ABSTRACT
Empathy is the ability to identify with other people’s thoughts and feelings. Empathic design is the attempt to get closer to the lives and experiences of the audience of focus. As instructional design instructors and practitioners, we teach empathy as a means for instructional design students to act by producing meaningful design deliverables. We guide design students to embrace empathic design and engage empathically with the audience of focus. Empathy drives action for design and is a means to an end. The end is a meaningful design deliverable that meets the audience of focus where the audience is. A meaningful design deliverable is designed to a localized context of use which emphasizes scaling context to what is needed in a situation.
We present A Journey Through Ratios where one of our instructional design graduate student teams designed a meaningful lesson on understanding ratios for adult learners preparing for a high school equivalency exam. The client was a non-profit who focused on developing educational interventions customized to the needs of adults with literacy-related knowledge skill gaps. Keeping adult learners at the forefront of the design and student designers’ minds, an empathic design approach required student designers to tap into their sensitivity toward the adult learners, the design process, and the collaborative nature of design practice. We discuss empathy and empathic design processes. We then return to the Understanding Ratios case and discuss the professional practice implications of empathy and empathic design processes. We conclude with The Power of Observation activity where instructors provide students a direct observation experience, and we share recommended readings.
