Designing the empathic experience

Alice Devecchi

Designing the empathic experience

Suggestions from Art Practices

The issue of empathy as an embodied, dialogic experience that potentially enhances the value of human relationships, constitutes the core of this book, which is mainly addressed to explore whether empathy is designable and how. This book traces a theoretical framework for changing perspective on empathy in design, by integrating a phenomenological account. One that focuses on empathy's specific nature of intersubjective experience that introduces the other into one’s own personal horizon.

Pages: 162

ISBN: 9788835157236

Edizione:1a edizione 2023

Publisher code: 10319.22

Info about Open Access books

The issue of empathy as an embodied, dialogic experience that potentially enhances the value of human relationships, constitutes the core of this book, which is mainly addressed to explore whether empathy is designable and how.
The emerging collaborative approaches to design call for a rethinking of how empathy is usually accounted for in this discipline. Empathy is not only a designer's skill to step into the other's shoes; it can be a dialogic experience that supports the unfolding of meaningful relations, laying the groundwork for collaborative design processes.
This book traces a theoretical framework for changing perspective on empathy in design, by integrating a phenomenological account. One that focuses on empathy's specific nature of intersubjective experience that introduces the other into one's own personal horizon, paving the way for the acknowledgement of otherness as a value.
Empathy may unfold spontaneously within relational contexts, while still requiring its facilitation and support. If empathy is un-designable, enabling conditions for its emergence can be set up. This study argues the case for a possible role of Art in suggesting strategies and models towards the successful setting of these enabling conditions.
In this perspective, an array of art practices - immersive, collaborative, and participatory - are analysed and squeezed to extract principles for designing the empathic experience. Principles converge then into guidelines, intended to offer a set of meta-design tools for fruitful collaborative processes.

Alice Devecchi is PhD in Design. She is a researcher and teacher in History of Contemporary Art. Her research interests lie on the boarder of the two disciplines and explore their mutual exchanges and interconnections. She wrote Giocare in casa. Il senso dello spazio e del movimento (Il Verri, 2012). About empathy and design she co-authored (with L. Guerrini) some influential publications, among which Empathy and design. A new perspective (2018) and Empathy for resilience (2019), awarded with the Best Paper Award at Cumulus Conference Rovaniemi 2019.

Luca Guerrini, Empathy between Art and Design
Introduction
Collaborative, relational and dialogic. Keywords for designing in our era
(Design practices and the issue of human relationships)
The experience of empathy and its role in human relationships
(Theories of empathy)
Empathy and design. A love story?
(Empathic design; Empathy in service design; Empathy in participatory and collaborative processes; Empathy critics; Discussion)
Art as context provider
Reading arts-based practices through the lens of empathy
(Definitions; Clustering)
Enablers of the empathic experience
(Contextual enablers; Relational enablers;Matching enablers and case studies; Insights)
Testing the system
(Survey; Workshop)
From enablers to guidelines
(Weaving theory into practice. An attempt; Guidelines for designing the empathic experience; Observations)
Conclusions
References

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