Abstract
Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing these insights, we offer six orientations that help designers to: challenge the normative, claim our terms, attend to the body, cultivate an ethics of care, focus on materialities, and redirect power. Queering empathy can provide new strategies for a more ethical, contextual, and reflexive approach to understanding others.
Keywords
queering, design methods, empathy, ethics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1384
Citation
Meharry, J. (2026) Queering empathy in/for/with/by design, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1384
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Queering empathy in/for/with/by design
Empathy is widely used as the initial stage of the design process to understand users and meet their needs and desires. Recently these methods have been critiqued for commodifying empathy in commercial practice, centering the designer instead of the user, and failing to account for power dynamics. Empathy is also under attack in political spheres, increasing the dehumanization of others. To address these criticisms, we explore the value of empathy in design processes and examine how queer theory and queering methodologies can help designers move past “walking in someone else’s shoes” towards intersectional design processes rooted in political responsibility. Synthesizing these insights, we offer six orientations that help designers to: challenge the normative, claim our terms, attend to the body, cultivate an ethics of care, focus on materialities, and redirect power. Queering empathy can provide new strategies for a more ethical, contextual, and reflexive approach to understanding others.