Toward Building Design Empathy for People with Disabilities Using Social Media Data: A New Approach for Novice Designers

Design empathy is a core HCI concept for understanding user perspectives in design processes. Although researchers advocate for leveraging design empathy in the design of assistive technology, educating novice designers about this is challenging; this is especially true in HCI classrooms when the target population includes people with disabilities, and students who do not have a disability are less aware of the diversity of disability. To help students better understand disability experiences, HCI education often adopts ``be-like'' (mimicking disabled-experience) approaches. However, accessibility researchers advocate adopting the ``be-with'' approach---learning about other's experiences through companionship. To mitigate the logistical challenges of being-with in a classroom setting, we developed a ``be-connected'' approach, which facilitates learning about the disability experience through the narratives of real individuals. Using social media posts from a spinal cord injury subreddit, we developed and deployed an activity aiming to develop design empathy. Our qualitative evaluation showed a notable transformation in students' design thinking process, suggesting an opportunity to leverage social media data to learn about disabled perspectives and develop design empathy.