Abstract
This year, humans were locked in their homes with a rising need for digital communication such as videotelephony. Although videotelephony helps to reduce the physical gap, it leaves little room for the transmission of body language that is usually associated with empathy. This research is inspired by the cognitive model of empathy which can be explained as our desire to understand others’ emotions and interact with them accordingly. By creating a reflective experience of imagining through the body in movement, the research looks into what inter-action design’s role be in working with empathy and asks: In which ways design placebos as body triggers could extend digital natives’ sense of empathy during videotelephony? This paper describes this ongoing investigation from the perspective of how experiential knowledge of tangibles can be used to embody feeling and thinking in action and support the creation of the design placebos through an experiment of cultural probing.
Keywords
empathy, design placebos, embodied design, movement-based interactions
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.598
Citation
Oktay, N. (2022) Design placebos for the impossibility of empathy in videotelephony, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.598
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Design placebos for the impossibility of empathy in videotelephony
This year, humans were locked in their homes with a rising need for digital communication such as videotelephony. Although videotelephony helps to reduce the physical gap, it leaves little room for the transmission of body language that is usually associated with empathy. This research is inspired by the cognitive model of empathy which can be explained as our desire to understand others’ emotions and interact with them accordingly. By creating a reflective experience of imagining through the body in movement, the research looks into what inter-action design’s role be in working with empathy and asks: In which ways design placebos as body triggers could extend digital natives’ sense of empathy during videotelephony? This paper describes this ongoing investigation from the perspective of how experiential knowledge of tangibles can be used to embody feeling and thinking in action and support the creation of the design placebos through an experiment of cultural probing.