Week 4 Blog

Empathic Design is something that I have not heard about until looking at the list of designs this week.  It is interesting because empathy is a great way to create relationships with learners and learners tend to learn better from an educator in which they have a good relationship.  By starting the design with what would benefit the learner as far as places to start and what to include is an interesting idea.  This is mainly a corporate design technique.  That would explain why a K-12 educator is not familiar with something like this.  Lenoard and Rayport set out five steps in how to approach this design type (1997).  These five steps are observe, collect data, reflect and analyze, brainstorm, and prototype.  These steps are set up to assess what your learners know, where they are in learning, and what you need to teach to get them the knowledge they need with the minimal about of time.  That is the empathy part, think about your learner and set up learning for them from their perspective.  The models used in K-12 education takes some prior knowledge into account but teaches all aspects of the lesson not just what the learners need to know.  In a classroom, there could be a wide difference in what learners walk into the classroom knowledge and since the educators are responsible for teaching all parts of the lesson, they design lessons to teach all parts that need to be learned.  That is the biggest difference.  This model is something that would work really well in corporate settings.  By designing learning like this, it can help create learning that will hit the mark with people that must complete modules like this in addition to their regular job.  Corporate learning is something that happens to employees that are usually added to their normal job.  Starting design from their perspective could help create some very effective learning.  These instructional designs like this are the results of putting different design theories into practice.  To get the Empathic Design, a designer looks at the theoretical model and then set up an instructional design model from that theory.  These design models are what the instruction follows and that is what the impacts the learner.  The theory behind the learning is what sets up the model but it is the model that sets up the learning.

Leonard, D. & Rayport, J. (1997). Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design. Harvard Business Review November - December 1997.