Public service messaging & Jungian archetypes: a case when pseudo-personas fail 

Learning designers can learn a lot from failed cases. The use of Jungian archetypes within the Australian public service presents such a case and demonstrates to learning designers that the use of pseudo-personas should be avoided. 

Personas are often used by learning designers in order to prompt the process of positioning, that is, they seek to empathize with the eventual end users of the instructional and training modules they are involved in creating in order to be able to respond to and meet their needs. Empathizing is a creative and emotive process and cannot be relied upon alone. Needs analyses and co-design is also employed so that the words, ideas and emotions of prospective end users can be understood in relation to the contextual background of the training module. Personas are developed out of, not instead of, the ground work that is done to understand the context where the intended training will take place, and can assist designers respond to the nuances of diverse learning needs, nuances that UX principles alone cannot assist with when trying to reach diverse learners. 

Within the public service Jungian-informed archetypes are used to inform demographic profiling which in turn informs community messaging. Also known as “Australian archetypes” the categories have included “Connected Retirees”, “Financially Secure Working Age Couples”, “Time Pressured Couples with Children”, “Dissatisfied Working Age Singles” and “Marginalised Australians” and they have been used as tools of public policy. Firefighting authorities, too, in Australia, make reference to archetypes as they seek residents’ responsiveness to bushfire related policies.

The failures in the communication strategies adopted by the Australian public service through their use of archetypes can be understood in terms of many missteps including most forcibly the rigidity through which they employ such demographic profiling wherein they treat each individual captured within their archetypal net as trapped and without agency. 

Fortunately, learning designers move beyond such rigid framing and at Silk-Wood we embrace human complexities within our learning designs.