Persona's Dilemma between Academics and Practitioners: Guidelines for Idea Management Workshops for Co-Designing Future Technologies

The introduction of Industry 4.0 interactive technologies and automated systems in complex organizations have imposed novel challenges and burdens on academics and industrial practitioners for developing systems that work for future workplaces. Developing such systems need sufficient knowledge and understanding of the trends and technological developments and viability from industry and academic experts before introducing them to the general population. Co-designing workshops with employees and users supported by various design tools can provide better ideation for designing future scenarios. We conducted a qualitative study to analyze academics’ and industrial practitioners’ views on a persona as a design tool during a conference workshop. These participants empirically test the co-creation of personas and find conceptual differences between the groups in their tool use. We propose guidelines on using personas for idea management in the co-design of future scenarios using pre and post-workshop surveys and workshop transcripts to code and clustered our findings. The conclusion is that considering the differences in academics’ and industrial practitioners’ perspectives, using the right design tools for ideation in a prepared environment for a combined team is substantial and can lead to designing positive experiences in future workplaces