Phase One: Brainstorming and Territory Definition

Week 1

We started this week getting introduced to the topic and learning who was in our team.

How can we design for empathy at scale?

How can we use empathy to address climate change and sustainability?

We were provided an overarching theme of empathy from Microsoft and an additional constraint of addressing climate change from our professor, Peter.

Team Contract

To set the tone for the project, we started out by discussing our work styles, communications styles, and goals for our project and creating a team contract of how we want to work together. We were lucky to discover that most of us preferred to work collaboratively so we plan to block off large chunks of time to work together, at least during the early phase of the project. We also discovered that most of us were “get it right” workers, meaning we have a tendency to focus on details and making sure things are done properly. While this is a beneficial trait it also means there is a possibility for us getting bogged down on small aspects which can slow us down so we need to keep this in mind when working.

We then discussed the skills each has and wants to learn. We have a very nice distribution of skills on our team ranging from research, prototyping, visual design, and presentations. We all expressed interest in getting to work on skills we are not strong on during this project. When mapping out strengths and interests we discovered that at least one team member had a strength where another had an interest and decided to create a master/apprentice approach for work where someone wanting to learn a skill could work with someone strong at it.

We decided to add our master apprentice model to our team contract.

Picking a topic

The next step was picking a topic we wanted to focus on for our project. Prior to meeting to discuss this we all did research on empathy and the 17 sustainable development goals as well as made a list of areas we were passionate about.

We started off our meeting having a long discussion on what empathy is and isn’t and what effective and ineffective ways of generating empathy are.

Some general agreement on empathy

• Sympathy is feeling bad for someone while empathy is understanding someone
• 3 types of empathy: emotional (innate, gut reaction), cognitive (learned), compassionate (a desire to act)
• To really connect with someone you need to have face to face, voice to voice, or skin to skin contact with them
• Presenting facts and statistics on issues typically result in apathy. Showing photos, or videos of people, or narratives that let you learn about a person creates compassion. But this may still not be empathy.

We then moved on to talk about issues each of us were interested in exploring. After presenting we organized our topics into themes and two main themes quickly appeared as the front runners: responsible consumption and refugees.

While both presented interesting opportunities we felt that issues of immigration and the refugee crisis were incredibly relevant in our current climate and empathy could more clearly be applied to resolve perceptions of immigrants and refugees.

Week 2

Focusing on a territory

Knowing our topic we then needing to explore the landscape and focus in on our area of interest. We decided that it was important to establish both who we were building empathy for and who we were trying to generate empathy in. We discussed reasons people may leave their country, their status in the immigration process, and types of locations they may be moving to. We also addressed the attitudes that people in the receiving country may have towards immigrants and the fears or conceptions they have about immigration. Finally, we discussed technologies and methods we may be able to use to address the situation.

Creating the territory map

We then needed to figure out how to give form to these areas of focus. After some initial sketching we decided quickly that it was important to represent both the group that was building empathy and the group we were building empathy for in the map. We also wanted to display the possible interventions as a bridge between the “empathy gap.”

We went through several rounds of iteration on form before landing on one.

Presentation

On Wednesday we presented our area of interest, territory map, and next steps to the class and our Microsoft Expo liaisons. This was the first time most of them were learning about our focus so we were a little nervous to hear their response. However, the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive with our Peter and the liaisons agreeing that our focus was on brief and a rich area for exploration.

Most also acknowledged that what we were taking on was a daunting task and many organization have unsuccessfully tried to garner empathy for refugees.