IxDA Student Design Challenge: Designing Their Heart Out
A week of empathy, community, and good old-fashioned competition at Interaction 19
Hundreds of sticky notes line the walls of the conference room as snow falls outside on the Amazon campus in Seattle. Desks are covered in markers, more sticky notes, and sketches. Nine students huddle around laptops, whispering and pointing.
Among the chaos, there’s a sense of calm. Only a few minutes until the deadline.
Nine students from around the world have spent countless hours at IxDA’s Interaction 19 conference researching, prototyping, interviewing, and collaborating to craft solutions to a bold challenge for this year’s Student Design Charette: design a product, service, or mechanism that scales empathy.
Back to basics
What is empathy? We’ve heard it hundreds of times, but what does it actually mean? Why does it matter in design?
Margaret Price, a principal design strategist at Microsoft and co-lead of the charrette, brought in a panel of experts from a myriad of industries to showcase the broad application of empathy in the world today.
For Belle Archaphorn, a professional training developer for the Woodland Park Zoo, empathy is the core of her work. Belle supports preservation efforts by building empathy among guests and staff for the animals in the zoo. One way her team does this is by naming early every animal in the zoo — helping guests and staff build more personal relationships with them.
“For me, empathy is that connection, and that understanding, of experiences coming together and being able to get into the mindset of someone or something else,” she said.
But ethics professor Dr. David E. Smith, another speaker at the conference, cautioned the students. “Empathy is the ability to begin to see myself in another person and begin to feel what they’re feeling. Common humanity is super important,” he said, “but if I haven’t experienced what you’re experiencing, I shouldn’t pretend to.”
Dr. Patricia Worthey, a psychologist certified with the Gottman Institute (which specializes in relationships) shared that to her, “empathy is stepping into someone else’s shoes with compassion — not judgement.”
These varying perspectives on empathy — from how it plays out in zoos, relationships, ethics, and the media — gave everyone an understanding of how broadly empathy can be defined, but also how broadly it can be implemented.
Extending empathy to inclusive design
In addition to refreshing their understanding of empathy, the students also dove into the world of inclusive design, a methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Empathy is both a natural extension and core component of inclusive design, because it encourages us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. When we design things with our own biases (which happens all the time!), we tend to leave others out, usually unintentionally. But when we put empathy at the forefront of our design process, it encourages us to think about solutions that work for more people — and that’s the essence of inclusive design.
Margaret ran the students through an inclusive design workshop, where they learned about the origins of the methodology, reviewed the core principles, and did several activities to practice putting the ideas into reality.
Armed with expert opinions and an understanding of inclusive design, the teams hit the ground running, researching and interviewing conference attendees to scope their projects.
Three approaches, one goal
At the end of the week, the teams produced three unique design prototypes that rose to the challenge of promoting empathy through inclusive design.
For Dinesh Ramaswamy (Indiana University, Bloomington), Ambika Vohra (University of Michigan Ann Arbor), and Gloriana Omodeo (Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica), the subject of their solution was under their noses the entire time: the team mainly used Slack to communicate throughout the week and ended up designing a solution to work in social workspace platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
“If we can find such opportunities in things that are so taken for granted, I can’t begin to imagine what we’re missing out on.” — Dinesh Ramaswamy
Their team created guidelines for online communication, allowing people to personalize their virtual spaces to build deeper connections with colleagues.
Kasper Burghout, (Hyper Island Manchester), Catherine Woodiwiss (Austin Center for Design) and Raphaëlle Gorenbouh (L’école de Design Nantes Atlantique) created “Me.Map” — a digital tool for teams that strives to allow new hires to bring their full, authentic selves to work. With prompting questions to help employees share their stories, Me.Map also features a flexible scale for vulnerability — with some tactical, workstyle-based questions, and other, more personal questions.
Catherine emphasized the importance of managing chaos to create clarity. “Being thrown into flux is a really important challenge,” she said. “Can we scale the idea of empathy into something that is workable, adoptable, and useful to specific people in a specific moment?”
One team took inspiration from the conference venue on the Amazon campus and focused their solution on voice-based assistants like Amazon Alexa. After talking to a voice designer at the conference, Akshita Mehta (National Institute of Design, India), Isabel Newsome (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Kathleen Hwang (Santa Monica College) designed a voice-based interactive tool called “Talkie” to help promote active listening. As conflicts arise, people can trigger the Alexa skill for help, and they can talk through their differences with Alexa as their guide.
The verdict
At the end of the day, the Student Design Charrette is a competition. Judges Ana Domb (IxDA), Andrea Mignolo (IxDA, Moveable Ink), Fabricio Teixeira (Work & Co, UX Collective), Jane Vita (Digitalist Group), and Margaret Price (Microsoft) unanimously chose Ambika, Gloriana, and Dinesh as the winners with their virtual workspace solution. Learn more about their prototype in this video:
The judges chose the project because of its “beautiful definition of empathy, storytelling, and practical application” of their solution.
Ambika said it was an honor to win the challenge with a solution that adds mindfulness to virtual work spaces. “Truly, it was one of the most challenging and rewarding weeks in my design career, and I got to meet so many amazing designers participating in efforts around inclusivity,” she said. Check out her perspective on the challenge here.
Here are the other two prototypes from the competition: Me.Map and Talkie. Versions of these videos with audio descriptions are also available for Me.Map and Talkie.
You can catch up on our social media coverage of the week here. And stay tuned for Interaction 2020 in Milan, Italy.
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