# Future and More-than Human Personas

Summary of method
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**Future personas** in a UX context represent hypothetical users who encapsulate the needs, behaviors, and expectations of users who live in some specified future time. Future personas may be used to understand how people in the future might respond to emerging technologies and especially what new affordances or problems new technologies might bring for them. A future persona may be conceptualised as living in either a utopian or dystopian future.

**More-than human personas** represent the needs of any non-human actor. This can include biota (any plant or animal life) as well as robots, or artificial intelligence (for example).

Variants of method
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See [Personas](/H1wfnh9up), [Living personas](/BkMQ4kT9T)

**Further Reading**
View [this video presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwNiFZ188rQ) from CHI conference about SciberPunks

SciberPunks were imagined as augmented or speciliased futurte humans who had abilities to connect directly with the environment and othert people around them, thereby experfiencing empathy not only to people but to the environment and all the creatures that live within it. Six SciberPunks were co-created online during covid with young people living in Lahti.


1. Warmonk is a shaman character who communicates with plants and trees using his staff that he built using the old world technology. The staff keeps his mind and body connected to nature.
2. Swamp fairy has a crown to listen to what nature is whispering. With that comes her unique power to actually listen and do what she is saying she will do and turn words into action.
3. Super woman belongs to Suomuijat tribe and is interested in understanding the human mind. She can transform into a tree and can teleport herself from place to place - she's all over the place. With the headband she can read peoples minds and forecast the future, at least some part of it.
4. Power Granny is a very small character who belongs to Suomuijat tribe and is interested in berries. Has a butterfly sensor which senses emotions and reacts with flashing red light when there is a lot of negative or not constructive feelings and golden light when there is positive feelings. Can also analyze very fast if something is false news, manipulation or provocation.
5. Cloudberry is able to get data from all the plants in the nature as well as the food you are going to eat and that you've eaten during the day. She knows which plants are edible and what they're good for. She also invented a ring so that everyone could get this kind of super power.

The SciberPunks could be used in design by asking questions such as:

* What would Cloudberry think about this proposed solution for this green space?
* How would Warmonk react to the idea of making a green roof on the bus shelter?

Reference: Wolff, A., Knutas, A., Pässilä, A., Lautala, J., Kantola, L. and Vainio, T., 2021, May. Designing SciberPunks as Future Personas for More than Human Design. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8).

###### tags: `method`