Beyond empathy: Role-Taking as a structural approach to participatory design
Jenny L. Davis · 2024
Empathy is a driving force in human computer interaction (HCI), underpinning a vast corpus of HCI co-design methods. Yet, empathy is limited, and limiting, due to its individualizing focus. Expanding empathy beyond the individual entails more than a revised emphasis, but a structural approach that exceeds empathy's scope. I suggest role-taking as a more apt orienting construct. Rooted in psychology, empathy centers individuals and their inner lives. In contrast, the sociological process of role-taking is fundamentally structural, based on interrelated role-positions that constitute a social whole. Not only does role-taking broaden HCI and user-experience research beyond individual social actors within specified situations, but also enhances attention to the structural variables of status and power that infuse microprocesses. As applied to HCI, role-taking anchors participatory methods that attend to diverse user-publics, especially those from minoritized and underrepresented groups. I thus argue that role-taking is preferable to empathy as a theoretical scaffold for participatory co-design within HCI research and practice. The case for role-taking begins with a summary of this construct as used in sociology and beyond, tracing its theoretical and empirical developments. These developments include a theoretical model in which empathy is one component part, and empirical evidence about status and power. This backdrops a review of empathy within the HCI tradition, a critical examination of select empathy-focused co-design methods, and a reimagining of those methods through a role-taking prism. This analytic exercise highlights role-taking's twofold value-add for HCI: enhanced precision and concerted attention to social hierarchies within the co-design process.