Beyond the Human: Designing with Non-Human Personas in Mobile Apps

Design has always started with people –how they think, move, tap, hesitate, and decide. For years, user-centric design has been repeated like a mantra across teams as a guiding principle. But somewhere along the way, user-centric quietly narrowed into user-only. It became shorthand for a single persona on a board: an age, a job title, and a favorite drink. Helpful at times, occasionally insightful, but ultimately incomplete.

These persona posters rarely change decisions. They don’t meaningfully influence how we design, code, build, or prioritize. By focusing so tightly on this fictional individual alone, we unintentionally removed everything else from the conversation –ecosystems, resources, and the living world that absorbs the consequences of every digital choice.

Designing and building apps today requires far more than shaping an interface. It means understanding how an app’s energy consumption, server load, water usage, and ripple out through a long chain of physical processes. For physical products, this kind of environmental awareness has been mainstream for years, sometimes even used as a marketing tool. Digital products, however, are still treated as if they’re weightless, impact-free, and endlessly scalable. They aren’t.

This is where non-human personas become useful. Not as a gimmick, but as a way to restore perspective, expanding design beyond the individual on the screen to include the world beneath it.

The Limits of Human-Only Personas

In product development, defining the user helps teams create experiences that meet real needs. Tools like personas, user behavior, goals, demographics cues, and context of use all guide design decisions. Yet they share a common limitation: they center on a single dimension –the human.

Personas, perhaps the most common tool, describe who an app is for. They are often character descriptive: Sofia, 29, who practices yoga and enjoys coffee. These profiles tend to be stereotypical, flattening complex human lives to simplified labels.

Functional personas emerged as a response, shifting attention from identity to intention. They describe what someone is trying to achieve, their goals, tasks, and hesitations –rather than describing who someone is. They’re more practical, grounded, and helpful when shaping interaction patterns.

Both techniques have value. Both keep teams aligned with people. Traditional personas tell who someone is, while functional personas describe what they’re trying to do. Neither captures the ecosystem an app depends on –its energy footprint, cloud infrastructure, or long-term environmental effects. Digital products aren’t isolated transactions between one person and one interface. They belong within social, cultural, and increasingly environmental systems.

If human personas describe intention, non-human personas describe impact. When apps run across low-power silicon, cloud clusters, data centers, and millions of devices, impact matters just as much as interaction.

Letting Ecosystems Shape the Conversation

A non-human persona doesn’t start with Sofia. It can start with water –the freshwater used to cool the data centers that support sync, search, storage, and computation. Defining this non-human person involves understanding how often the app calls a server, if background refresh cycles are predictable, and how caching behaves.

From there, the lens broadens to air. Energy production and CO₂ emissions are tied to everything from animation to notifications. An app that constantly triggers layer validation may feel responsive, but it can be environmentally expensive. Understanding the impact on the environment expands to considering migratory birds affected by long-term infrastructure expansion and climate instability driven by energy demand.

Suddenly, design decisions become environmental decisions. They influence whether a feature increases network stress, triggers wasteful rendering, or quietly accumulates CO₂. This doesn’t make the design process heavier. If anything, it grounds it in reality.

Designing for the Pluriverse challenges the myth of the “universal user.” There has never been a single human we designed for. Technology touches many worlds, and good design acknowledges that diversity rather than flattening it. Non-human personas extend this thinking by recognizing the planetary systems surrounding our digital ones.

User-ecosystem thinking is a concept that views products as participants in networks of relationships. It means acknowledging the planetary systems surrounding our digital ones. Designing for reality instead of abstraction is stopping treating the interface as a hermetically sealed relationship between one person and one device.

Case Study | Apple Mail

Apple Mail shows an ecosystem-aware design by minimizing redundant work and prioritizing predictability.

1. Fetch vs. Push: Fetch retrieves data on a schedule, while push wakes the device whenever a message arrives. Predictable behavior reduces energy spikes and stabilizes cooling demand.

2. Thread Mute: Fewer push notifications = lowers device wakeups = less GPU + CPU usage.

3. Local Caching: Mail stores loaded messages and attachments on-device whenever possible, reducing repeated server calls and the cooling water and energy they require.

Through these choices, Mail aligns with non-human personas: water benefits from stable load patterns, while air benefits from reduced compute and synchronization.

Designing With the Environment as an Actant

A non-human persona mirrors the structure of a human persona –description, needs, pain points, gains, and goals– grounding each element in ecological realities, rather than individual preferences. It describes an ecosystem, the conditions that sustain it, and the pressures that threaten it. It articulates long-term balance while identifying where an app introduces demand.

Unlike many human personas, which are often shaped by assumption or bias, non-human personas are grounded in environmental data and established science. This makes them –ironically– more objective than most user personas.

The term actant refers to anything that plays an active role in shaping outcomes. It is not limited to people; an actant can be a human, a technology, a system, or a material condition that exerts influence.

In design theory, the concept comes from Actor-Network Theory, which offers a non-anthropocentric way of understanding how social, technological, and environmental events unfold. Rather than treating humans as the sole agents of change, the theory grants equal agency to both human and non-human actants.

From this perspective, outcomes are not caused by a single decision or actor, but by networks of interdependent actants –devices, infrastructures, policies, environments, and people– each shaping the direction and consequences of what is built.

Even something as simple as sending a message has an environmental cost –from storage to computing cycles. This cost becomes a design opportunity. Small decisions, like reducing attachment size or clarifying deletion flows, can meaningfully lower impact.

This isn’t guilt-driven design. It’s precision.

Designing With Living Systems in Mind

Theoretically, the concept makes sense, but applying it can feel overwhelming. Digital products are embedded in complex, interdependent systems, and many existing frameworks remain too linear and human-centric to capture that complexity. Starting small makes it achievable.

Begin with real environmental data rather than assumptions –use credible sources –NGOs, scientific literature, pollution statistics, governmental datasets. Define the human context clearly, recognizing that neither “the user” nor “the environment” is a single entity. Then adapt persona templates to describe living systems: what they depend on, what destabilizes them, and where the product intersects with their well-being.

Mapping actants –both human and non-human– expands the design canvas beyond screens and flows.  Tools like actant-mapping canvas help visualize these relationships and make invisible dependencies explicit. AI can support this work by synthesizing inputs and generating early drafts, but validation remains non-negotiable. Share drafts with people close to users and with environmental consultants, then cut anything that can’t be defended.

Human vs. Non-Human Personas

Closing the Loop

Digital products have real-world weight, even when that weight is invisible. Every network call, animation loop, and background task reflects beyond the device in someone’s hand. Those features impact energy grids, cooling systems, and ecosystems across the planet. Non-human personas bring the environmental reality to decision-making. It goes beyond what the user wants to include what the world must sustain.

Designing with non-human personas means seeing apps as participants in planetary systems, not isolated experiences. Performance constraints offer guardrails, platform guidelines provide direction, and design provides perspective. Sustainability becomes less about perfection and more about clarity and responsibility.

Recognizing the ecosystems beneath the apps –and giving them a seat at the table– is one of the clearest steps toward building digital products that support, rather than strain, the world that sustains them. Because every design decision is, in the end, an environmental decision.