Stimulating empathy in ideation workshops

Abstract

In participatory design users are involved in the design process, but oftentimes in industrial practice this involvement is limited to specific moments (e.g., a user study or a user test). Then designers have to work with indirect results about users. This paper describes a study about promoting empathy in conveying user insights to designers who have been partly or not even involved in meetings with users. Arranging the communication in a way that the designers can empathize with users is difficult, when they have not met the users. Based on our prior experiences with this problem, and a review on design and psychological literature, we formed a structure for how empathy can be stimulated in ideation workshops. An important step is to stimulate designers to recall their own experiences about the topic in order to be able to create a deeper understanding of the users' experiences.