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The EmpathiCH Workshop: Unraveling Empathy-Centric Design
... The dominant discourses on empathy in HCI/CSCW and its relation to design are being critically examined, as evidenced by the organization of three consecutive workshops at CHI in 2022-2024 [40,43,103]. Besides seeking to critically assess and clarify the notion of empathy-centric design, these workshops have also aimed to consolidate the multidisciplinary scholarships and perspectives on empathy and develop a future research agenda on the a) upscaling the application of Empathy-Centric Design, b) rethinking the role of researchers' empathy and evoking it in multistakeholder contexts, c) ethics of Empathy-Centric Design, d) coalescing the varied means and instruments for capturing empathy, and e) examining the temporality and materiality of empathy in the design process. ...
... However, as we tread this multi-disciplinary path, we encounter significant gaps. For instance, while there is a wealth of literature detailing empathy's constructs, a consensus on its metrics and measures remains elusive [28,43,89]. In addition to the measures, the duration of empathy interventions underscores several concerns. ...
... In exploring the complex field of empathy in HCI/CSCW, our focus rests heavily on Empathy-Centric Design [43,103,158] -an emerging notion in HCI/CSCW that aims to critically rethink and reposition the role of empathy in designing technologies for different user groups with varying needs, experiences, and expectations. Empathy-centric design distinguishes itself from similar notions such as Affective Computing, by considering the holistic embodiment of empathy as a key research and design quality, rather than its emulation through computational means. ...
Empathy is considered a crucial construct within HCI and CSCW, yet our understanding of this complex concept remains fragmented and lacks consensus in existing research. In this scoping review of 121 articles from the ACM Digital Library, we synthesize the diverse perspectives on empathy and scrutinize its current conceptualization and operationalization. In particular, we examine the various interpretations and definitions of empathy, its applications, and the methodologies, findings, and trends in the field. Our analysis reveals a lack of consensus on the definitions and theoretical underpinnings of empathy, with interpretations ranging from understanding the experiences of others to an affective response to the other's situation. We observed that despite the variety of methods used to gauge empathy, the predominant approach remains self-assessed instruments, highlighting the lack of novel and rigorously established and validated measures and methods to capture the multifaceted manifestations of empathy. Furthermore, our analysis shows that previous studies have used a variety of approaches to elicit empathy, such as experiential methods and situational awareness. These approaches have demonstrated that shared stressful experiences promote community support and relief, while situational awareness promotes empathy through increased helping behavior. Finally, we discuss a) the potential and drawbacks of leveraging empathy to shape interactions and guide design practices, b) the need to find a balance between the collective focus of empathy and the (existing and dominant) focus on the individual, and c) the careful testing of empathic designs and technologies with real-world applications.
... Historically, as seen in workshops at ACM CHI 2022 [31] and 2023 [12], the discourse on empathy in HCI pivoted around human needs (e.g., control and safety) and values (e.g., inclusiveness and ethics). Recognizing empathy as "the intuitive ability to identify with other people's thoughts and feelings" [54] has transformed our design approach, going beyond merely knowing the user to acknowledging their lived experiences and subjective context [5,49]. ...
... Through two consecutive workshops at CHI'22 [31] and CHI'23 [12], we have consolidated various notions, paradigms, and constructs in the continually evolving discourse on Empathy-Centeric Design. Meanwhile, we have grown an engaged and dedicated research community, with a steady influx of new members 1 . ...
... The subsequent CHI'23 workshop-Unraveling Empathy-Centric Design [12]-expanded the discourse on pluralistic and divergent conceptions of empathy and Empathy-Centric Design, and sought to disentangle them from within established paradigms and methodologies, and their manifestations in existing scales, measures, and instruments for capturing empathy. Furthermore, over 50 participants in a hybrid workshop in Hamburg, Germany, collectively scrutinized and debated the seams of Empathy-Centric Design and the unconsidered role of empathy as a potential instrument of manipulation and influence. ...
