A Design-Thinking Activity for Developing Empathy

21st September 2020 • Tips

As you may know, we recently launched make:able – a 3D printing and assistive technology design challenge for students, where they work in teams to design a product that improves the day-to-day life of someone who struggles with mobility in their hands. We’re delighted to inform you that over 500 schools/organisation have registered 11,000 students so far!

A key part of the make:able design process is developing empathy for a selected end user. This can be done in many ways and make:able’s online challenge toolkit guides you through an activity called challenge mapping, which involves analysing the day-to-day challenges of the end user, in view of determining what solution to design and what criteria to include. Today we’d like to share with you an additional video we created about the challenge mapping activity, which can be applied to make:able but also a whole range of design-thinking challenges.

As you will see in the video, there is a printable template for the challenge mapping activity. This can be downloaded here and printed on a large format sheet of paper (e.g. A1 size), but you can also simply copy the diagram yourself. We hope you enjoy the video and feel free to share it with your students!