Empathy Workshop: When Project Team and Pilot Users Exchange Experiences

Empathizing with user, has been considered by many design researchers as one of the important factors that help to understand the final user’s needs and wishes during the design process. Hence there are still many design projects that do not consider that important basis for design of products and services. In fact, if we look into the psychological process of the ways people communicate and build relationships, we can approve that empathy is fundamental and applying that might seem as an obvious matter in design process. This paper aims to be one another contribution to the field and seeks to emphasize the important role of the empathy in design process. In particular, this paper focus on developing empathy between developers and trial users through a participatory session. We believe this is relevant because we sought to bring the experience of using Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices by trial users in their real homes. It will illustrate the process and results of the participatory session conducted for a pilot project INTrEPID. The whole process of workshop has been built on the fundamental theories about empathy in psychology and the value of its application during the early phases of design process. We suggest to apply the Empathy workshop method when the project team and the final users meet each other, for understanding not only the user's experience and needs, but also the technical team's efforts. It is also proved a good way for fostering the creativity and involving all stakeholders into the design of new services.