Empathy as a Design Skill

Abstract

Empathy is an essential part of a collaboration and is often referred to in the design field. Not only it helps designers to step into their users’ shoes, but it also smoothens the communication between the designer and their stakeholder, client and, team members. If empathy is so important for collaboration in design and establishing human-centered working alliances, how come, then the focus is mainly on the user research and how come designers are not taught of the related skills, attitudes and behaviors? The gap in the design education field about empathy training for professional contexts creates an opportunity for design. In this project based on knowledge from multidisciplinary literature review, the following design goal has been formulated: designing a training material which can be used in the educational setting by design educators & coaches to help design students increase their awareness of the six key attention points of empathy as a design skill.’’To create the basis of the training material, a long list of skills, attitudes and behaviors related to empathy is structured from fields of healthcare, human-centered therapy, business, social and positive psychology and design. Then, in collaboration with the design educators and design students from the Delft University of Technology, the long list has been scaled down to six key attention points; willingness, active listening & attending, open-mindedness, embracing differences, sensitivity and holistic view.With the inspiration of training methods used in above-mentioned fields, these six attention points are used in the ideation rounds as the basis of the training concept. After several iterations, the concept is refined and tested with design students. ‘‘Empathy as A Design Skill : Practicing Six Key Attention Points’’ is a training material set consisting of printable materials which are designed to be used during the five steps; describe, internalize, sensitize, apply and evaluate. Each attention point is described with examples, internalized with exercises and the students are sensitized with homework each week. After six of the attention points are introduced, a real-life interview is arranged as a means of applying the six attention points. This interview is asked to be video recorded which is used for the final step; evaluate in which the design students are asked to reflect on their performance. The final test for user evaluation with design students reveals that this self-reflective training material helps design students to be more conscious of the attention points then, recognize these points both in their professional life and their daily lives.