Youth Creating to Meet Other's Needs: Using Empathic Design Principles in a Makerspace

• In Event: Structured Poster Session: Analytical Frameworks to Advance the Study of Making: Themes in Research and Development on Makerspaces

Abstract

Objectives:
This research examines how youth used empathic design (Koskinen & Battarbee, 2003) to create a prototype to meet the needs of an assigned partner on a field trip. The goal was to examine how the addition of elements of empathic design within the makerspace activities can enable more equitable learning through making.

Perspectives:
Design thinking is often used within educational settings as a way to engage students through authentic problems and problem solving. Brown (2008) identified empathy as a characteristic of a design thinker that allows designers to consider the user, as well as engage with multiple perspectives when designing. Empathic design (Koskinen & Battarbee, 2003) emphasizes designers engaging closely with users to understand their lives, experiences, and feelings in order to design a product that best fits their needs.


Borrowing from engineering research (Kouprie & Visser, 2009), this study employs a four-phase framework for techniques supporting empathic design:
● Discovery – first contact with the user results in a willingness to learn about the user
● Immersion – collecting data about the user and factors that influence their experience
● Connection – the designer connects to the user to understand both their feelings and meanings
● Detachment – the designer returns to the designer role to make sense of the user’s world and then design a solution
By making each phase explicit within the design process, this structure has been shown to enhance development empathy within participants.

Methods and Data:
Methods included video data collection, written documents containing notes and design sketches, and photographs of the prototypes created for 47 elementary youth (grades 4th – 6th) as they participated in a field trip experience to a makerspace housed at a large Midwestern university. Approximately 700 minutes of video were collected from nine two-hour class visits. The visits were qualitatively coded using the empathic design as an analytical framework to analyze the youth as the interviewed their “user”, then sketched design ideas based on the assessment of needs, and created a prototype of the learning space for each user.

Results:
Initial findings indicate that the empathic design of the experience influenced the affordances that the youth incorporated into their final prototype. For instance, youth designers incorporated their understandings of the partner’s (the user) needs into the design vs. clearly stated decorating choices. This finding illustrates the ability of even young designers with few experiences to draw upon to take the perspective of the user when designing.

In addition, youth were inspired to add additional details to their prototype while building as they viewed the work of others within the makerspace. Additional research is needed on collaborative learning within makerspaces through incidental exposure to other’s work.

Significance:
While design thinking has been successfully implemented into makerspace experiences, the use of empathic design as a framework for structuring maker activities and experiences shows potential for fostering youths’ understanding of others perspectives and needs. This framework could contribute to the understanding of how making can better support more equitable learning opportunities.

Author

• Jennifer Lynn Weible, Central Michigan University