Welcome to Episode 142 of the Think UDL podcast: Empathetic Design with Jimena Vergara Sanz. Jimena is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. A teaching and learning college of mine introduced me to Jimena’s work, so I’d like to thank Derek Eggers in our Center for Teaching and Learning for Student Success for this fantastic connection. In today’s episode, we discuss empathetic design, human-centered design, adaptive design versus universal design, and of course, universal design for learning. I learned so much from the exercises Professor Jimena Vergara Sanz has introduced to her students and so have her students and also, so has she as we will discuss. We talk about her interesting journey as a professor in a foreign context, that is being an international professor teaching in the United States, and also how having a physical disability informs her teaching practice. And we end with hope. So much hope! And how we need empathy in the world and how empathetic design makes the world so much better–not just in education, but in politics, the medical and medical insurance field, and just everywhere. I am so excited to bring this conversation to you and if you want to learn more you can find Jimena’s contact information along with the articles mentioned in today’s episode on the ThinkUDL.org website resources just before the transcript for this episode.
Resources
Find Jimena Vargas Sanz via email at vergarasanzj@appstate.edu or via Jimena’s LinkedIn profile
Articles that Jimena mentions in the episode:
Empathetic design: Research strategies by Joyce Thomas and Deana McDonagh
Designing for Empathy: Research Expanding Aging Experiences Suit for Educational Purposes by Byungsoo Kim, Hongyang Liu, and Sharon Joines
Transcript
46:36
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal design, empathetic design, human-centered design, adaptive design, inclusive teaching, physical disability, student reflection, design challenges, prosthetic hand, disability awareness, emotional capacity, learning experience, industrial design, inclusive thinking, accessibility tools.
SPEAKERS
Lillian Nave, Jimena Vergara Sanz
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 142 of the Think UDL podcast: Empathetic Designwith Jimena Vergara Sanz. Jimena Vergara Sanz is an assistant professor of industrial design at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, a teaching and learning colleague of mine introduced me to Jimena’s work. So I’d like to thank Derek Eggers in our Center for Teaching and Learning, for student success, for this fantastic connection. And in today’s episode, we discuss empathetic design, human centered design, adaptive design, versus universal design, and, of course, universal design for learning. I learned so much from the exercises Professor Jimena Vergara Sanz has introduced to her students, and so have her students. And also we talk about so has she as well. We’re going to talk about her interesting journey as a professor in a foreign context that is being an international professor teaching in the United States, and also how having a physical disability informs her teaching practice. And we end this episode with hope, so much hope, and how we need empathy in the world, and how empathetic design makes the world so much better, not just in education, but in politics, in the medical and medical insurance field, and just everywhere. I’m so excited to bring this conversation to you, and if you want to learn more, you can find Jimenez contact information along with the articles mentioned in today’s episode on the think udl.org website resources just before the transcript for this episode. And thank you so much for listening to the think UDL podcast. Thank you to our sponsor text help a global technology company helping people all over the world to understand and to be understood. It has led the way in creating innovative technology for the workplace and education sectors, including K 12 right through to higher education for the last three decades. Discover their impact at text, dot, help forward, slash, learn more. That’s L E, A, R, N, M, O, R, E. Welcome Jimena, to the think you do podcast. I am really glad to have you today, so I wanted to start with my very first question, which is, what makes you a different kind of learner. Okay,
Jimena Vergara Sanz 03:21
hello, Lillian. I am very happy and honored to be in this podcast. And well, I think we all are different learners. There’s not one single learner that learns the same as other. And I would say that what makes me a different learner in this moment of my life, because I also think it depends on the context where you are while you’re living. So in this very moment, what makes me a different learner is that I come from a completely different context. From where I’m living. I come from Colombia, South America, and right now I’m living in United States, in Boone, teaching and learning in Appalachian State University. So this is, like the first thing that makes me a different learner. I have a completely different cultural context behind and the second thing that I would think it’s very common for me, even though I change place, where I’m living, is that, like, the this curiosity that I’ve always had, I don’t feel like there’s like an absolute truth about whatever we’re learning, and I am very like, happy to discover each time, new ways of seeing things. So I’m not like, Okay, I learn it. I master it. That’s it. I am constantly on a very curious way, asking, like, always having, like, an open question to learn more. So I don’t feel like learning is just like a task that you learn, check learned. Yeah, but I think it’s a work in progress. Is constantly and I think it evolves as our mind evolves, as our perfect perspective evolve. So it’s not like a finalized thing, but a process. I would say that tells how I’m How was my learning style, yeah.
