Toolkit Library/

Empathy Interview

Empathy is the act of feeling what someone else feels. It is central to both principled innovation and human-centered design processes. Deeply understanding someone and their life experiences is the foundational first step towards imagining new concepts and forming new solutions. The interview process is an integral step toward understanding people’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions. It is also an opportunity to engage our moral, civic, intellectual,and performance assets. The empathy interview can be framed as a 1:1 conversation with active listening and responding in an open, inquisitive manner.

   Tool

   20 minutes

   By: Principled Innovation® (PI)

   Educator-prep | Lifelong learners


Making connections:

Principled Innovation asks us to work with others and recognize the limits of our own knowledge so that we can better understand and tackle the complex issues our communities face.

More on this topic:

Critical reflection: a road to empathy and growing relationships

  Video

  3 minutes

  By: Nirmal Nanayakkara, TEDx

What is empathy?

  Video

  3 minutes

  By: Ashoka Foundation

Designed for engagement

  Article

  10 minutes

  By: Edutopia

How to design deliberative democratic assemblies in an inclusive way: a recommendation for policy-makers

  Article

  15 minutes

  By: Democratic Audit, Marta Wojciechowska

Why diversity is hard (and why it’s worth it)

  Video

  2 minutes

  By: Columbia Business School, Katherine Phillips

Access our collection of +200 learning materials

PI toolkit library