Using empathic design, human-centered design (HCD) or design thinking as a process and set of mindsets and tools for designing for empathy.
Some empathy based methods use in this process.
Humanizing Narratives for Inspired Healthcare Experiences
"Objective: Designers can and should play a critical role in shaping a holistic healthcare experience by creating empathetic design solutions that foster a culture of care for patients, families, and staff. Using narrative inquiry as a design tool, this case study shares strategies for promoting empathy.
Background: Designing for patient-centered care infuses empathy into the creative process. Narrative inquiry offers a methodology to think about and create empathetic design that enhances awareness, responsiveness, and accountability.
Methods: This article shares discoveries from a studio on empathetic design within an outpatient cancer care center. The studio engaged students in narrative techniques throughout the design process by incorporating aural, visual, and written storytelling. Benchmarking, observations, and interviews were merged with data drawn from scholarly evidence-based design literature reviews."
Empathic design: Research strategies
Abstract
"This paper explores the role of empathy within new product development from the perspective of human-centred design. The authors have developed a range of empathic design tools and strategies that help to identify authentic human needs.
For products and services to be effective, they need to satisfy both functional and emotional needs of individuals. In addition, the individual user needs to feel that the product and/or service has been designed ‘just for them’, otherwise they may misuse, underuse or abandon the product/service. This becomes critical with a product such as a Zimmer frame (walker), when it fails to resonate with the patient due to any stigma the patient may perceive, and thus remains unused.
When training young designers to consider the wider community (people unlike themselves) during the design process, it has proven extremely valuable to take them outside their comfort zones, by seeking to develop empathy with the end user for whom they are designing. Empathic modelling offers designers the opportunity to develop greater insight and understanding, in order to support more effective design outcomes. Sensitising designers to the different ways that individuals complete daily tasks has helped to diminish the gap between themselves and others (e.g. people with disabilities).
The authors intend for this paper to resonate with health care providers. Human-centred design can help to refocus the designer, by placing the individual end user’s needs at the heart of their decision-making."
Empathic Design: The Most Difficult Simple Approach to Successful Design
"Unlike the marketing research that deals with numbers and facts, empathic design tries to meet users’ needs and even thinks in terms of what they may need to make their life much easier. Empathic design aims to build an emotional relationship between the end consumer and the product by achieving a better understanding of the user experience and users’ needs at an early stage of new product development (NPD).
While other marketing methods put a high priority on the product and its sales, empathic design puts the end user and building that emotional connection between the consumer and the product first. Putting the consumer first can be considered a strong marketing objective of empathic design."
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