Lillian Nave 05:18
Oh, that’s fantastic. And I definitely have a kinship with you and that curiosity and love learning and talking to people and learning their stories, and I’m never done so I’m really glad that a mutual colleague of ours introduced us, and he kind of pointed me your way, and I’m really interested in something that you’re doing in your design classes, and I was hoping you could tell me about what this empathetic design is and how you Introduce it in your classes. Yes,
Jimena Vergara Sanz 05:58
sure. So I tend to like to expose my students in all my classes, and not all of my students like everyone around me. I really like to share about empathy and, in this case, in design, but the class where I like do it more strictly, let’s say like, like more focused is on human factors in design. So basically, empathetic design is I really like this definition by design, the empathetic design, which resonates a lot with me. This article written by Dina McDonough, and basically she’s saying is identifying authentic human needs, ensuring that products and services satisfy both functional and emotional requirements and resonate with individuals. So I really feel very in tune with her, like definition, the reason why I feel like this motivation to share this with my students is because I was born without one hand, and I have all my life faced like challenges, because the world is basically designed for people who has two hands. So a lot of like basic tasks, I have learned my way of doing it. I don’t necessarily use a prosthetic help. So this has always brought to my mind, like this mindset of, what are the difficulties that other persons in other bodies have just because I live in my personal experience with this, this kind of broaden my sensitivity to other abled bodies. So I in human factors. The very first exercise I do that, I really love it. I tell that my grandma, she was the first teacher in my life of empathetic design, or empathetic empathic design, which was when I remember when I tell the students this story, because I really like when we start a course to tell about myself, so that we can connect, not as a teacher, but as a human so I like to tell them stories about my life, and I told him about my grandma. When I was a child, a I used to live outside from a Bogota, which is the capital city I live in, the in the countryside, and my mother used to work a lot, both my mother and my father, so when the boss took me from from the school to my grandma’s home so that I could wait. Then my mother picked me up and took us home. I was hanging out a lot of time with my grandma, and I guess it’s around four and five years old when you learn to tie your shoes, right? Yeah? So it wasn’t yeah somewhere. There. It was around that time that every time I got to my grandma’s home, I was just obsessed, because all my friends, all my classmates, could tie their shoes really well, and I didn’t want to feel different, even though I knew I didn’t have a hand. That’s something that you when you have a disability, it’s a very difficult part to accept that you’re different. You want to be included. You want to be able to do the same as the rest. So I experienced like frustration because I couldn’t tie my shoe. I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, learning tying the shoe with two hands is already a difficult task for any human being. Then if you add, okay, you don’t have a one hand, it makes it even more complicated. So my grandma, she looked at this frustration, and she was like, No, dear, come let’s play this. Let’s do that. And I was like, no, no. I kept obsessively trying. And she was like, but why don’t you care? Get velcro shoes? And I was like, No, I don’t want velcro I want to tie my shoes. Like
Lillian Nave 10:00
my friends. I want to be like everybody. Yes, I don’t
Jimena Vergara Sanz 10:02
want to be like a special, different shoe. No, I want to tie my shoe. So she did something that to me, was like, incredible, and she’s like my heroine, and I learned so much from her, and I so grateful. She’s called Magdalena de Jesus. That was her name. She basically took her right hand and covered it completely with tape, with masking tape, so she could restrict her hand and feel what it is, a little bit what it is to be me right then, as she know how to tie her shoes, she just figure out a way. So the first time she did it, she was kind of a like cheating a little bit, because she left a piece of her thumb out of the tape. And when she showed me, I was like, No, Grandma, I cannot do this. This is cheating. So then she completely closed it. So that specific thing that she did two trials really taught me how our body, when we try to constrain it to understand someone’s reality, our mind and our body tend to cheat, to use all our abilities. Yeah. So the first thing that she learned and taught me didn’t work, so she really needed to improve a lot on okay, how can I experience her reality? And then that’s how she taught me, wow. And when I tell the students the story, I don’t tell them what she did. I just said my grandma did something, and she figured out a way of for me to tie my shoe. And basically, I bring a lot of tools. I put them in the front of the of the classroom, there’s tape, there’s robes, there’s fabric scissors, like different, different things. And I tell them, like, Okay, you are very creative people. We are in industrial design program, so I want you to use your creativity. And if you were my grandma wanting to teach this frustrated five year old girl how to tie their shoe. How would you use your creativity to teach the hair? So I give them a little time to play with this, to think and reflect, and then after some of them share some experiences, then I tell them the resolution that it’s been very curious, because some of, like, a lot of times, they basically stop using the complete arm. They just try with one hand. You know, I have seen so many variations of how they approach. So I have learned the perspective we have about certain disabilities is, like, super biased, yeah. So this is why I really love starting like this exercises introducing empathy in the class with my grandma example, because this is a perfect way of showing how our bias perspective is really interfering on the way we could actually embody another person’s situation.
