Using Personas as a Multidisciplinary Design Tool for Social Justice in Engineering

This paper presents a structured workflow for integrating personas into multidisciplinary STEM design processes, with a focus on promoting social justice and user-centered engineering outcomes. Drawing on our combined perspectives as a technical communication scholar and an engineering student, we demonstrate how personas-typically associated with digital UX contexts-can be effectively adapted for engineering projects. We argue that incorporating well-researched, inclusive personas into engineering workflows enables practitioners to balance human factors with technical constraints, leading to more equitable and context-aware design solutions. The paper outlines key stages for implementing personas in engineering contexts, examines their role in design reviews, and addresses limitations and ethical considerations associated with their use.