A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people's own terms support the design of technologies by truly satisfying users' needs and drives. Examining the experiences of those working "out there", and our practises, we conclude persona is a vital designerly artefact to empowering people in representing themselves. A persona-based study on User-Created Persona in Namibia contrasts the current persona status-quo via an ongoing codesign effort with urban and rural non-designers. However we argue persona as a design device must ease its implicit colonial tendency to and impulses in depicting "the other". Instead we endorse serenity, mindfulness and local enabling in design at large and in the African context in particular.

Persona is elicited through qualitative, quantitative or both methods combined. Yet, for it to be validated data must come from research on end-users. Literature reveals projects combining persona and participatory design (PD) tend to be long-lasting, large-scale, western, resourceful ventures, with personas being generated from extensive qualitative user-data and empirical research. This project investigates how the method is taken on, interpreted, constructed and communicated by end-users within PD in non-WEIRD (Westernised, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Developed) cultures. Literature pinpoints a misuse of persona by design stakeholders across cultures due to either a lack of grounded data; interpretivism vs. userdata in decision-making, or to organisational decisions and power dimensions within the PD process. Besides, most projects involve end-users in the research phase, yet not in creating and grounding of personas -which often come built from somewhere else. This project thus sets to provide empirical research on how end-users in non-WEIRD settings elicit and build personas within PD to convey their technological requirements, expectations and aspirations towards a satisfactory User Experience (UX).

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales.

Persona is a communicative artefact for usability that currently functions under the umbrella of User-Centred Design (UCD). Since we argue usability methods differ across cultures, this project presents a cross-cultural research probe on persona generated by indigenous Otjiherero speakers in Namibia. The objective is to find out how participants in this milieu take on, understand and portray persona artefacts, what goals of User Experience (UX) emerge from the inquiry, and whether the artefacts created simulate or differ from those in literature. Tentative methods scaffold from benefits attained by persona in the attempt to advance persona technical communication in crosscultural design. This experience report presents initial findings on narrative content, rhetorical preferences, and the physical layout of persona artefacts as so-far constructed by Otjiherero speakers in rural Namibia. The report draws to a close reflecting on present challenges and advances, and indicating upcoming pathways.