A Study of the Effectiveness of Empathic Experience Design as a Creativity Technique

The need for innovation in product design is an ongoing challenge. Many methods have been proposed to create more innovative products and to better identify customer needs. In this study we introduce an Empathic Experience Design (EED) method to be used just prior to concept generation to help create more innovative concepts. The EED method exposes the designer to empathic experiences, which are designed to help the designer empathize with customers who use the product under a variety of non-ideal conditions. Separate experiments were conducted at two universities, in which students were asked to develop concepts for a nextgeneration alarm clock. Subject and control experiments were designed and implemented, and the resulting concepts were analyzed to determine the originality and technical quality of each concept. The subject group concepts, which were developed after participating in the empathic experiences, were compared with the control group concepts, which were developed without empathic experiences. At each university, the subject group concepts demonstrated significantly higher originality, relative to the control group concepts, without any sacrifice in technical quality.