Empathy Games

How can you as a designer study the people you are designing for? There are numerous methods available to tap information from your user group. But what if you could be the user for a brief moment?

This is exactly the aim of an empathy game; try to create empathy with a certain user group. An empathy game is created by setting up a protocol on how to act or by creating tools that require certain behavior. When 'playing' the game, the 'player' can experience what it is to be part of a certain user group.

In this project we focused on users with an addiction. We aimed to simulate the physical need or physical dependency on, for example, drugs. For this empathy game we develop a tool that we believe simulates this behavior (to a certain extent).

The tool consists of a pair of glasses with ear plugs attached to it. LED lights are mounted on the glasses, shining directly into the players eyes. An Arduino microcontroller is used to control the LED lights and the sound in the ear plugs.

The Arduino makes the LED lights flash at specific intervals. On top of this a 'noise' is produced through the ear plugs. This combination of light flashes and noise simulates the request from your body for a next shot. Over time, the interval between the LED flashes decreases, simulating the increased need for drugs.

The 'empathy game' is a strong tool I have added to my knowledge. With a well developed protocol or product it can provide you with useful knowledge and experience about your user group. I believe this is very useful to improve your understanding of the user at the start of a project.