... These issues have resulted in the development of policies that either fail to capture the complexities and nuances of citizens' needs leading to imbalanced focus, or seek to optimize high-level demographic indicators resulting in policies that are disconnected from citizens' needs and experiences altogether. In past years we have seen an increased interest in assimilating empathy as a design lens in HCI, which is evident from the recent discourses, such as the Empathy-Centric Design workshops at CHI [27,29,73] which sought to reframe the emerging themes around empathy and devised the future research agenda to examine empathy and its role in design and evaluation of systems and interventions. Based on these emerging discourses on the role and importance of empathy in HCI and CSCW, we believe it is crucial to incorporate and empirically evaluate how empathy could mediate (if not directly influence) constructive discussions around policy making and the participatory development of inclusive policies. ...
Digitally-supported participatory methods are often used in policy-making to develop inclusive policies by collecting and integrating citizen's opinions. However, these methods fail to capture the complexity and nuances in citizen's needs, i.e., citizens are generally unaware of other's needs, perspectives, and experiences. Consequently, policies developed with this underlying gap tend to overlook the alignment of multistakeholder perspectives, and design policies based on the optimization of high-level demographic features. In our contribution , we propose a method to enable citizens understand other's perspectives and calibrate their positions. First, we collected requirements and design principles to develop our approach by involving stakeholders and experts in policymaking in a series of workshops. Then, we conducted a crowdsourcing study with 420 participants to compare the effect of different text and images, on people's initial and final motivations and their willingness to change opinions. We observed that both influence participant's opinion change, however, the effect is more pronounced for textual modality. Finally, we discuss overarching implications of designing with empathy to mediate alignment of citizen's perspectives.
... It means not only understanding these needs but also proactively incorporating them into the design of products, processes, and systems [14]. This approach emphasises empathy, recognizing the importance of understanding individuals' perspectives and experiences to truly serve their needs [15]. In the industrial context, empathy not only impacts workplace relationships [16] but also guides technology design and implementation, especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI) [17]. ...
The transition from Industry 4.0 towards Industry 5.0 marks a paradigm shift, emphasising human-centricity in industrial settings. Industry 5.0 focuses on improving the future role of people in addition to merely technological progress. While "human centricity" gains recognition, ambiguity surrounds its definition and application. The literature lacks clear consensus on the concept and its industrial implications. This paper provides clarity on human-centricity by analysing viewpoints and public opinions based on posts published on LinkedIn in the last five years regarding human-centricity. The analysis involved text mining techniques, including semantic clustering to discover distinct clusters of discussions related to human-centricity and keywords extraction to tag the different clusters. The findings reveal that public opinion predominantly centres on the skills required by future workers, encompassing both hard and soft skills, as well as social themes such as gender equity and workplace comfort. This research underscores the critical relevance of these components in the transition towards Industry 5.0, offering valuable insights for industrial practitioners and researchers alike.
Empathy is argued to be a key factor for a successful design discussion. However, such causality cannot be empirically proven based on how empathy is currently defined in design community. Empathy is used as an umbrella construct, broad and encompassing of diverse phenomena, making it difficult to quantify. We suggest improving such a situation by introducing a definition of empathy based on psychology literature, which provides structure and guidance for studying the role of empathy in design. We first break empathy to components. Then, we review empathy as used in design. Finally, we synthetize the reviewed material. From this synthesis, we conclude that empathy in design shares several key components of empathy in psychology; particularly with state influences, top-down control process and emotional stimuli. These are present in design methods although they have not been studied using such terms. Incorporating psychological components of empathy into design can help conceptualising empathy from a different angle, thus opening interesting new avenues for future research. We hope that our treatment provides present and future designers with some useful guidance.