Lillian Nave 13:04
Wow, that’s really interesting story, because it is telling us about, really, how we think through problems, and we don’t recognize that we make these assumptions along the way, right and or the bias against, well, if you don’t have parts of your hand, you think, Oh, the whole arm is gone, right? No, but you have part of that that you could use that in order to help tie your shoes. But we might think we’re just throwing the baby out with the bath while there, as to say, like, well, if you don’t have that, you don’t have all of this, and that’s actually one of the things in the UDL 3.0 guidelines about emotional capacity, which is to recognize what our own expectations are, what our own beliefs are. And you’re really giving the students an exercise for them to understand what their own bias is, or, you know, what they think about this disability, or what they think about that situation that they probably didn’t even know
Jimena Vergara Sanz 14:12
Correct correct later in the course, I start exploring in the content of the course, a little bit more in depth. Okay, what is human centered design, which is one branch that tackles empathetic design, and what is empathetic design? So we get to analyze a little bit more, and then they have a task to design as a suit. So they need to choose a specific physical disability I would love to do also cognitive, but a I think it’s even more complicated, because how can you actually, like, simulate that? Super complicated, because it’s kind of something inside of your brain the way you think so, the physicality. Maybe it’s a little bit more like. Matter related, so you can modify it better. So they need to choose a physical disability, investigate about it, learn, like, how many people like, what’s the population? What’s the demographic? A learn, what are the things that this person’s struggled most with? And then they need to use their this, their creativity to design a suit. And this is very inspired in in by Bian So Kim and Sharon Jones study that is designing for empathy. This is a very, a very good study they did analyzing how the aging population is growing each time more, and it’s super important that young designers comprehend like, what are the challenges on the growing population? So normally, there are some suits already designed, but they are super expensive, mostly like a car designers. Car design companies use it because they really want their designers to experience the difficulties of persons from the elder population getting in and out of the car. But these are suits that are around 2000 euros. And if we’re talking about design school and wanting to teach your students, that’s like not possible. So beyond sukim and Sharon Jones, they were like exploring, how can we prototype suits that are cheaply done, that can help our students understand a different reality? So I got inspired by that and and then bringing this to the students as a as a motivation to how can we use creativity to constrain our bodies, our able bodies? And for example, if you are going to experience a person with arthritis, right, how can you do something around wrap something around your fingers so that you can experience what it is to live in this person’s life, or if you’re going to maybe be as a person who uses a wheelchair, right? Yeah, so Okay, how are you going to design this situation? Where are you going to find the wheelchair? What kind of activities you’re going to do? And basically, part of the assignment, which is like research on empathy design is living in someone else’s shoes for a minimum three hours. But I tell them, if you can do longer, the better in these three hours. It’s very important that they go like to public spaces, because if you’re just in your home doing the things you’re experiencing very limited, but when you when you’re out, when you’re seen, when you’re doing your grocery shopping, that you experience how is the interaction with other beings? And that gives even more brother a perspective of what it is to be this person. And then after that, they have to do a lot of reflections specifically about what were their preconceptions, what they thought the experience was going to be like, and then how those preconceptions might have changed after the experience, and if they found something that they feel designed could help this population with
Lillian Nave 18:23
well, then you have a specific one, I think you said the Jimenez suit. Yeah, yeah. So what has that taught your students about design, and maybe what their experiences in the Jimenez suit have taught you, and does this promote better awareness of themselves and others? Which, again, is one of the UDL guidelines 9.2 which is developing awareness of yourself and others.
