Åsa Wikberg-Nilsson

Reframing practice through the use of Personas

The focus of this paper is a development process of ‘Personas’; fictitious characters are used to reflect on norms and perspectives of practice. Although reflective practice is a well‐known process to enhance and support learning, improvement, development, etc., it is not easy to implement. Drawing on theories of action, this paper describes learning gained through using the Persona method within a research project called the Future Factory. The process of developing a Persona includes a reflective examination of the case approached and an analysis and Persona creation development that go hand‐in‐hand. Lessons learned are that the process of creating Personas has contributed to a critical reflection of investigation contexts and that both the technique itself and the process of creating Personas has contributed to re‐framing practice among participants in the Future Factory project.