GenAI Personas

Co-designing Characters with GenAI and people with Parkinson's

2024-2025

Prompt Engineering, Participative Design, Human-AI interaction, Digital Health, TORUS project

As part of EPSRC-funded TORUS digital health project, I co-produced AI-generated characters working together with people with Parkinson’s, for the purpose of conducting internal and external research within the project.

The TORUS project develops a smart home system for at-home monitoring of Parkinson’s disease, comprising vision-based cameras for posture recognition and a wearable band.

The Gen AI characters

Through a series of online workshops, I involved people living with Parkinson’s in co-designing three GenAI characters (personas) using the platfom MidJourney. This exercise was to ensure that their values and experiences are better reflected, and that the resulting characters were accurate depictions of people living with Parkinson’s.

In total, I generated ~2900 images, with ~103 of them featured in storyboards developed as the next step.

Myself and my co-authors author a paper (in process), presenting key findings from the three-week design experiment of co-generating the characters with participants, reflecting on key learnings from the design process and unpacking some of the complexities at play in the use of GenAI tools for design workflows.

Above: A diagram showing the amount of content generated and key design phases.



Above: Example of MidJourney prompting exploration.



Above: Example of MidJourney prompting exploration.



Above: Example of MidJourney prompting exploration.



Above: Example of MidJourney prompting exploration.



Above: Example of MidJourney prompting exploration.