Ecosystemas: Representing Ecosystem Impacts in Design

Personas—distilled representations of particular user groups—are a key part of many design processes. Researchers have created animal personas to represent nonhuman animals as stakeholders in design efforts. However neither human nor animal personas allow for the representation of broader-scale ecological impacts in design decisions. To address this gap, we present an additional conceptual tool for design: the ecosystema. This design construct is analogous to a persona, but at the level of an entire ecosystem rather than of a particular human population or animal species. These constructs could allow ecosystem-wide impacts to influence design processes more effectively, and may provide greater leverage on current environmental crises than existing human-centered techniques.