Jimena Vergara Sanz 18:52
Yes. So I have been very surprised when students decide to, I mean, they don’t call it him in a suit, but they just call it a person without one hand, but it’s clearly my suit, yeah. But to me, it has been very impressive when I when I go through all their reflections and I’m evaluating their work and when they’re presenting and sharing that sometimes they find needs that I personally don’t know. Didn’t know I had. For instance, there was one example that for me was fascinating. A this student realized that the envelopes, like the simple envelopes that you receive in your in your mail. He basically just wrapped his hand with a sock, and then around the sock, he put a lot of tape, and he did so many things, he cooked, he drove. I mean, he did so many things. And the thing that was really impactful for him was when he received his meal, because. Opening the envelope was absolutely difficult, right? The thing is that, as I have never opened an envelope with two hands, my own awareness does not allow me to realize that the envelope could be designed differently. Even though I’m very creative and curious and designer is the experience itself as an abled body that allowed this student to say, hey, we could design a different envelope that could help a person who doesn’t have a hand or who has issues with their hands. Maybe is not permanent disability, maybe the person broke the arm, or maybe is just an issue with arthritis. It’s difficult with dexterity. If we design an envelope that has, like a little tab that you can pull easily, some envelopes have that, but the way he designed it is like with a little loop. So basically, you can, you can insert a finger, or whatever you can and just pull so to me, it was very a wide opening like eyes, and we had a reflection about and obviously this, this, this reflection also brought awareness to their own perspective, because I was very shocked to see, oh, wow. I didn’t realize this. This could be done easier for me and and then he realized, wow, I didn’t know that my situation having two hands allows me to understand, how can I help someone who doesn’t have a hand? So it’s validating both the perspective of him as an abled 200 person and him in in the Jimenez suit, understanding something that Jimena herself would never realized. So that was very, I mean, that specific one was very wide opening, because it was a specific about my situation, yeah, so I constantly talk about that specific one.
Lillian Nave 22:03
Wow. So this incorporates, it sounds like a lot of reflection in these exercises. Can you tell me about how you do that, or what the students are saying or gaining, or, yeah, how that works? Yes,
Jimena Vergara Sanz 22:22
after they experience the disability, understood they designed, then I am introducing them to universal design. And obviously it’s very important to understand what is adaptive. Design. Adaptive is when we design things that are specifically for a person who has a disability, for example, a prosthetic hand would be adaptive design, universal design would be this envelope this student created, right because the envelope works for everyone, but it’s taking into consideration The needs of more people that would normally, will normally being considered, right? So after they experience this, we start talking about these two sections of design, and then I encourage them to do universal design, because I really feel that it does really bringing in close inclusive thinking. So then, after they experienced the situation, of course, they found so many things that could be solved by adaptive design. So I say, okay, just list all these things. These are great ideas, but also list all these ideas that could be universal design, and maybe some of them could be overlapped. Why not? And then they, I invite them to choose a universal design solution that came through their experience on this person’s shoes. Sometimes also I, I tell them if you heard a classmate experience that was very like wide like opening eye for you. You can also choose your classmate experience and design something for that population. It doesn’t really need to be necessarily with what they experience, because sometimes some students get a little bit shy to do this first experience, and then they learn a lot when the others share what they did. So I really want them to, even though they experience one disability, they could use others knowledge to design. And then basically they have to, I mean, this is not a studio class, so it kind of goes super deep into the details of the design. So we keep it a little bit kind of ideation state and very simple prototyping, and more into the reflection about why is universal design experience important, and why is it relevant, and analyzing the building where we are so a I mean, I would love to take more. Time to develop all these ideas super refined on a very refined way. But in this class, I’m teaching them so many other topics that this is kind of brief introduction, right for those students who are interested in that later in studio, I offer a studio for senior level where we tackle specifically design for disability, so we kind of take that to a more refined level, but in this case, it’s just a very simple prototype that allow us to communicate and reflect about what would this be like, and how would this include more people and so forth? Yeah,
Lillian Nave 25:44
wow, that’s a lot of learning from the reflections. And, you know, I firmly believe that we learn from our reflection on an experience more than the experience like we have to think through those things. And what I appreciated about that is that you really capitalized on the fact that they’re learning from each other’s elections. And anytime I think that we can have a student share their results with other students, and everybody can see that, oh, they tackled the problem slightly differently than I did, or they saw a different problem than I did. Then there’s so much more learning. It’s so much more rich, and the students are taking a whole lot more from that problem or task or assignment than if they had just done it kind of in a vacuum between themselves and the professor. You know, and they just submitted that to you, and nobody else saw it. Yeah, it’s made when I do that, it’s made my classes so much better. There’s so much more learning when we’re sharing how other students are understanding what’s going on, and I’m learning too, yeah, like you said, yeah, yeah, things that I didn’t know I had put in the assignment are then coming back. Like, oh, actually, that’s a really good learning that I didn’t even think about in this assignment. So yeah, this is really good.