Advances in Natural Language Processing offer techniques to de- tect the empathy level in texts. To test if individual feedback on certain students’ empathy level in their peer review writing pro- cess will help them to write more empathic reviews, we developed ELEA, an adaptive writing support system that provides students with feedback on the cognitive and emotional empathy structures. We compared ELEA to a proven empathy support tool in a peer review setting with 119 students. We found students using ELEA wrote more empathic peer reviews with a higher level of emotional empathy compared to the control group. The high perceived skill learning, the technology acceptance, and the level of enjoyment provide promising results to use such an approach as a feedback application in traditional learning settings. Our results indicate that learning applications based on NLP are able to foster empathic writing skills of students in peer review scenarios.
In this research note, we bring clarity to the concept of empathy in design research by discussing issues in its conceptualization and operationalization. We review literature to identify and clarify the core concepts of empathy and to showcase its potential operationalizations, borrowing from closely related fields of social psychology and neuroscience. We identify five core concepts: empathic understanding, empathic design research, empathic design action, empathic orientation, and empathic mental processes. We also identify six potential operationalizations: empathic tendencies, beliefs about empathy, emotion recognition, understanding mental contents, shared feelings, and prosocial responding. By combining the core concepts and operationalizations, we provide a frame of operation for future empathy research in design.
Trait emotional intelligence and evoked empathy may help in a task where emotion-evoking source material is utilized to ideate solutions and services for the end-user. Participants of the current study read life stories of different persons, with perspective-taking instruction to evoke either high or low empathy. The reading was followed with ideation tasks, first identifying problems that the person of the story is facing, and then creating initial ideas for products or services to help with these problems. The perspective-taking empathy manipulation had an expected effect to the self-reported state empathy; however, it did not have an effect on the performance in the ideation tasks. Trait emotional intelligence was related to the detection of the problems and to the generating of more ideas. The results imply that emotional intelligence may be beneficial in ideation process where perspective of the customer or end user has to be considered.
Are we reaching the limits of what human-centered and user-centered design can cope with? Developing new design methodologies and tools to unlock the potentials of data technologies such as the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for the everyday job of design is necessary but not sufficient. There is now a need to fundamentally question what happens when human-centered design is unable to effectively give form to technology, why this might be the case, and where we could look for alternatives.
Previous research using immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown that after a short period of embodiment by White people in a Black virtual body, their implicit racial bias against Black people diminishes. Here we tested the effects of some socio-cognitive variables that could contribute to enhancing or reducing the implicit racial bias. The first aim of the study was to assess the beneficial effects of cooperation within a VR scenario, the second aim was to provide preliminary testing of the hypothesis that empathy and political attitudes could contribute to implicit bias about race, while the third aim was to explore the relationship between political attitudes and empathy. We had (Caucasian) participants embodied in a Black virtual body and engaged either in a cooperative (Coop group) or in a non-cooperative (Neutral group) activity with a confederate experimenter embodying another Black avatar. Before and after VR, we measured participants’ implicit racial bias by means of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and their perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter. Before VR we also assessed participants’ political attitudes and empathy traits. Results revealed that, as compared to the Neutral group, the Coop group showed lower IAT scores after the social interaction. Interestingly, in the Neutral but not the Coop group the perceived closeness toward the confederate experimenter was associated with the initial racial bias: the more the participants reduced their distance, the more they reduced their IAT score. Moreover, reported traits of empathy and political attitudes significantly explained the variance observed in the initial implicit bias, with perspective-taking, empathic concern, and personal distress being significant predictors of the IAT scores. Finally, there was a relationship between political attitudes and empathy: the more participants considered themselves as left-wing voters, the higher their perspective-taking and empathic concern scores. We discuss these findings within the neuroscientific and social cognition field and encourage scholars from different domains to further explore whether and under which conditions a given manipulation for reducing racial bias could be efficiently transposed in VR.
