Abstract
Design education has embraced empathy, developing a diverse repository of tools and methods for cultivating empathic engagement. Yet guidance on how or why these tools should be selected remains limited. Current practices often conflate availability with appropriateness, with tools chosen based on familiarity or convenience rather than empathic fit or contextual suitability. This leads to shallow engagement, limiting the empathic understanding needed for effective design outcomes. This paper proposes a criteria-based framework for evaluating empathy tools, grounded in psychological theory and established empathic design frameworks. The proposed criteria offers a structured lens to assess how tools operate, for whom, and to what effect. Supporting this is an Empathy Tool Repository of 65 design methods, analysis of which reveals important patterns in current practice which demonstrate that true empathy is rarely achieved through a single tool alone. The framework provides selection wisdom to enable a shift from tool-first to intention-first pedagogy.
Keywords
Empathy, Tool selection, Design education, Intention-first pedagogy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2817
Citation
Singh, A., Fridman, I., Joshi, P., and Flynn, D. (2026) From tool-first to intention-first pedagogy: A framework for evaluating and selecting empathy tools in design education, 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.2026.2817
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
From tool-first to intention-first pedagogy: A framework for evaluating and selecting empathy tools in design education
Design education has embraced empathy, developing a diverse repository of tools and methods for cultivating empathic engagement. Yet guidance on how or why these tools should be selected remains limited. Current practices often conflate availability with appropriateness, with tools chosen based on familiarity or convenience rather than empathic fit or contextual suitability. This leads to shallow engagement, limiting the empathic understanding needed for effective design outcomes. This paper proposes a criteria-based framework for evaluating empathy tools, grounded in psychological theory and established empathic design frameworks. The proposed criteria offers a structured lens to assess how tools operate, for whom, and to what effect. Supporting this is an Empathy Tool Repository of 65 design methods, analysis of which reveals important patterns in current practice which demonstrate that true empathy is rarely achieved through a single tool alone. The framework provides selection wisdom to enable a shift from tool-first to intention-first pedagogy.