Embedded Files
Learning Goals
Students engage in an audience empathy activity.
Students individually develop audience questions and collaboratively synthesize an audience question guide with related interview responsibilities.
General Description
Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To empathize, you observe users behaviors, in context when possible, interview and interact with users, and experience what users experience. As a human-centered designer you need to understand the people for whom you are designing. The problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of particular users; in order to design for your users, you must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them.
Activity 1 (20 minute budget)
Students engage in a water carry activity to develop empathy.
1. Teacher shows Flint Water Hand Out video (3 minutes) and explains that in a full emergency situation, people may need to walk to the water source and pick it up, rather than having the water delivered to them. The teacher hands out Water Carry Empathy Sheet and stop watches to each group. Students work in pairs to carry 48 bottles of water 100 feet while the third student in the group records the amount of time it takes for the carry. Students record their time and use the formula provided in the worksheet to calculate the amount of time it would take them to carry 48 bottles of water 1 mile back to their family from a water station in the case of an emergency. The teacher should facilitate either a class or student group discussion on how this knowledge might impact the questions they may need to ask the user.
Activity 2 (1 hour budget)
Students individually define questions for the user, then summarize their questions as a group
Teacher shows slide on Interview Questions and facilitates discussions on Open vs Closed question and General vs Specific questions. Technique to prepare students to think about interview questions. Teacher has the students count 1, 2, and 3 in each group. One's are to brainstorm general questions, and two's and three's are to brainstorm specific questions without discussing them with the other members of the group. Remind them that their questions should be open, and have an indirect connection to the challenge for the general questions and a direct connection to the challenge for the specific questions. Their questions should be recorded on to post it notes that are stuck on to the left side of their Question Guide Worksheet. Teacher should monitor students to make sure all students have at least 3 to 4 questions that can be shared with their group.
Teacher shows slide on Summarizing a Question Guide and directs student groups to discuss their questions and select questions that they will summarize in to a question guide on to the right side of the Question Guide Worksheet. Teacher can choose to show the class a sample question guide to speed up the process, or can use the sample just with groups that are struggling to synthesize their guide. Tell students that they are not to fill out their roles just yet.
Once students have worked together to summarize their question guide, the teacher should show the last slide on Interviewing roles and then have the students define their roles at the bottom right of the Question Guide Worksheet.
Activity 3 (Suggested homework)
1. The teacher will need to decide if they want students to do interviews in class and/or as a homework assignment. Because the audience for this problem includes young and elder people, is suggested that some of the interviews be done as homework.
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