Animated Inclusive Personae

Animated Inclusive Personae

This project, financed by the Pedagogy Transformation Fund, will enable the creation of Animated Inclusive Personae (AIPs) – furthering the progress made in developing inclusive digital personae and animating these for use in teaching and training material.
In conjunction with their development, we will work with course teams and service providers to look for ways to further embed equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) in learning materials and student services through by identifying areas where these AIPs can be deployed to enhance the student experience or provide information.

These AIPs will develop work in the following projects.

These animated characters will have stories and biographies like those used in AA but they will have bespoke graphics that will enable them to be animated and therefore used in a much wider range of scenarios.

Why we are doing this work

The personae designed by for the AA project have proved that using inclusive personae in course content can help students empathise with others and that students value them as examples of how the course content can be related to real life. They have also been successfully used in the Careers Service as a tool for staff to reflect on how their service may be developed to benefit users from different backgrounds. In developing inclusive personae for animations in the Mental Health and Wellbeing project the limitations of available imagery became very apparent.

We have found a significant issue with off-the-shelf products whereby finding appropriate imagery, either animated or photorealistic, to represent our diverse cohort is near impossible. Solving this problem with live action recordings or professionally developed animations is prohibitively costly both financially and in terms of lead time for development.

To address this, we intend to use artists to develop the initial set of personae and in doing so create templates that mean future users can create their own characters with a range of features, skin tones, and body types.

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Student Partners

1. We will be working with StudentShapers within departments to review areas where teaching and learning can be made more inclusive/representative to find places where AIPs can be most usefully deployed.

2. We are recruiting students with skills in character design and animation. The students will develop bespoke AIPs for different scenarios as we work on a range of projects to create the personae behind the animations. For more information email Katie Stripe. k.stripe@imperial.ac.uk