Towards Understanding and Modeling Empathy for Use in Motivational Design Thinking
This work addresses the need for technology to detect empathy in costly Design Thinking workshops, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods.
This position paper tackles the problem of identifying and modeling empathy in Design Thinking workshops by using Gaussian mixture models with heart rate and skin conductance data, and proposes an updated approach to ensure participants think beyond their own backgrounds.
Design Thinking workshops are used by companies to help generate new ideas for technologies and products by engaging subjects in exercises to understand their users' wants and become more empathetic towards their needs. The "aha moment" experienced during these thought-provoking, step outside the yourself activities occurs when a group of persons iterate over several problems and converge upon a solution that will fit seamlessly everyday life. With the increasing use and cost of Design workshops being offered, it is important that technology be developed that can help identify empathy and its onset in humans. This position paper presents an approach to modeling empathy using Gaussian mixture models and heart rate and skin conductance. This paper also presents an updated approach to Design Thinking that helps to ensure participants are thinking outside of their own race's, culture's, or other affiliations' motives.