REFLECTION OF EMPATHIC DESIGN PROCESS ON INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS’ UNIVERSAL DESIGN SOLUTIONS

In design education, applying universal design (UD) and human factors/ ergonomics (HF/E) principles can be a complicated task in practice for students who must apply these principles in their designs. Designing products and architectural spaces according to the UD principles make products and environments usable to the greatest extent by people with diverse abilities. The important thing is that the student designers should involve people with disabilities with an increased awareness and without any discrimination and stigmatization of users in their designs. This could be achieved by gaining empathy toward people with disabilities’ as well as their needs, problems, and expectations from the environment or products in design studio process. In this respect, the purpose of this study is to explore the empathic design (ED) approach as a design learning and experiential tool in interior architecture education regarding the pedagogical outcomes and process assessment of ED. So, the main aim of this study is to investigate the role of three ED techniques on undergraduate interior architecture students’ UD solutions in the design process. To explore the effects of building empathy and its reflections in design studio process, it investigates how experiencing ED process has an impact on students’ empathy level, decision making process and perceptions of learning experience.