The current meta-analysis aims to investigate and clarify existing research on virtual reality (VR) as a medium to elicit empathy. An exhaustive literature search (updated to February 29, 2020) enabled us to locate seven published articles, yielding a total of nine independent samples. The results reveal statistically significant positive changes in perspective-taking outcomes after VR exposure (d+ = 0.51 [95 percent CI: 0.15-0.88]) but they did not note in empathy (d+ = 0.21 [95 percent confidence interval, CI: -0.37-0.79]). A potential limitation of this work is the low number of studies included. Implications and directions for theoretical development and empirical research are also discussed.
Although empathy is an essential aspect of co-design, the design community lacks a systematic overview of the key dimensions and elements that foster empathy in design. This paper introduces an empathic formation compass, based on a comparison of existing relevant frameworks. Empathic formation is defined here as the formative process of becoming an empathic design professional who knows which attitude, skills and knowledge are applicable in a co-design process. The empathic formation compass provides designers with a vocabulary that helps them understand what kind of key dimensions and elements influence empathic formation in co-design and how that informs designers’ role and design decisions. In addition, the empathic formation compass aims to support reflection and to evaluate co-design projects beyond the mere reliance on methods. In this way, empathic design can be made into a conscious activity in which designers regulate and include their own feelings and experiences (first-person perspective), and decrease empathic bias. We identify four important intersecting dimensions that empathy is comprised of in design and describe their dynamic relations. The first two opposing dimensions are denoted by empathy and differentiate between cognitive design processes and affective design experiences, and between self- and other orientation. The other two dimensions are defined by design research and differentiate between an expert and a participatory mindset, and research- and design-led techniques. The empathic formation compass strengthens and enriches our earlier work on mixed perspectives with these specific dimensions and describes the factors that foster empathy in design from a more contextual position. We expect the empathic formation compass—combined with the mixed perspectives framework—to enhance future research by bringing about a deeper understanding of designers’ empathic and collaborative design practice.
Several disciplines have investigated the interconnected empathic abilities behind the proverb “to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” to determine how the presence, and absence, of empathy-related phenomena affect prosocial behavior and intergroup relations. Empathy enables us to learn from others’ pain and to know when to offer support. Similarly, virtual reality (VR) appears to allow individuals to step into someone else’s shoes, through a perceptual illusion called embodiment, or the body ownership illusion. Considering these perspectives, we propose a theoretical analysis of different mechanisms of empathic practices in order to define a possible framework for the design of empathic training in VR. This is not intended to be an extensive review of all types of practices, but an exploration of empathy and empathy-related phenomena. Empathy-related training practices are analyzed and categorized. We also identify different variables used by pioneer studies in VR to promote empathy-related responses. Finally, we propose strategies for using embodied VR technology to train specific empathy-related abilities.
From a historical and cross-disciplined perspective, this paper reviewed the evolvement of empathy in philosophical aesthetics, sociology and psychotherapy. Three aspects of ambiguities about empathy were summarized, namely, affection and cognition, subject-oriented and object-oriented perspective, and attitude and ability, based on which a system of coordinates was created to indicate three pairs corresponding problems of empathy in design research and practice. Through this system of coordinates, the authors wanted to build a reference for designers and researchers to deeper understand the subtle nature of empathy in design.
Textual communication via mobile phones suffers from a lack of context and emotional awareness. We present a mobile chat application, HeartChat, which integrates heart rate as a cue to increase awareness and empathy. Through a literature review and a focus group, we identified design dimensions important for heart rate augmented chats. We created three concepts showing heart rate per message, in real-time, or sending it explicitly. We tested our system in a two week in-the-wild study with 14 participants (7 pairs). Interviews and questionnaires showed that HeartChat supports empathy between people, in particular close friends and partners. Sharing heart rate helped them to implicitly understand each other's context (e.g. location , physical activity) and emotional state, and sparked curiosity on special occasions. We discuss opportunities, challenges , and design implications for enriching mobile chats with physiological sensing.
