How to Boost Designers' Emotional Intelligence to Promote Empathy Toward Participants with Disabilities in Design Thinking

North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Greensboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach to deeply understand challenges, ideate a range of solutions, and refine them iteratively through prototyping and testing. A designer often adopts Design Thinking while working closely with a user in a face-to-face meeting to create innovative designs. Emotional interaction with a user is deemed critical in Design Thinking because it helps to gain a thorough understanding of user needs. This research aims to improve the quality of emotional interaction in Design Thinking via emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence can help to establish a strong emotional relationship between a designer and a user, contributing to developing design solutions to accommodate as many users’ needs as possible, including the unique needs of users with disabilities. This research also supports educational opportunities for students from underrepresented populations. Conventional design practices tend to be skewed towards accurate and objective data collection rather than a designer’s emotional interaction with a user. To address the limitation, this research utilizes emotional intelligence (the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions). In contrast to empathy which focuses on others, emotional intelligence focuses on oneself, contributing to emotional interaction with others. The primary goal of this research is to understand how to enhance and integrate emotional intelligence in Design Thinking to foster a designer’s emotional interaction with a user. The specific objectives include advancing knowledge of human emotion systems; uncovering individual differences in emotional intelligence; creating an initiative to enhance emotional intelligence accounting for individual differences; and evaluating the effect of the initiative on in-person Design Thinking activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.