Hello Everyone, I’m Sydney Pratte from the university of Calgary and I am going to present
our work on evoking empathy: a framework for describing empathy tools by me and my supervisors,
Dr. Tony Tang and Dr. Lora Oehlberg. Our work provides a descriptive framework that captures
and describes the broad space of empathy tool designs into a single vocabulary. I will begin
with a brief description of what empathy tools are and provide examples to motivate our work.
Then, I will provide a brief teaser of our framework to give you a sense of what we developed.
Empathy tools are physical or digital artifacts that are designed to help people understand
the lived experiences of others.
Empathy tools were first used by product designers as a technique for designers to gain insights
into the challenges faced by their end users. In this example from IDEO, the gloves here
are used to simulate reduced dexterity and tactile sensations during product testing
where they pressed buttons
However, these tools appear in many different forms. And we as designers do not have a common
vocabulary to label, describe, organize, and discuss the wide range of empathy tools that
HCI researchers have produced. This means that each empathy tool created exists as a
point solution - or case study. Consequently, designers are unable to learn from previous
solutions—what worked, what didn’t —and are effectively creating empathy tools anew
each time. They aren’t able to leverage the lessons learned from prior work and are
potentially making the same mistakes.
Our work aims to address this gap with a descriptive framework that captures these instance examples
into a single vocabulary. In order to create this framework, we constructed a corpus of
26 papers reporting on empathy tools, by searching the ACM Digital Library for papers that included
the term “empathy.” We focused on works that were published in an HCI context and
aimed to create empathy for other humans. We used an open-coding process to create categories
describing the various artefacts. These categories were refined through successive passes, and
then we performed axial and selective coding to distill a spectrum of design strategies.
The final corpus of 26 papers was not intended to be an exhaustive list, but to represent
a range of examples showing the diversity of empathy tools.
While the goal of all these tools is to evoke empathy in the user, from our analysis we
discovered two different ways of categorizing empathy tools: (1) the target audience of
the tool (designers, caregivers, and the public), and (2) the techniques utilized by the tools
(agency, sensation and perspective). First, I will discuss the different target audiences.
As stated earlier, Empathy tools were first used by product designers to better understand
the challenges faced by their end users. In this second example. The AGNES suit was designed
for designers to better understand the physical challenges associated with aging. The AGNES
suit simulates the approximate motor, visual, flexibility, dexterity, and strength of a
person in their mid-70s.
Secondly, Empathy tools designed for caregivers focus on providing insights into the experience
of a reference population. Here, the goal of the tool is to create better care and understanding
of patients instead of creating more inclusive designs. The ACES project for example, is
an instant messaging application that emulates the effects of the language disorder - aphasia
by distorting the typed text from the user. The tool illustrates the challenges of living
with aphasia and was designed to serve as a training tool for physicians, nurses and
speech–language pathologists.
Empathy tools for the public are designed with the intention to shed light on the plight
of disadvantaged, marginalized, or otherwise underrepresented populations. Here the goal
of the tool is to promote awareness and prosocial behaviours. For example, the mixed-reality
game, A Breathtaking Journey, aims to create awareness for the struggles of refugees fleeing
from their home countries. In a first-person Virtual Reality experience the user sits in the back of
an orange truck that is used to smuggle them out of the country. As you can see in this
image, the user is physically sitting in a motorized box to simulate the truck and actual
falling oranges – even smell is used here to stimulate olfactory senses. The stated
purpose of this game is solely to bring awareness and to evoke empathy for refugees.
Next, I will discuss the different techniques utilized by the tools in our corpus.
Based on our analysis, tools will select a primary design strategy, and then supplement
the primary strategy with others to a lesser extent. We observed design strategies grouped
into three major dimensions: (i) the amount of agency the tool allows, (ii) the type of
sensations that are experienced and (iii) the user’s perspective while using the tool.
I will discuss each of these design strategies and provide a few brief examples. (1) the
amount of agency the tool allows: The goal of tools utilizing agency is to evoke empathy
in the user either by giving them the freedom to explore the experience created by the tool
or strategically limiting agency for a desired effect. Agency can be affected in two different
methods: (1) interaction agency, which refers to the amount of freedom the user has in any
interactions with the tool and surrounding elements that can be manipulated during the
tool experience and (2) narrative agency which is the amount of choice the user has
in controlling the experience with the empathy tool.
The wear.x project is an example of interactive agency – particularly navigational agency.
This project is a wearable garment that simulates the effects of chronic knee pain. Here the
user is allowed to move freely in the space and by having the agency to walk, sit, jump
and freely move the user gains a better understanding of how knee pain affects what would otherwise
be normal movement. An example of narrative agency - particularly open-ended narrative
agency - is the Dyslexperience project is a book using projection mapping to simulate
different variations of dyslexia. The user can follow the book in a guided experience,
and they are free to explore it in whatever manner they wish – how they look through
the book does not affect the overall experience.
The second dimension consists of the type of sensations that are experienced. Sensation
refers to the creation/generation or limitation of sensorial input to the user from the empathy
tool. Sensation can be affected through: mobility limitations, which physically restrict the
user’s movements, perceptual augmentation or limitation, which alter the user’s senses,
or physiological, which affect the user’s biosignals in the body.
The Breeze project is an example of an empathy tool that utilizes physiological sensations
to evoke empathy. In this work the authors created a pendant that measures breathing
patterns and sends the biofeedback to another user. The idea is to evoke empathy for another’s
emotional state and create a sense of connectedness over a distance. The mixed reality game, the
Alzheimer’s Eye Challenge, is an example of an empathy tool that uses perceptual limitation
and augmentation to evoke empathy. In this game the user completes tasks while experiencing
visual filters in real-time that simulate common aging visual conditions such as macular
degeneration.
Finally, The 3rd design dimension is the user’s perspective while using the tool, for instance
is the user a member of the reference population or do they observer an interaction involving
the reference population? Perspective refers to how the user views the experience created
by the empathy tool: perspective can be in either 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person point of view
or multiple.
The wear.mashca project uses 1st person to simulate the effects of a migraine by using
elastic straps and Styrofoam balls in the head piece to create tension and pressure
– here the user experiences the effects of another’s migraine symptoms while remaining
in their own body – as if they were the reference population. The Injustice project
uses the second person perspective in a live-action VR experience. Here the user plays through
the scenario as themselves but interact with a member of the reference population. The
user witnesses the game character in an unjust experience and is an active participant in
the scenario through their choices. As you can see through these examples, we can now
begin to group empathy tools in a meaningful way and can compare and contrast them.
While the relationship between these two methods of categorizing empathy tools is not 1-1,
we observed three trends between them: Empathy tools for designers tended to rely on sensation
design strategies, Empathy tools for caregivers tended to rely on perspective design strategies,
while Empathy tools for the public relied equally on agency and perspective.
In this work we contribute a descriptive framework that captures these instance examples into
a single vocabulary. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for designers of
empathy tools, including how to assess and measure empathy. This will allow others to
compare, contrast and build off others’ approaches with empathy tools in the future.
Thank you for listening. For more information, please see our paper: Evoking Empathy: A Framework
for Describing Empathy Tools.