For decades, designers and businesses have created personas for their target audience—fictional character documents, based on interviews and research, that summarise customers with similar needs. Non-human and non-user personas enable designers to also respect the needs of the environments, animals, and invisible humans who are impacted by product lifecycles and business ecosystems.
Applying non-human/non-user personas during design not only reduces the negative impacts caused to them but also inspires ways for products and businesses to regenerate them.
However, these tools are new, and therefore their use is low and best practices are still evolving.
The Non-human Persona Guide synthesises learnings from designers from around the world into methods for identifying, creating, and working with non-human/non-user personas to expand human-centred design to design for more than human needs.
https://lifecentred.design/non-human-personas/the-non-human-persona-guide/