Toward Artificial Empathy for Human-Centered Design

In the early stages of the design process, designers explore opportunities by discovering unmet needs and developing innovative concepts as potential solutions. From a human-centered design perspective, designers must develop empathy with people to truly understand their experiences and needs. However, developing empathy is a complex and subjective process that relies heavily on the designer's empathic capability, and is often subject to the experiences of a small group of people. Therefore, the development of empathic understanding is intuitive, and the discovery of underlying needs can be serendipitous and unrepresentative. This paper aims to provide insights from artificial intelligence research to indicate the future direction of AI-driven human-centered design, considering the essential role of empathy. Specifically, we conduct an interdisciplinary investigation of research areas such as data-driven user research, empathic design, and artificial empathy. Based on this foundation, we discuss the role that artificial empathy can play in human-centered design and propose an artificial empathy framework for human-centered design. Building on the mechanisms behind empathy and insights from empathic design research, the framework aims to break down the rather complex and subjective process of developing empathic understanding into modules and components that can potentially be modeled computationally. Furthermore, we discuss the expected benefits of developing such systems and identify research opportunities to suggest future research efforts.