AnneRegelt

In the face of complex global
issues designers need to ‘be in tune’
to create interdisciplinary solutions.
Empathy seems to be the key word
in a world full of ideas, endless technical
possibilities and urgent needs
for smart, sustainable and creative
products and services.
The ability to feel and understand
other people’s emotions, or those of
an animal, is a very old achievement
that is deeply rooted in the human
body and mind. in fact, according to
world-renowned Dutch primatologist
and ethologist Frans de Waal, it
was empathy, and not the survival of
the fi ttest, that made it possible for
human beings to survive. Therefore
it should play a key role in politics,
commercial institutes and society in
general.
Empathy brings us in dialogue with
the world and the people around
us, but dialogue can manifest itself
in many ways. Through speech and
debate, through shared emotional
experience, through sharing and
executing shared goals and perhaps
most intriguingly, through nonverbal
interactions where intuition
and body language create dialogue.
Today we will be exploring how
empathy creates dialogue and how
we use this as designers and how
the design education of the future