Building empathy in interior architecture education: exploring empathic design and its reflections

Integrating empathy to design education enhances students' universal design solutions since empathic design provides a feeling and understanding of a wide range of users' needs in the designed environment or products. This study investigates how using empathic design techniques as instructional design methods influence students’ improvement in the multiple dimensions of empathy, design process and end products, and perceptions of their learning experience. The empirical research is conducted with three groups and a control group who are asked to experience different empathic design techniques (direct contact between designers and users, indirect contact between designers and users, and role-playing) obtaining in the redesign of an existing kitchen and reflecting their learning and design outcomes on an online session in virtual meetings. Qualitative data collection methods consist of behavioral observations, the researcher's logbook, interviews, and design conversation protocols obtained by video recordings of the Zoom meetings. Quantitative data collection methods include using a questionnaire and survey as instruments and assessment of end products. Thematic analysis was conducted to study data from interviews and design. Results indicated that an empathic design process positively indicated students' perceptions of their learning experience and enhanced their self-awareness and design awareness. In addition, empathic design improved students' problem-solving skills, helped them attain universal design solutions easily, and shortened the design process time. The role-playing technique was the most efficient compared to other techniques for raising students' empathy and proposing universal design solutions.