Imbibing Empathy in Experience Design Pedagogy: Learnings from the Healthcare Domain

Design teaching and learning have evolved over the last three decades. The initial focus on art and craft moved toward mechanical design and later industrial and communication design. Technology has driven innovation for a large part of the last century. The main challenge in the current time is how to productize the technology and make it useful to humanity. AI tools have been effective in incremental technology ideas and implementation solutions. What these AI tools are still unable to predict and identify is empathy toward the user or the consumer of the innovative solution. While technology is becoming more user-centered, designers need to understand the user’s perspective to be more effective and successful. Healthcare companies are reinventing themselves into Health-tech companies on one hand, while on the other they are building empathy and patient centricity. Healthcare on the one hand looks at adopting technology and on the other hand, imbibes empathy as a core value in the overall user and patient experience design. An empathy-based design process that has evolved in healthcare can be picked up in design pedagogy. This paper elaborates on an empathy-based design process from the healthcare domain perspective and how it can mold the design of teaching and learning.