Katja Hölttä-Otto

Empathy is essential in understanding the user’s experience. However, the relationship between the different empathy constructs, such as empathic mental processes and empathic understanding (EU), remains unclear. Therefore, in this study, we explore EU from both the designer’s and the user’s perspectives and how it relates to empathic mental processes. Specifically, we investigate the relationship between the user’s perceived empathic understanding (PEU) and the designer’s actual EU. We also examine the role of mental processes, specifically verbal mimicry, measured as Language Style Matching (LSM), in developing EU during interviews. The results show a relationship between PEU and EU, but no correlation between verbal mimicry and either perceived or actual EU. However, our results show that verbal mimicry indicates the user’s expressiveness during the conversation, which may facilitate the relationship between PEU and EU. We find that when both mimicry is high and the user perceives the designer as empathic, the designer’s EU is almost always high, and vice versa; however, this is less predictable in interviews with low mimicry. We conclude that treating empathic mental processes as a prerequisite for developing and attaining EU might be more useful than investigating a relationship.

Design Science is the discipline that studies the creation of artifacts – products, services, and systems and their embedding in our physical, virtual, psychological, economic, and social environments. This editorial is a collective effort of the Design Science Journal’s editorial board members, past and present. The journal’s inaugural 2015 editorial, “Design Science: Why, What and How,” reflected the thoughts and vision of that first editorial board for the new journal and the discipline it represented. The present contribution offers the reflections of editors who served the journal in the past 10 years. The individual contributions were not primed and are presented here unedited for conformity or consistency. Differently from the 2015 editorial, there is no effort to synthesize the individual contributions, leaving the task to our readers, who can draw their own conclusions about the Design Science Journal and community accomplishments to date, and the challenges ahead.

Nature provides a rich source of information for the design of novel materials; yet there remain significant challenges in the design and manufacture of materials that replicate the form, function, and sustainability of biological solutions. Here, we identify key challenges and promising approaches to the development of materials informed by biology. These challenges fall into two main areas; the first relates to harnessing biological information for materials innovation, including key differences between biological and synthetic materials, and the relationship between structure and function. We propose an approach to materials innovation that capitalizes on biodiversity, together with high-throughput characterization of biological material architectures and properties, linked to environmental and ecological context. The second area relates to the design and manufacture of bioinformed materials, including the physical scale of material architectures and manufacturing scale up. We suggest ways to address these challenges and promising prospects for a bioinformed approach to materials innovation.

Taking the perspective of users and stakeholders can help designers incorporate human-centricity in their practice. However, we know relatively little of the dynamics of perspective taking – a cognitive facet of empathy – in design processes as a situated cognitive and behavioural activity, rather than as an overall orientation. To illuminate how perspective taking is used in design, we carried out a longitudinal multiple case study of 49-month-long graduate-level product and service design projects, exploring differences between high and midscale performance in different design phases. Through thematic analysis of review session discussions, we find that perspective taking in high-performing sessions involves three aggregate dimensions: gathering data to form perspectives, scoping and making sense of perspectives and using perspectives in creative processing. We identify phase-dependent characteristics for the scope and emphasis of perspective taking in concept development, system design and detailed design. We also describe different ways in which novice teams struggled to create and apply user perspectives. As a result, the current study sheds light on perspective taking and the changing nature of effective perspective taking across the design process.

Empathy is argued to be a key factor for a successful design discussion. However, such causality cannot be empirically proven based on how empathy is currently defined in design community. Empathy is used as an umbrella construct, broad and encompassing of diverse phenomena, making it difficult to quantify. We suggest improving such a situation by introducing a definition of empathy based on psychology literature, which provides structure and guidance for studying the role of empathy in design. We first break empathy to components. Then, we review empathy as used in design. Finally, we synthetize the reviewed material. From this synthesis, we conclude that empathy in design shares several key components of empathy in psychology; particularly with state influences, top-down control process and emotional stimuli. These are present in design methods although they have not been studied using such terms. Incorporating psychological components of empathy into design can help conceptualising empathy from a different angle, thus opening interesting new avenues for future research. We hope that our treatment provides present and future designers with some useful guidance.