Informed empathy in design practice: Exploring designers’ empathy in reference to unfamiliar user groups

Date

2024-9-02

Author

Kulaksız, Mert

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

255
views

352
downloads

Cite This

Empathy is increasingly recognized as a crucial yet complex concept in design, especially for fostering a deep understanding of unfamiliar user groups shaped by socio-economic, cultural, bodily, or professional differences between designers and users. Despite its importance, the term 'empathy' in design remains ambiguous, often broadly used to describe exploratory user research. While much attention has been given to methods for cultivating empathy, limited research exists on what truly defines designer empathy in design practice. This thesis addresses the gap in understanding designer empathy by investigating the experiences of professional designers working on various projects involving unfamiliar user groups. Through 20 semi-structured interviews, the study explores the attitudinal, behavioral, and evaluative dimensions of designer empathy, revealing how these perspectives shape designers’ empathic design processes. Key findings show that the empathy mindset, shaped by attitudinal dimensions such as personal values and professional responsibility, plays a significant role in guiding designers' motivations and values for empathy. Empathy in action, characterized by behavioral dimensions, extends beyond mere user understanding and is strongly affected by organizational, cultural, and contextual factors. Empathy in reflection, tied to the evaluative dimensions, encourages designers to evaluate and adapt their mindset and actions throughout the design process. The thesis introduces the concept of informed empathy and develops the ABE Framework of Informed Designer Empathy which helps designers embed empathy as a defining quality in practice, supports educators in cultivating it as a core competency for students, and provides academia with a practice-based foundation for expanding empathy research in design.

Subject Keywords

Informed Empathy, Designer Empathy, Empathy in Design, User Research in Design, Unfamiliar User Groups

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111580

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis