this research-in-progress investigates the role and uses of personas in foresight to inform decision-making and strategy when building sustainable futures. The research question driving the research is “How can the personas method be deployed to assist organizations in envisioning and building more sustainable futures?" We analyze relevant literature to explore the use of personas in futures exercises and scenario building. We searched for publications using ‘personas’, ‘foresight’, and ‘futures’ as keywords to explore whether the notion of personas is adopted in the context of foresight and futures studies and the rationale for using personas and how these contribute to constructing future scenarios. We identify that personas method in foresight could be potentially adopted for: representing fictional users that support a deep understanding of future possible scenarios implications; generating and shaping debates and reflections around complex and wicked problems such as climate change and sustainability issues; bringing scenarios to ‘life’ by describing how characters might experience futures as part of everyday life. This research contributes to integrating personas method in foresight with the aim of enhancing the relevance of scenario process and outputs for organisational planning and strategy, in view of a digital and green transformation.