Empathy Workshop Activities

Understand your users through visual artifacts.

A mood board is a collage of images and texture that communicates a feeling or experience. See what inspires people by asking them to make their very own.

Get fresh and perspective by trying something new and (slightly) scary.

Often, we're designing for behavior change. To find emotional common ground with the people you're designing for, observe how it feels to wade into the unknown, and experience how scary trying something new can be.

Gain empathy by trying something new.

Imagine a day in the life of a person you're designing for - their morning routine, diet, hobbies, commute, commonly used products, and more.

Identify some of your user's key emotions.

Offer prompts in an interview to uncover people's emotions about things that might not come up otherwise and set yourself up for more engaging conversation.

Get a window in someone else's life. Gain access to the parts of someone's life you might not otherwise see by having them keep a photo diary for a few days or weeks.

Writing with empathy is all about inhabiting the shoes (or paws) of something that is not yourself. In this exercise, we ask participants to imagine the perspective of a fox and then write from the point of view of the fox.

An Empathy Walk develops your capacity to “hold space” for someone who is very different from you and establish a relationship across a significant boundary. It is adapted from the work of MIT Professor Emeritus Ed Schein, who has shaped the field of organizational culture, learning, and leadership over the past 50 years.

Ein Empathy Walk stärkt deine Fähigkeit, Raum zu halten für jemanden, der sehr anders ist als du – und über eine bedeutende Grenze hinweg Beziehung aufzubauen.