Exploring Empathic Design for Children Based on Role-Play Activities: Opportunities and Challenges within the Indian Context
Ekaterina Muravevskaia, Bicky Kuriappan, Panos Markopoulos, Swathi Lekshmi, M. Krishnaveni, Karen Schrier · 2024
Research in co-design methods and children’s participation in design has addressed aspects such as adapting design activities to children’s interests and abilities as well as overcoming power imbalance while co-designing with adults. Less attention has been paid towards methods for empathic design with children, which consider children’s emotions in design. Role play, as a co-design method for empathic design, has been studied mostly with adult participants and in a Western cultural context. We conducted four role-play sessions with children in rural India, to explore how they perceive and understand an empathy- and emotions-focused role-play and what lessons, challenges and opportunities can be identified which may inform research in interaction design and children. We observed a strongly ingrained gender and teacher-student hierarchy dynamic, which led to challenges with engagement and potential biases on what children understood and shared with us. We suggest further exploring how co-design methods for empathy, and especially expanding such methodological investigations to diverse cultural contexts.