Aalto DF
Empathic Engineers
Inside the empathic brain
DF Researcher 07/01/2021User understanding is a key part of empathic design, but have you thought about what happens in the brain when we try to understand another person?
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Being in sync, being connected
DF Researcher 06/11/2020
Can you transfer empathy?
DF Researcher 03/09/2020Gaining a deep understanding of users has become important in technology development, helping designers provide useful and successful solutions for the users. Even though many methods developed for empathic design emphasize direct contact with the user, it is seldom efficient for the whole development team to meet the user.
Catching emotions
DF Researcher 12/05/2020A newborn begins to cry, inducing her neonatal neighbors to join in an ensemble of high pitch cries. A few years later, that child runs to hug her classmate in pain. As a teenager, she enjoys hanging out with her friends. Sometimes she laughs with them, even though she is not sure what they are laughing about. A few years later, this teen is a professional designer interviewing a user for the first time. Her colleagues say she is good at building an “emotional connection” with her clients. She cannot tell for sure why, but she feels she connects with the emotions of others and can sometimes experience on her flesh the sensations and feelings described by someone else.
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We have started to measure what the user is thinking and it has given us quite a surprising result: we understand them up to 50%. This is significant. We tend to believe that when we talk to users and spend time in their environment, we get good user understanding.
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The evolution of empathy
DF Researcher 30/01/2020Empathy is part of our everyday life. Empathy allows us to understand others and to feel the joys and sorrows of fictional movie characters as if they were real. Empathic understanding helps us to recognize the needs of other people and can even lead to extreme forms of unselfish behavior. People have even donated their kidney to an unknown person without expecting anything in return. Where does this remarkable ability originate? Often, it’s said that only humans can feel empathy. But what should we think, for example, about birds that show characteristics of empathy or unselfish behavior among single-celled organisms?
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Empathic engineers go global
DF Researcher 04/09/2019What happens when our team project is presented to an international community of designers? The word gets spread!
