Emotional Tools Design: A Project to Increase Empathy, Engagement and Interest in Industrial Design Students

Abstract

Empathy is the ability of people to identify emotional aspects of others. A fundamental aspect to teaching in design education must be empathy. This paper presents the design process of an emotional tools using emoticons or emojis for evaluated products as educational exercise. The dynamics behind of the tool is the empathy experimented during the develop of the emojis characters. The project was implemented in the second period of the second year, with an execution time of 5 weeks. A series of surveys were conducted to assess perception of aspects such as utility, novelty, sensitivity and relevance of the project, in addition to knowing the progress of empathy evoked by the students dynamic. The results revealed the following findings: The opinion of 25 students describe their wide acceptance of this project methodology. Students considered the relevance of assessment processes, their recommendation to use those processes, and invited other students to develop it. Also, student’s positive perception about utility, novelty, sensibility and relevance of project dynamics are not determined by acceptance of this type of project. The preliminary results suggest that this educational exercise has the potential to cultivate or train empathy and other skills in design and engineering students.