Emotional Tools Design: A Project to Increase Empathy, Engagement and Interest in Industrial Design Students

Empathy is the ability of people to identify emotional aspects of others. The practice of design is constantly changing; new dynamics, process and technologies became a support for the implementation of disruptive projects in diverse disciplines. A fundamental aspect to teaching in design education must be empathy.  In product design there are emotional components in the moment of design. These elements can be measured, analyzed and improved. Designing products can resemble the action of empathy. There are similar aspects such as meaning, imagination, emotions and feelings.

At Tecnológico de Monterrey, an initiative has been launched in the industrial design program. This initiative has been named the Research, Experience & Design (RED) Laboratory where students and teachers promote the use of scientific methods and technologies to improve or measure the experiences of products, services and systems.

The objective of this research is to observe and analyze how the result of a series of projects could improve the ability or competence of understand emotional and meaning components. The project was the creation of an emotional assessment tools using emoticons or emojis. The dynamics of the tool is the empathy experimented or related when a product is evaluated through different emotions shown by animated emojis. The project was implemented in the second period of the second year, with an execution time of 5 weeks.

A series of surveys were conducted to evaluate the perception of aspects such as utility, novelty, sensitivity and relevance of the project, in addition to knowing the progress of empathy self-perception. Students were questioned about their skills and empathy before the project, as well as how they applied these emotional aspects, evaluation processes and if they recommended these types of projects to other students to improve their practice as industrial designers.

The results of this investigation revealed the following findings: The opinion of 25 students describe their wide acceptance of this project methodology. Students considered the relevance of assessment processes, their recommendation to use those processes, and invited other students to develop it. Also, student´s perception about novelty, the utility and relevance of the tool in their education was highly rated. A one-way analysis of variances was performed to comparison data. The study revealed that none of the 16 variables observed presented significant differences, because opinion and perception responses were generally positives.

Finally, the research captures information about how the students live the creating project of the tool. Students experienced great interest in development, creative dynamics as well as methodical dynamics had a positive impact in design education. The project process revealed an opportunity area in the observation of creative process during emotions design in order to know deeper an emotional and empathetic process for design education. Finally, this project aims to incorporate students from other areas that favor dynamics as digital artists and marketers. In a Mexican context, the renewal of educational dynamics and design techniques helps to improve professional dynamics of the design student.