Empathy in Technology Design and Graffiti

Abstract

This paper discusses empathic understanding, what it means, and how it can be acquired. After an overview of some theories and models from the existing literature, two experiments are presented, where participants were assessing graffiti works. From the results of these experiments, it can be concluded that empathic understanding involves both embodied processes and abstract inferences. Furthermore, understanding can be based on perceived, mechanistic bodily similarities and movements or on folk-psychological inferences mentalized between the observer/empathizer and an object/empathized. Empathic understanding it can also be gained by recognizing and implementing learned bodily skills and conceptual knowledge in mental simulations and theorizations. Furthermore, people have existing schemas and stereotypes that may affect their empathic understanding. In the context of technology design, this implies that the designer as an empathizer needs to consider their own and their users’ perspectives and interactions in different sociocultural contexts; their background knowledge; their future intentions; and the ways empathy can be gained through both embodied processes and mental inferences.