Doctoral dissertation - Designing the empathic experience. Suggestions from art practices

In the light of the emerging collaborative approaches to design, this thesis aims at rethinking the traditional consideration of empathy as a designer's skill addressed at understanding the need and wishes of users. In managing collaborative processes, the designer's ability to step into the other's shoes is no longer enough. Empathy should be extended to participants who are asked to cooperate towards a common goal. On the basis of these premises, the thesis claims that a shift from considering empathy as a psychological ability of an individual to accounting for it as an experience that enhance dialogic and cooperative relations, could contribute to improving collaborative processes. In order to achieve this change of perspective, the thesis refers to a theoretical framework built on a phenomenological account of empathy. The phenomenological reading of empathy – developed in particular by Edith Stein and recently rediscovered and reviewed by Laura Boella, amongst others – focuses on its nature as an interpersonal experience that introduces the other into one's own personal horizon making his/her irreducible otherness emerge. The capacity of acknowledging otherness is as a key for establishing dialogic exchanges and cultivating a cooperative attitude. Empathy may unfold spontaneously within relational contexts, still requiring facilitation and support in addition to contextual circumstances which do not prevent it from occurring. Hence, this study aims to provide guidelines that assist in the design of particular conditions that enable the unfolding of empathic experiences. The guidelines serve a practical tool to help set up the context of collaborative processes in order to make them more effective. The guidelines for designing the empathic experience have been drawn from the study of participatory and collaborative art practices. In the thesis, art is accounted for its potential of creating particular relational contexts in which empathic experiences are triggered. Six case studies of art practices – immersive, collaborative and/or participatory – are analysed to the aim of understanding how they can suggest strategies and provide models for design processes based on collaboration. The case studies are interpreted referring to the theoretical framework of empathy as an experience, in the attempt of circumscribing the elements which enable an empathic experience therein. Nine recurring elements called enablers came out of the research on the case studies, laying the groundwork for developing the guidelines. The thesis is a cross-disciplinary work that waves philosophy and art into the current design discourse, and is intended as an attempt to translate theoretical reflections about empathy and our modes of experiencing the other into practical suggestions for facilitating collaborative processes and managing the relational dynamics at stake therein.