Empathic Design

How do you experience a public space?

Do you feel safe? Seen?

Represented?

The response to these questions may differ based on factors including your race, age, ethnicity, or gender identity. In the architecture and design professions, decisions about the articulation of public spaces and who may be honoured in them have often been made by white men. How do designers rethink design processes to produce works that hold space for the diversity of people using them?

In Empathic Design, designer and architecture professor Elgin Cleckley brings together leaders and visionary practitioners in architecture, urban design, planning, and design activism to help explore these questions.

Cleckley explains that empathic designers need to approach design as iterative, changing, and shifting to say, “we see you”, “we hear you”. Part of an emerging design framework, empathic designers work with and in the communities affected.

They acknowledge the full history of a place and approach the lived experience and memories of those in the community with respect.