In my newest article with Michael Kerr Griffin, Using Personas as a Multidisciplinary Design Tool for Social Justice in Engineering, we propose a structured workflow for bringing personas into engineering design so human factors sit alongside feasibility and performance. The goal is practical: improve outcomes while advancing social justice in engineering.
What We Argue
Personas began in UX, but they can translate into engineering projects when they are grounded in real data and used at the right moments. Our thesis is simple. Well researched and inclusive personas help engineering teams balance human factors with technical constraints, which leads to more equitable and context aware solutions.
Why Personas Belong in Engineering
Many engineering processes privilege technical requirements first. That approach can hide real user needs and can even reinforce inequities. Personas counter this by:
- Making invisible users visible in design conversations
- Turning abstract user groups into concrete, evidence-based profiles
- Prompting teams to question assumptions about access, ability, and context
When personas are built from diverse sources, they surface the social realities that shape product use. That is the heart of social justice in engineering.
A Structured Workflow Engineers Can Adopt
We map personas to common engineering phases so they become part of the work, not an add-on.
- Problem identification
Use exploratory personas to frame stakeholder needs, including constraints around access, cost, environment, and policy. This helps teams avoid defining the problem only in technical terms. - Concept development
Bring preliminary personas into early ideation to test ideas against real use contexts. Ask what will fail for each persona and why. - Preliminary design
Use personas during the first design review to validate requirements that affect users, such as learnability, maintainability, and environmental fit. - Detailed design
Refine personas with additional research and link each critical decision to a persona’s need. Treat persona checks like performance checks. - Prototyping, testing, and validation
Test prototypes against scenario scripts written from persona perspectives. Compare observed behavior to the expectations set by the personas. - Post implementation assessment
Collect real user feedback and compare it to persona-driven assumptions. Update the persona set and feed lessons into the next cycle.
How Personas Change Design Reviews
Design reviews in engineering already check for feasibility and compliance. Adding a persona track adds a second lens.
- Preliminary review
Does the concept address persona constraints, not only system constraints - Detailed design review
Are specifications traceable to persona needs and not just to internal preferences - Prototyping and testing
Do scenario-based trials reveal friction for non-ideal users - Final validation and after-action review
Do field results match what the personas predicted, and if not, what changed in the user environment
This keeps usability and access visible without derailing the schedule.
Balancing User Needs and Functional Requirements
The paper shows how personas help negotiate tradeoffs rather than romanticize them. A device can meet every spec and still fail people due to context, affordability, or climate. We discuss cases where teams accounted for:
- Local material availability and repair practices
- Harsh environmental conditions that change performance and comfort
- Dexterity, literacy, or access constraints that shape daily use
These examples show how persona guided decisions produce solutions that are technically sound and socially responsible.
Limitations and Safeguards
Personas only help if they are built and used carefully.
- If research is thin, personas flatten real complexity
- If teams treat personas as a checklist, they get ignored
- If projects serve very diverse populations, a small persona set may not scale
Safeguards include pairing personas with targeted user interviews when possible, documenting data sources, and revisiting personas at each review. Participatory approaches can strengthen accuracy while respecting participant effort.
Why This Matters for Social Justice in Engineering
Social justice in engineering is not a slogan. It is a design criterion. Personas make equity concrete by turning structural barriers into requirements that influence decisions. Success is not only performance against a spec. Success includes whether the product works for the people who will live with it.
Read the Paper
Title: Using Personas as a Multidisciplinary Design Tool for Social Justice in Engineering
Authors: Guiseppe Getto and Michael Kerr Griffin
Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11114940