The manifestation of empathy within design: findings from a service-learning course

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Empathy
• empathic design
• service-learning
• engineering design
• design pathways

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the efforts made by Robin S. Adams, Junaid A. Siddiqui and the rest of the behind-the-scenes 2014 Design Thinking Research Symposium coordinators for all of their efforts in collecting, organising and sharing the dataset utilised in this study. We would also like to thank the students featured in this study for their willingness to record and share their design behaviours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.