Within the research agenda InSituEx, the independent project "Polyphonic Personas" focuses on the question of how media experiences can be described from multiple human and nonhuman perspectives. It aims to harness the rich tradition of multi-perspective storytelling in literature and its reflection in narratology for the field of experience design. Or more concretely: how can the narratological concepts of polyphony and focalization be operationalized in the creation of so-called design personas? We want to develop an approach to multi-perspective narratives of media experiences in which users are conceived as entities in experiential networks.

The project organizes an interdisciplinary dialogue between humanities scholars and design researchers that will mainly take place in two workshops on Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red (1998/2001), which is set in Istanbul in 1591 and depicts a conflict between Ottoman miniature and Renaissance portraiture styles of painting from the perspectives of various human and nonhuman narrators. In the first workshop, readings of selected chapters of My Name Is Red will be presented and discussed. In the second workshop, the results will be translated into methodological guidelines for multi-perspective descriptions of everyday media experiences, which will subsequently be tested with design students. The project's findings will be presented at international conferences, published as a special issue in a peer-reviewed journal, and integrated into the research agenda InSituEx.

"Polyphonic Personas" aims to take up, on the one hand, the currently lively debate on multi-perspectivity in literary narratology and, on the other, diversify and enrich the conception of design personas. Its main goal is to combine these related approaches and hence develop narratives of everyday media experiences from human and nonhuman perspectives. As part of InSituEx, it serves to elaborate a non-anthropocentric and ecologically sustainable framework for experience design.