Enhancing Collective Creative Design: An Exploratory Study on the Influence of Static and Dynamic Personas in a Virtual Environment

In this paper, we propose to extend an existing method, 'the personas', and to develop a 'dynamic persona' in a virtual environment. To determine the interest of such a dynamic persona, we compared the influence of dynamic vs static personas in groups composed of two professionals (a designer and an ergonomist) who had to deal with either a dynamic or a static persona, while being engaged in a creative task. Their creative performances were also compared with those of 11 groups of three lay-participants who performed the same task, in the same virtual environment, with the same communication modality (i.e. chat). Moreover, we analysed the quality of collaboration in groups with personas and their level of empathy toward the dynamic or static personas. Results tend to be in favour of the dynamic persona condition, concerning the fluency and originality of ideas, and with regard to quality of collaboration and empathy.