Empathy and experience in HCI

  • Authors:
  • Peter Wright;John McCarthy

  • Affiliations:
  • Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom;University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

For a decade HCI researchers and practitioners have been developing methods, practices and designs 'for the full range of human experience'. On the one hand, a variety of approaches to design, such as aesthetic, affective, and ludic that emphasize particular qualities and contexts of experience and particular approaches to intervening in interactive experience have become focal. On the other, a variety of approaches to understanding users and user experience, based on narrative, biography, and role-play have been developed and deployed. These developments can be viewed in terms of one of the seminal commitments of HCI, 'to know the user'. Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience. In this article, we use 'empathy' to help position some emerging design and user-experience methodologies in terms of dynamically shifting relationships between designers, users, and artefacts.