"Dear User...": Empathy Building Methods For Assistive Product Design

Empathizing with users, many authors argue, is especially important in assistive product design, and participatory design is, amongst other things, highly efficient in eliciting designer-user empathy. However, participatory design demands expenses and resources which are not always available. This paper describes a workshop with graduating design students in which alternative methods were devised and combined to foster designer-user empathy. The methods were found to have been successful both in empathy eliciting and, furthermore, in raising students’ sense of social responsibility, and are thus presented as a possible alternative to tackle, to some extent, the concerns associated to the use of participatory design