Human-centered design provides a means to help designers create products or systems with ‘people’ as the focus. Compassionate Design (CD), introduced in this paper, is an approach that addresses niche sensitive needs and involves a way of thinking where designers pay special attention to the users’ sense of dignity, empowerment, and security. These niche needs surfaced as a result of analyses of 12 cases situated in sensitive contexts where the users felt vulnerable, had a high level of emotional engagement and were negatively affected by the situation. The designers described their deep concern for the users in various talks and interviews. This paper explains the conception of CD and its development that resulted from iteratively and qualitatively analyzing these cases in which designers were intuitively focusing on niche user needs. Dignity, empowerment and security form the basis of CD and have been contextualized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs after they emerged as a result of the analysis of data. This research sets the platform for a design approach that can help designers to consider the often unarticulated user needs of dignity, empowerment and security, in a more intentional manner and not be left to chance.
Design educators in mechanical engineering departments have witnessed an evolution in the types of design problems that students prefer to address in their courses. Anecdotal evidence from discussions with colleagues indicate that over the last 30 years, projects have evolved from the design of purely mechanical systems to projects that require knowledge outside of the traditional engineering paradigm, including social sciences. These evolving interests have added complexity to the role of design educators and have revealed the limits of available design tools used in these courses; these tools are often not sufficient to support decision-making when subjective aspects of the design process are involved, such as customer preferences. Though a number of design tools exist to assist engineers with understanding customer preferences, they do not provide the specificity needed for sensitive design contexts and require direct access to the end-user. We define sensitive design contexts as those that are perceived largely as invasive/ personal, resulting in a high degree of emotional engagement by the user, such as patients in medical environments or victims in disaster areas. The variety and complexity of design considerations to be considered are high. In the following, we will focus on "compassionate design thinking", i.e., on the role and impact of compassion during the design process. This paper presents a baseline approach for establishing a framework for compassionate design. The ultimate goal is to provide context-specific guidelines that can be used without having direct access to the end-user.
Although the hair care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, there still remains a dearth in the available technologies and research methods to answer one simple question: What temperature and frequency of use will lead to permanent structural damage (i.e. heat damage) to curly hair? Currently, trained professionals in the hair industry cannot predict when heat damage will occur and often rely on heuristics and intuition in their hair care approaches. In addition, scientists that have conducted studies with heat and hair have often used European hair types, which cannot be generalized to all ethnic groups; they have also conducted experiments that are not ecologically consistent with individuals' use context. As a result, a number of lay scientists have emerged whose use contexts are ecologically valid, but are lacking the experimental and quantitative rigor that engineers can provide. In this work, we discuss an interdisciplinary approach to integrating customer needs, design methodology, and thermal sciences for application to the hair care industry. We discuss the formulation of a predictive model, the design of an experimental test-bed for collecting data, and present initial results.
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