Designing empathy: the Role of a "Control-Room" in an E-learning environment

The article focuses on the challenge of designing an interface for a virtual class where being represented together contributes to the learning process. It explores the possibility of virtual empathy. Empathy is the cognitive ability that a person uses to project him/herself into another person's viewpoint. How can we recreate this feeling of empathy through a delicate staging of location and interactions? First, how to organize the feeling of togetherness in a 3D environment without creating a feeling of distraction? Then, what are the tools of empathy in a mediated situation? We propose to use the concept of "contradictory semiotic analysis" to describe the design process that taps into visual cultures to build a representation and tools that support users' empathetic interactions. The analysis of designers' work from a semiotic point of view shows that they do not necessarily paint after life but play with different media and representations to build "remediated" situations of use. We then introduce the concept of "control room" elaborated after Manovich's control panel, to describe the visual interface that supports a diversity of points of view, hence supporting mediated empathetic relationships.

Marie Cambone, Annie Gentes. Designing empathy: the Role of a "Control-Room" in an E-learning environment. IADIS International Conference e-Learning, International Association For Development of the Information Society, Jul 2012, Lisbonne, Portugal. ⟨hal-01944357⟩