Social-Systems Archetype

⸺ by Charles Iliya Krempeaux

🠶 archetypes (noun): an idealized model of a number of similar things.

From the point-of-view of — an archetype is a model of some aspect of a person shared among many people.

UX people tend to call "archetypes": "personas". And marketers tend to call "archetypes": "segments". In practice, all 3 of these are very similar concepts.

Some examples of archetypes include:

father,
• mother,
• son,
• daughter
• brother,
• sister,
• husband,
• wife,
• gardener,
• farmer,
• computer programmer,
• grocery store cashier,
• CEO
• CTO
• etc.

You can also probably already see that an individual could express more than one archetype. For example — a single individual could be — a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a CTO, and a programmer at the same time during a certain span of their life.

The archetypes an individual expresses could also change over their life-time too. For example — before someone has a child, they wouldn't be a father or a mother yet; but after they have a child, they would (also) become a father, or a mother (in addition to whatever other archetypes they express).