Personality Lab - case study in development
What does it take to design an AI participant people actually respond to? The Personality Lab is my answer—a system for building, configuring, and measuring distinct AI personas for deliberative research.
Overview
The Personality Lab is a framework I developed to create measurable, distinct AI personas for research environments, mapping behavioral dimensions across a custom model that captures how a persona engages, challenges, supports, and responds to others.
Rather than starting from abstract parameters, I drew on an unconventional source of inspiration — the rich, well-documented personalities of fictional ensembles — to anchor each persona in something psychologically coherent and recognizable.
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The result is a system that connects persona configuration to observable engagement outcomes, giving researchers a structured way to test how different AI personality types affect user behavior in online discussions. The Personality Lab is currently in use on a deliberative social platform as part of ongoing research into AI-mediated civic dialogue. A full case study is in development.
My Role
I conceived and led the design of the Personality Lab in my role as Senior UX Designer at Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab.
This included defining the persona framework, developing the measurement methodology, and translating research requirements into a system that could be consistently applied and evaluated across a live platform.
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Tools and methods
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Persona framework design and behavioral mapping in Figma and Notion
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Collaborative iteration with researchers and engineers
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Engagement scoring design and validation planning