Enhancing collaborative creativity with virtual dynamic personas

In many sectors, designers have to develop products that are creative, and thus both new and adapted to the context. They can use a variety of methods to favor their creative design activities, including a new one that we have developed, featuring dynamic personas. This method allows participants to interact in real time in a virtual space with an avatar that represents an archetypal future user and provides them with information about this future user throughout the interactions. In the present experimental study, we compared this method with the classic (or static) persona method, by asking 102 participants to perform a creative design task. Results revealed statistical differences between the use of the static and dynamic persona methods, and highlighted the advantages of the dynamic method over the static one. We discuss the prospects for using this method in an ecological setting and identify the aspects to be improved.