?A BEHAVIOR-ORIENTED, HOLISTIC INVESTIGATION OF TEAM LEARNING FOR SHARED EMPATHIC UNDERSTANDINGS THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF DESIGN CONVERSATIONS

Empathic design involves two social practices – one is collaboration with users to elicit and make a meaning of user experiences, and another is intrateam collaboration to develop a mutually understood, agreed-upon interpretation of user experiences among team members. This study is focused on the latter phenomenon, conceptualizing this social practice as team learning for shared empathic understandings. Through this conceptualization, this study aimed to characterize a social mechanism underlying intrateam collaboration in empathic design in terms of how professionals interact with each other to develop and apply shared empathic understandings to design ideas within a team over a design process. For this objective, I conducted a conversation analysis to examine one professional design team’s conversations over a design journey from need-finding to initial ideation to prototyping and testing, exploring team members’ conversational behaviors revealed in conversational exchanges. More specifically, I investigated their conversational behaviors at both the team and individual levels: team learning behaviors (i.e., construction, co-construction, and constructive conflict) for team-level collective behaviors and interpersonal reactions (e.g., move, question, block, etc.) and empathy perspectives (i.e., the first, second, and third-person perspectives) for individual-level behaviors. Through this investigation, I found that a team’s design journey can be characterized by their travel among the team learning behaviors during design conversations and that each type of team learning behavior can be featured by frequently used interpersonal reactions and empathy perspective transitions at the individual level. Through this behavior-oriented, holistic view of team learning for shared empathic understandings, this study provides fresh insights into what conversational behaviors can be more used at the team and individual levels and how these behaviors can facilitate a team to arrive at team-level empathic understandings and design ideas. I discuss the research and educational implications of this study and future research ideas based on this study.