Incomplete and inconstant empathy in human-centered product design and development

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isbn9789526409849.pdf (3.15 MB)

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School of Engineering | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2022-10-25
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Date

2022

Department

Konetekniikan laitos
Department of Mechanical Engineering

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

84 + app. 148

Series

Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL THESES, 150/2022

Abstract

Understanding users is a core component in human-centered product design and development. It helps designers define design questions, understand in-time design challenges, and improve user experience. Empathic design methods are developed on this basis. It aims to help designers step into users' shoes and understand users more precisely. However, empathizing with users is not always successful. Many reasons lead to an unsuccessful empathic understanding. This study investigates how interpersonal factors and types of users' mental content lead to an incomplete empathic understanding. Specifically, it adopts a behavioral measure to quantify designers' empathic accuracy in understanding users' mental contents and emotional tone; shortens the measure and applies it in design research; implements the short measure in understanding userdesigner facial synchrony; and tests designers' empathic understanding under the influence of various factors. Moreover, since accurately identifying needs is a promising result of empathizing with users, this study also explores the relationship between designers' empathic understanding and their performance in needfinding. This study suggests a novel way to define latent needs to achieve this goal. It evaluates designers' performance from the quantity of latent needs and quality of needs. The results highlight the importance of accepting the incomplete and inconstant empathic understanding and statistically show how various interpersonal factors influence empathic understanding. Moreover, this study finds correlations between emotional tone accuracy and designers' performance in identifying important needs and the needs that users feel most satisfied. It is among the first to explain designers' incomplete and inconstant empathy from the aspect of interpersonal differences and explore the link between empathy and the designers' performance in needfinding. Overall, this thesis comprises six papers, including three journal papers and three conference papers. It explores the incompleteness of empathy, the inconstancy of empathy and the relationship between empathy and needfinding. It expands the existing knowledge of empathy in humancentered product design and development and provides a novel direction to understand how empathy contributes to user understanding and needfinding.

Description

Supervising professor

Hölttä-Otto, Katja, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Finland

Keywords

empathy, product design

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Parts

  • [Publication 1]: Jie Li & Katja Hölttä-Otto (2020). The Influence of Designers’ Cultural Differences on the Empathic Accuracy of User Understanding, The Design Journal, 23:5, 779-796
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202009185432
    DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2020.1810414 View at publisher
  • [Publication 2]: Jie Li, Antti Surma-aho, Álvaro M. Chang-Arana & Katja Hölttä-Otto (2021). Understanding customers across national cultures: the influence of national cultural differences on designers’ empathic accuracy, Journal of Engineering Design. Full text in Acris/aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202107017920.
    DOI: 10.1080/09544828.2021.1928022 View at publisher
  • [Publication 3]: Li, J., Surma-Aho, A. and Hölttä-Otto, K. (2021). Measuring designers’ empathic understanding of users by a Quick Empathic Accuracy (QEA). In International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (Vol. 85420, p.V006T06A027). American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
    DOI: 10.1115/DETC2021-69407 View at publisher
  • [Publication 4]: Salmi, A., Li, J., Hölttä-Otto, K. (2022). Facial Expression Recognition as a Measure of User-Designer Empathy. In International Design Engineering Technical Conference and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (Vol. 88924). American Society of Mechanical Engineers. (Invited and submitted to the Journal of Mechanical Design)
  • [Publication 5]: Li, J., Hölttä-Otto, K. (2022). Inconstant Empathy – Interpersonal factors that influence the incompleteness of user understanding. Journal of Mechanical Design (Conditionally accepted)
  • [Publication 6]: Li, J., Hölttä-Otto, K. (2022). Does empathizing with users contribute to better need finding? In International Design Engineering Technical Conference and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (Vol. 89413). American Society of Mechanical Engineers

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https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-64-0984-9

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[diss] Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu / ENG