From a dance perspective the persona is the most engaging boundary object seen.. it becomes an object when it is identified.

I would look at Architecture (my first impulse), Human Development, Sociology, Fashion (including costuming) and Theater/Dance Philosophy.

Here are a few resources.. I hope to check back here and see this discussion develop.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=fJS-Bie75ikC&oi=fnd&pg=PT7&dq=scholarly+articles+on+human+beings+and+architecture&ots=QwiHvL9L-y&sig=9iGwinM57jdt0smcQLLwqyR5DBI#v=onepage&q=scholarly%20articles%20on%20human%20beings%20and%20architecture&f=false

 http://www.pps.org/reference/toward-an-architecture-of-place-moving-beyond-iconic-to-extraordinary/

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/boundary-objects-guide/index

Personas and scenarios are definitely boundary objects in the design process.  They have always been characterized this way. And basically that is the primary source of their value in design. You have to separate the concept of boundary object from the term as a particular kind of jargon. In my writing from the late 1980s and early 1990s on scenarios, I always emphasized that different knowledge communities (software developers, usability engineers, users, marketing people) could all make sense of a system design through the mediation of scenarios as a shared (and use-oriented) representation -- that's a boundary object!

You could check out early papers like these ...

Carroll, J.M. & Rosson, M.B.  1990.  Human-computer interaction scenarios as a design representation.  In B.D. Shriver (Ed.), Proceedings Volume II of HICSS-23: 23rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Software Track. (2-6 January 1990; Kona, HA). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 555-561.

Carroll, J.M.  1994.  Making USE a design representation.  Communications of the ACM,  37/12, 29-35.

Our my books ...

Carroll, J.M. 2000.  Making use: Scenario-based design of human-computer interactions.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  Japanese edition published in 2003 by Kyoritsu Publishing, Tokyo; translated by Professor Kentaro Go.

Rosson, M.B. & Carroll, J.M., 2002. Usability engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.

John: thanks a lot for these sources, these are spot on! Dara: your architectural take is somewhat further from my needs, but this adds much context. I am curious how this discussion could evolve as well :)

Dear Koen, Jack, and Dara,

I disagree with Jack. Personas and scenarios cannot always be regarded as boundary objects. It depends on how they are used, or rather *non-used* by developers. Take a look at a very recent paper from our research group that was presented at CHI '15 (Blomkvist, Person, Åberg, 2015). It gives you more of an argument than I can give you here.

There is also an earlier paper from our group that you amy want to look at (Sökjer, Holmlid, Tholander & Lantz, 2010). You may also want to check what Massanari (2010) have written.

I personally wrote one paper that touches on scenarios, UI prototypes and UI sketches as boundary objects (Johansson & Arvola, 2007), but not any on personas as boundary objects. However, I would say that our results on scenarios in that study alsy may apply on personas. Again, we see more on how scenarios are non-used by developers.

Blomkvist, J. K., Persson, J., & Johan Åberg. (2015). Communication through Boundary Objects in Distributed Agile Teams. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15), pp. 1875-1884. ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI=10.1145/2702123.2702366 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2702123.2702366

Johansson, M., & Arvola, M. (2007). A case study of how user interface sketches, scenarios and computer prototypes structure stakeholder meetings. In L. J. Ball, M. A. Sasse, C. Sas, T. C. Ormerod, A. Dix, P. Bagnall & T. McEwan (Eds.), People and Computers XXI: HCI... but not as we know it, Proceedings of HCI 2007, The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference, Volume 1, pp. 177-184. University of Lancaster, UK., 3 - 7 September 2007. Swindon, UK: The British Computer Society. http://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/13315

Massanari, A. L. (2010). Designing for imaginary friends: information architecture, personas and the politics of user-centered design. New Media & Society, 12 (3), 401-416. http://www.adriennemassanari.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/nms_massanari.pdf

Sökjer, P., Holmlid, S., Tholander, J. & Lantz, A. (2010). The dynamics of objects in client-designer communication. In Hernwall, P. (Ed.), The virtual: Interaction : A conference 2007, pp.. Huddinge, Sweden: School of Communication, Media and IT, Södertörn University. http://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/publications/fulltext/2007/SökjerVirtual2007.pdf 

thanks a lot. I''ll look in to this. 

I also realized that I wrote about this non-use of personas earlier. Anyhow, again, if they are not used by the developers they won't be a boundary object between designers and developers. But you may want to focus on other stakeholders than developers.

Blomquist, Å., & Arvola, M. (2002). Personas in action: Ethnography in an interaction Design Team. In Proceedings of NordiCHI 2002: Tradition and trancendence, pp. 197-200. October 19–23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark. New York, NY: ACM Press. http://www.ida.liu.se/~matar63/NordiCHI02blomquist-web.pdf

Arvola, M. (2006). When personas were not fully effective: The mastery, appropiation, and authority of a design tool. In J. Pruitt & T. Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, pp. 300-301. Morgan Kaufmann.