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

设计思维是一种解决问题的方法，用于深入理解挑战，构思一系列解决方案，并通过原型和测试迭代地改进它们。设计师经常在与用户面对面的会议中密切合作，创造创新的设计时采用设计思维。在设计思维中，与用户的情感交互被认为是至关重要的，因为它有助于获得对用户需求的透彻理解。本研究旨在通过情绪智力来提高设计思维中情感互动的质量。情商可以帮助设计师和用户之间建立强烈的情感关系，有助于开发设计解决方案，以满足尽可能多的用户需求，包括残疾用户的独特需求。这项研究也支持来自弱势群体的学生获得教育机会。传统的设计实践倾向于准确和客观的数据收集，而不是设计师与用户的情感互动。为了解决这一局限性，本研究利用了情商（感知、理解和管理情绪的能力）。与关注他人的共情不同，情商关注的是自己，有助于与他人的情感互动。本研究的主要目的是了解如何在设计思维中增强和整合情商，以促进设计师与用户的情感互动。具体目标包括推进人类情感系统的知识；揭示情商的个体差异；创建一项倡议，以提高考虑个体差异的情商；并评估该倡议对面对面设计思维活动的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.