Tamanna Motahar, PhD

HCI and Accessibility Researcher



Building Design Empathy Among Novice Designers while Designing for People with Motor Disabilities


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, \myRed{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.

Publications


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


Tamanna Motahar, Noelle Brown, Eliane S. Wiese, Jason Wiese

ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2024


Building “Design Empathy” for People with Disabilities: an Unsolved Challenge in HCI Education


Tamanna Motahar, Noelle Brown, E. Wiese, Jason Wiese

EduCHI, 2023


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