Designing Empathy: The Creation of Empathy through Design Fiction and Play

Workshop Presentation
Ishrat Lallmamode  

This workshop explores how speculative design and design fiction can be used to foster empathy, critical thinking and decision making. Through games and play participants engage in fictional but plausible scenarios creating an immersive environment where users navigate real-world-inspired problems. Such approaches are in use through training simulations for governments, agencies and militaries, allowing players to safely explore decision-making, ethical dilemmas, and systemic challenges. In this session, participants will take part in a guided, game-based activity that invites them to co-create narratives, assume roles, and work within designed constraints to collaboratively solve a complex, true-to-life problem scenario. The workshop will challenge them to co-create narratives, assume new roles, and work within set constraints to arrive at a shared resolution, building empathy, collaboration, and imagination as tools for reflection and problem solving.