Improve Creativity in Future-Oriented Design with the Prospective Persona
Résumé
As ergonomics is confronted with future-oriented design projects, ergonomists must investigate how design could create novel and adapted ideas. In often ill-defined contexts, prospective ergonomics proposes to rely on methods and knowledge related to creativity, to foster the design process. In this paper, we introduce the prospective persona method, which is the implementation of the persona method applied to individuals who experience uses or artefacts that are identified as being precursory. The objective of this persona is to improve constraints management by adding the description of needs little known to designers. The study presented in this paper aims to compare the quality of ideation during a creativity task using ordinary persona, prospective persona or no persona. Our results show an effect of prospective persona on creativity. Prospective persona allows for a higher number of new ideas than ordinary persona and is the source of more feasible ideas the non-use of persona. We therefore recommend the use of prospective persona in future-oriented creativity design phase.