This study develops and tests an integrated model of how three psychological variables, presence, flow,
and character identification contribute to interest in learning and empathy with people from other
cultures through a simulation game. U.S. college students played one of two roles (an American journalist
or Haitian survivor) in the game that dealt with the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Presence was
a powerful predictor of flow, character identification, and empathy felt during the games. Furthermore,
empathy experienced by game play significantly predicted interest in learning more about the game
topics. Flow and identification made secondary contributions to learning outcomes, with flow mediating
the effect of presence on males’ empathy and identification contributing to females’ interest in learning.
While the proposed model was generally successful at predicting outcomes, it did a better job of accounting
for the experience of participants who played a role rooted in their own culture (the journalist)
than in a different culture (the survivor), and for female than male players. Our results suggest that
serious game designers should prioritize inducing empathy and immersive presence in players, giving
secondary attention to designing for flow and character identification.
The emergence of human-centred design strategies has directed attention to the role of empathy within design. While research on co-design acknowledges the potentially improved outcomes of using an empathic design approach, a comprehensive analysis on how empathy functions throughout the design process has been minimally explored in this literature. In this study, we analysed a series of design review videos depicting students’ design procedures within a service-learning course. These student designers were tasked to design a universally accessible zip-line and access ramp along with associated features. Our objective was to explore how empathy functioned throughout the development of the students’ final design solutions, which included a zip-line access point, ramp and cheering platform. To guide our depiction of these empathic design pathways, we relied on a set of pre-established empathic design techniques utilised by student designers. We provide a visual summary of student designers’ empathic design techniques, the interrelation of these techniques, along with implications for how design educators might effectively embed empathy throughout design curricula.
This paper calls for a new way of understanding and using methods in human-centred design. Design researchers have recently been active in developing new types of methods aimed at greatly improving their empathic understanding of people's holistic experience, and their design imagination. The strong motivation for a new methodology stems from critical reflection on scientific rationalisation of human-centred design, which attempts to pin down the design process and develop abstract user models. Despite this motivation, the design community has shown a tendency to use a conventional, scientific rationalisation when applying a stream of new design methods. In this paper, I analyse misinterpretations of the new design methods, which I call 'empathic design methods', and seek a more constructive way of understanding and describing how they actually work, going beyond 'method-recipe' convention. By analysing design students' learning diaries, I investigate what learning is going on in method-making processes and demonstrate how those processes help design students to gather contextual knowledge of a design project and to develop their empathic understanding of users.
The paper takes a closer look into one of the main attributes of Design Thinking: Empathy. The motivation for doing so has its roots in the post Design Thinking period, which we are entering now, following a rich decade of the use of this approach to innovation. Approaching a Designerly Thinking perspective of what the designer does in practice, five different epistemological paths will give an understanding of the effects empathy has in the design process. Empathy is addressed by exploring two main aspects, the emotional and the cognitive. The theoretical perspective of Design Thinking, seen as a reflexive practice, or as a creator of meaning, or even as a problem solving activity, is used to understand how empathy can be used in a design context. This aspect is then further analyzed using the results of a large workshop where Design Thinking was used.
In this paper, we report on autoethnography as a method to access non-routine usage of mobile devices, such as during business trips, vacations, etc. Autoethnography, a self-study method with the researcher as participant, was employed for the evaluation of a wrist blood pressure monitor used by people with conditions such as hypertension. The findings from the study were surprising, especially with respect to the environmental and social impact on the use of the technology. Although the autoethnographic method can be disruptive for the researcher, it enables them to understand and empathize with the experiences mobile device users can face in difficult to access contexts. This method allows HCI researchers to better understand user experiences with mobile devices, including mobile medical technology, especially during non-routine times that can be difficult to study in-situ with traditional user studies.
