The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the "Other"
By Cynthia L. Bennett, Daniela Karin Rosner. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019
401 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines the promise of empathy, the name commonly given to the initial phase of the human-centered design process in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform technology development. By analyzing popular empathy activities aimed at understanding people with disabilities, we examine the ways empathy works to both powerfully and problematically align designers with the values of people who may use their products. Drawing on disability studies and feminist theorizing, we describe how acts of empathy building may further distance people with disabilities from the processes designers intend to draw them into. We end by reimagining empathy as guided by the lived experiences of people with disabilities who are traditionally positioned as those to be empathized.
Subfields: Mechanical Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7ca88f6a9b0a6827d63e36ce2b576bc0ab4b962
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In Mechanical Engineering
In Human-Computer Interaction
- Cecily Morrison
- Katja Hofmann
- Edward Cutrell
- F. Delgado
- Simone Stumpf
- Stephen Yang
- Qian Yang
- Michael Madaio
Citations in the corpus
- The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice (2023, methodology): “Further, there is a risk that UX/HCI experts as stakeholder intermediaries may inadvertently elevate or augment some voices, while leaving other voices out of the conversation—as has been written about extensively in participatory democracy [173] and participatory development [54].”
- Disability-first Dataset Creation: Lessons from Constructing a Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition with Blind and Low Vision Data Collectors (2021, background): “Moreover, the way recruitment, task, and support are set up will speak strongly about the power relationship between research and disability communities [7].”