3 Empathize
Frances Davis and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
Empathize
The first step towards developing empathy is to inform yourself on the challenge and context. If your design is for a specific person in your life you can engage in the first-hand work of design (such as interviews or observations). However, in this course we will primarily rely on secondary research by reading relevant scholarly research and studying available quantitative data. Using these secondary resources, you can learn about the issues at hand and develop a comprehensive summary and critical evaluation of existing research on your topic.
When evaluating your research sources consider —
- What can you learn about the group of people you are designing for?
- Gather general information (How many people in the US? Is the group growing? )
- How does your product impact the lives your target group?
- How might your experiences impact how you view and interpret the problems facing that group?
- What can you learn from other designs that attempt to solve the same problem?
- Consider both the benefits and drawbacks of the design.
- Consider the historical context of the original design relative to the present day.
- Identify challenges that impact of all (or most) of the designs.
- How might your experiences impact what you see and how you interpret it?
Literature Review
In this class, you will primarily rely on secondary sources (e.g. newspaper articles, journal articles, product descriptions). As part of writing the introduction in your final report you will be asked to complete a literature review. A literature review is when you collect journal articles about your topic and develop a summary of what is currently understood about your topic. As part of this process you will be asked to critically evaluate the information that you read. This will require you to paraphrase the information in the article focusing only on the information that is relevant to your topic. An annotated bibliography is a good technique for keeping track of all of the information that you gather.
Annotated Bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to articles where each citation is followed by a brief descriptive paragraph. The descriptive paragraph might include:
- important facts you want to cite in your final paper.
- notes on where the information in this article conflicts with information in other sources.
- any ideas generated about your project based on reading the document.
Steps for creating your annotated bibliography:
- Use Google Scholar to help you identify articles in your topic areas. You will likely need to try many different keyword combinations. For the your project, it may be helpful to add the word review to your keyword search.
- Browse the abstract of several articles to find one that best fits the information that you are looking for. It is likely that you will need to read 5 or more abstracts to find one good article.
- Once you have selected an article. Re-read the abstract. Confirm it fits your topic. Then read the discussion or conclusions and confirm that it fits your topic again. If it does not fit, go back to the previous step.
- Open up a file for your annotated bibliography. Input the information for the citation into Word using the techniques discussed in class.
- Read the article. Feel free to skip sections that are not relevant to your project. Add 2-3 sentences summarizing the main point of the article with respect to your project. Include an additional 1-2 sentences critically evaluating the information in the article.
Annotated Citation Example
- S. M. Gomez Puente, M. W. van Eijck, and W. M. G. Jochems, “Towards characterising design-based learning in engineering education: a review of the literature,” European Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 137-149, 2011. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2011.565116.