The effect of multisensory-induced changes on body-ownership and self-awareness using bodily illusions has been well established. More recently, experimental manipulation of bodily illusions have been combined with social cognition tasks to investigate whether changes in body-ownership can in turn change the way we perceive others. For example, experiencing ownership over a dark-skin rubber hand reduces implicit bias against dark-skin groups. Several studies have also shown that processing of skin color and facial features play an important role in judgements of racial typicality and racial categorization independently and in an additive manner. The present study aimed at examining whether using multisensory stimulation to induce feelings of body-ownership over a dark-skin rubber hand would lead to an increase in positive attitudes toward black faces. We here show, that the induced ownership of a body-part of a different skin color affected the participants’ implicit attitudes when processing facial features, in addition to the processing of skin color shown previously. Furthermore, when the levels of pre-existing attitudes toward black people were taken into account, the effect of the rubber hand illusion on the post-stimulation implicit attitudes was only significant for those participants who had a negative initial attitude toward black people, with no significant effects found for those who had positive initial attitudes toward black people. Taken together, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that the representation of the self and its relation to others, as given to us by body-related multisensory processing, is critical in maintaining but also in changing social attitudes.
In user-centred design, a widespread recognition has surfaced for the importance of designers to gain empathy with the users for whom they are designing. Several techniques and tools have been developed to support an empathic design process and several issues are indicated that support an empathic process, but precise definitions and a framework of what makes ‘empathy’ is missing. Although the need for empathic approaches in design has been repeatedly stressed, a fundamental basis of the concept of empathy is missing. The goal of this paper is to inform the discussion in the design community by applying the concept of empathy as it has developed in psychology. This paper presents a review of how empathy has been discussed in design and psychology literature, and proposes a background framework for supporting empathic approaches in designing. The framework presents empathy in design as a process of four phases, and gives insight into what role the designer's own experience can play when having empathy with the user. This framework can be applied to three areas: research activities, communication activities and ideation activities.
Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience (UX), practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes
“pleasurable experiences” with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such
as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience
with interactive technologies. To explore this, we collected over 500 positive experiences with interactive products (e.g.,
mobile phones, computers). As expected, we found a clear relationship between need fulfilment and positive affect, with stimulation,
relatedness, competence and popularity being especially salient needs. Experiences could be further categorized by the primary
need they fulfil, with apparent qualitative differences among some of the categories in terms of the emotions involved. Need
fulfilment was clearly linked to hedonic quality perceptions, but not as strongly to pragmatic quality (i.e., perceived usability),
which supports the notion of hedonic quality as “motivator” and pragmatic quality as “hygiene factor.” Whether hedonic quality
ratings reflected need fulfilment depended on the belief that the product was responsible for the experience (i.e., attribution).
In recent years, various methods and techniques have emerged for mapping the contexts of people's interaction with products. Designers and researchers use these techniques to gain deeper insight into the needs and dreams of prospective users of new products. As most of these techniques are still under development, there is a lack of practical knowledge about how such studies can be conducted. In this paper we share our insights, based on several projects from research and many years of industrial practice, of conducting user studies with generative techniques. The appendix contains a single case illustrating the application of these techniques in detail.
For a decade HCI researchers and practitioners have been developing methods, practices and designs 'for the full range of human experience'. On the one hand, a variety of approaches to design, such as aesthetic, affective, and ludic that emphasize particular qualities and contexts of experience and particular approaches to intervening in interactive experience have become focal. On the other, a variety of approaches to understanding users and user experience, based on narrative, biography, and role-play have been developed and deployed. These developments can be viewed in terms of one of the seminal commitments of HCI, 'to know the user'. Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience. In this article, we use 'empathy' to help position some emerging design and user-experience methodologies in terms of dynamically shifting relationships between designers, users, and artefacts.
