Personas are a popular tool used in design education to represent target users. Personas become a point of reference for generating ideas, prototyping, and identifying solutions that resonate with target users. The paper measures the effect of persona priming on ideation fluency and originality of ideas during a brainstorming session. In a three-between subjects experimental design, sixty industrial design students were randomly assigned to three conditions: a single persona condition, a multiple personas condition and a control condition. After brainstorming ideas, participants completed a short questionnaire that measured their perspective taking ability and Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) as a measure of interpersonal closeness felt with a persona.

The results of a one-way ANOVA show that participants in the control group and single persona group generated more ideas compared to participants in the multiple persona group. However, participants in the multiple persona group generated a higher number of original ideas compared to other groups. The results indicate that participants provide with a single persona had greater interpersonal closeness compared to the participants provided with multiple personas but did not show any significant difference in the ability of
perspective taking. The study results demonstrate the positive influence of multiple personas on originality of ideas, however, their effect on increased empathy for end users remains uncertain. Finally, the study discusses practical implications for improving person-primed ideation.