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Exploring Empathic Design for Children Based on Role-Play Activities: Opportunities and Challenges within the Indian Context

Published: 17 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Research in co-design methods and children’s participation in design has addressed aspects such as adapting design activities to children’s interests and abilities as well as overcoming power imbalance while co-designing with adults. Less attention has been paid towards methods for empathic design with children, which consider children’s emotions in design. Role play, as a co-design method for empathic design, has been studied mostly with adult participants and in a Western cultural context. We conducted four role-play sessions with children in rural India, to explore how they perceive and understand an empathy- and emotions-focused role-play and what lessons, challenges and opportunities can be identified which may inform research in interaction design and children. We observed a strongly ingrained gender and teacher-student hierarchy dynamic, which led to challenges with engagement and potential biases on what children understood and shared with us. We suggest further exploring how co-design methods for empathy, and especially expanding such methodological investigations to diverse cultural contexts.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IDC '24: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference
    June 2024
    1049 pages
    ISBN:9798400704420
    DOI:10.1145/3628516
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 17 June 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. Indian context
    2. co-design
    3. empathic design
    4. empathy
    5. empathy assessment
    6. role-play

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    IDC '24: Interaction Design and Children
    June 17 - 20, 2024
    Delft, Netherlands

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