The current mechanisms that drive the development of AI technologies are widely criticized for being tech-oriented and market-led instead of stemming from societal challenges. In Human-Centered AI discourses, and more broadly in Human-Computer Interaction research, initiatives have been proposed to engage experts from various domains of social science in determining how AI should reach our societies, predominantly through informing the adoption policies. Our contribution, however, seeks a more essential role for social sciences, namely to introduce discursive standpoints around what we need AI to be. With a focus on the domain of urbanism, the specific goal has been to elicit – from interviews with 16 urban experts – the imaginaries of how AI can and should impact future cities. Drawing on the social science literature, we present how the notion of “imaginary” has essentially framed this research and how it could reveal an alternative vision of non-human intelligent actors in future cities.
Healthcare simulators are learning environments that offer many training opportunities. The integration of expressive virtual patients in these simulators encourages the exchanges and provokes emotional reactions in the learner, which promotes memorization and learning. Based on these elements, we assume that the facial expressiveness of a virtual agent is a factor to be considered in order to improve the user experience. We investigate the impact of the facial expressiveness of virtual humans on the empathy induction in the user of health simulators. We also investigate the impact of facial expressiveness on the user’s sense of similarity and the affective bond with the agent. Our results show a high empathy score when users train with simulators. Depending on the context, we observe a significant difference in perspective-taking in favor of the users who interact with an expressive virtual agent to a virtual agent without facial expressiveness.
This paper presents a manifesto for the future design of human-made systems and engage this reflection by promoting a computational human factors engineering (HFE) approach. In this paper, we concentrate on the fact that human well-being and sustainability objectives are inseparable. Thus, this paper's primary focus is to demonstrate a simulation-based computational design methodology, Digital Human-in-the-loop (D-HIL), which utilizes the Digital Human Modeling (DHM) platform to inject HFE design principles early in design. The D-HIL framework enables human, product, and systems data to be coupled with computational toolkits; thus, bringing opportunities for facilitating ergonomics decision-making to be part of the Digital Twin driven design. We presented two frameworks originating from our recent work in D-HIL research: (1) Prototyping Toolbox and (2) Human Error and Functional Failure Reasoning (HEFFR) as means for realizing sustainability goals through Digital Twin-based design. While our preliminary studies show that both tools show promise in terms of realizing the sustainability goals, they are limited to only goals that relate to cost. In our future work, we plan to explore models and computational tools from non-traditional engineering domains to expand our frameworks' scope to realizing sustainability goals that go beyond the cost estimations.
In the 1980s, one of the values advanced to distinguish the field of design from the sciences and the humanities was empathy. Since then it has become an important theme in design practice, research, and education. Insights from philosophy and cognitive science, however, suggest that empathy has become a design ideology rather than a principle suitable for judging the value of design solutions in some situations – for some end-users and some aspects of their experience. When it is applied in design, two important steps tend to be skipped: an ethical and a perspectival one. Assessing its suitability, we hypothesise, has much to gain theoretically and practically from accounting for the role of embodiment in the process of developing empathy.
This paper examines the promise of empathy, the name commonly given to the initial phase of the human-centered design process in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform technology development. By analyzing popular empathy activities aimed at understanding people with disabilities, we examine the ways empathy works to both powerfully and problematically align designers with the values of people who may use their products. Drawing on disability studies and feminist theorizing, we describe how acts of empathy building may further distance people with disabilities from the processes designers intend to draw them into. We end by reimagining empathy as guided by the lived experiences of people with disabilities who are traditionally positioned as those to be empathized.
Research into students’ interactions with historical video games is limited and tends to focus on teacher mediation. As a result, little is known about the meanings that students independently construct as they consume this form of media. This qualitative interview study uses Assassin’s Creed, a narrative video game with a historical setting, as a site of inquiry. Students described a sense of immediate access to history that contrasted with school-based learning, a sense of human connection to people in the past, and increased perception of multiple perspectives in history. They also evidenced a willingness to allow the games to rewrite their beliefs about history, and theorized about the games’ historical accuracy. However, students tended to miss opportunities for critical engagement with this visceral sense of immersive experience. As such, implications are raised regarding ways to promote critical investigation into gameplay experiences as well as the importance of fostering a sense of human connection to history through social education.
There have been long-term concerns regarding discriminatory discipline practices used with culturally and linguistically diverse students, with little research on the impact teacher-centered empathy interventions may have on this population. This randomized pretest–posttest control group design investigates the ability of a brief empathy-inducing intervention to improve the implicit bias of pre-service teachers, as measured by the Implicit Association Test. We found the empathy intervention statistically significant at decreasing the implicit bias of White female pre-service teachers toward Black individuals (F = 7.55, η² = 0.22, p = 0.01). Implications and future research are discussed, including extended intervention periods.
As a user-designer face-to-face design approach, co-design needs the two sides standing at each other’s perspectives for problem solving. In co-design, the key point is building empathy between designers and users. This paper went through the literature about “design empathy”. A practical co-design workshop was organized which proved the effectiveness of design probes for empathy building. Other findings include the three modes of designers’ participation in co-design.
Recent studies have shown that there is a need to improve usability-related decision-making in product development teams to prevent usability problems in the final product. Those decisions are heavily influenced by the knowledge those teams have of future use situations and expected usability issues. Our previous research showed that design team members often implicitly hold this type of knowledge, but do not share it within the team. This lack of a shared understanding of product use negatively influences the decision-making process. In this paper we present the iterative development of a set of guidelines to support design teams in sharing knowledge of product use through the generation of flexible, explicit and evolving frames of reference. A series of studies in which the guidelines were evaluated suggest that particularly the activity of collaboratively creating the explicit frame of reference contributes to a shared understanding of product use.
In order to explain the premises and consequences of the current turn to empathy-based design in its form as user- or human-centred design, this paper connects it with the utopian tradition inherent in much of design's history. The paper also introduces two new concepts not normally
associated with the field, 'absorption' and 'theatricality', to explain this history. It then goes on to locate empathic design within the category of 'absorption' and makes some conclusions about the social effects of this approach to design, arguing that empathy can be the source of what
can be called 'tactical' design.
This paper presents a model of communicating user experiences to design teams. The model comprises three qualities of communication: enhancing empathy, providing inspiration and supporting engagement. A new participatory communication tool is developed and explored in two empirical studies. The first study investigates the use of the tool during idea generation by design teams. The second study compares four different communication tools to study the qualities of empathy and inspiration. Our findings indicate the value of making the receivers of the information participative in the act of communicating. In this way designers become co-creators and co-owners of the information, resulting in higher degrees of acceptance and use. The participatory nature of the proposed tool spurs deeper understanding and more intensive use of insights from user studies in the creative process.
Empathic research approaches to support the designer: a supra-qualitative research for designing model
- Mcdonagh
- McDonagh D
Social Theory as a Thinking Tool for Empathic Design
- Carolien Postma
- Kristina Lauche
- Postma Carolien
Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy, Vincent Koenig, and Carine Lallemand. 2022. Empathy in Design Scale: Development and Initial Insights
- Luce Drouet
- Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy
- Vincent Koenig
- Carine Lallemand
- Drouet Luce
Empathic Design - User Experience in Product Design
- Tuuli Ilpo Koskinen
- Katja Mattelmäki
- Battarbee
Using focus groups to support new product development
- Deana Mcdonagh
- Philp
- Anne Bruseberg
- McDonagh-Philp Deana
Anne-Sophie Milcent, Abdelmajid Kadri, and Simon Richir. 2021. Using Facial Expressiveness of a Virtual Agent to Induce Empathy in Users
- Anne-Sophie Milcent
- Abdelmajid Kadri
- Simon Richir
- Milcent Anne-Sophie
Antti Surma-aho and Katja Hölttä-Otto. 2022. Conceptualization and operationalization of empathy in design research
- Antti Surma
- Katja Hölttä-Otto
- Katja Hölttä-Otto Antti