Jimena Vergara Sanz 27:16
Yeah. Sometimes I have even had situations where, I mean, at the beginning I was like, very like, strict, like, if you did this disability, you need to design that. But then I saw, I mean, it’s bringing empathy also to the teaching. I mean, not all the students, yes, have the same resources to do a disability suit as well as others. You know, there some of them tried, but they really didn’t. Maybe they didn’t have the time, or they were just having other things in their mind in that time. So when I opened the assignment to that like open dialog, and you can grab ideas from the dialog, I even had sometimes students that me without telling them they are like, I decided that I wanted to repeat the experience, yes. So yeah, yeah, it they self motivated because they really found value, and they saw that. And I tell them, you don’t really need to if you if the others experience was like, like, inspiring. And you found some knowledge there that they are like, No, I want to do it. So I have had couple times that they redo the experience.
Lillian Nave 28:30
Wow, yeah, that is a lot of motivation that your students have. This is all very universal design for learning too. Yeah. Where do we include an authentic task, something that’s relevant to their lives, something that’s going to be relevant to their future career as designers and industrial design and the creative process? It’s really fantastic. I can see how engaged your students are because of these projects, but also because, as you said, you start with your own personal stories, and that gives it a human side to why they’re in this classroom and why it’s important. This is really great. So you also talking to me about your experience as a professor with a disability, a physical disability, that has shaped the way you perceive the world and approach problem solving. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Jimena Vergara Sanz 29:34
Yeah, sure. So it’s been a very interesting journey, like super personal, but at the same time, like reflected in my outside world, a I have learned with my life experience a lot about people with disability. When I was younger, my parents. The first time they, they brought me here to the US from Colombia, because they wanted, they thought that I would use a prosthetic hand, and it would be helpful for me, right? So I have like, the like state of the art type of prosthetic in the time, and I personally never liked it, so I went to school. I wore it a couple times. I just played like, Robocop, you know, made some show, and then I just forgot about it. I came back home, and my mom is like, dear, where is this hand? It was like, pretty expensive. Where did you leave it? And I was like, No, I never felt I needed it, and now that I have gone through a very deep journey about my disability, I realized what was going on in the beginning of my life, similarly to what happened with the tying shoe experience, I was neglecting the fact that I didn’t have a hand. So all my the first part of my life, basically, I was just trying to be part of a world that is for abled bodies, right? Like everyone in the same box, what able means, right? Yes, and by doing so, I was never giving myself the chance to look at myself and say, Hey, actually, I’m different. This never gave me a moment to reflect with my parents, with my siblings, with my classmates. I never had the communication, the chance to say, Hey, I’m different. I experienced the world differently because it was kind of taboo, right, in the societal level, right? So that is also imprint in oneself, right? So you’re like, I don’t talk about it because I’ve internalized it. Yes, I’m normal, right, in my mind. So what happened on the last stage of my life and as I became a teacher in upstate, it’s been very beautiful, because this kind of shifted my self perception and invited me to rethink what it is to inhabit a human body with a disability as an adult now, so I started experiencing, when I moved here, a very strong pain in my left arm because of the overuse, or a long, long life overuse. So this started limiting my capabilities as an industrial designer, and I haven’t been doing a lot of enhanced stuff because of the pain, and the other hand, I don’t have it right? So all this started like making me re evaluate, like, what? Who am I? What’s going on with me? Do I have to achieve career? Or could I be a designer, even though I cannot be very hands on right now? How can I resolve this situation? Yeah, so on one side, I started tackling on all the journey of, okay, how can you get a prosthesis through the system? And I started learning about all the challenges that persons with disabilities face. Because till today, I haven’t got it, and I’m trying, because now I accept that having this help would alleviate the pain on my other hand, okay, so even though I would look robocopy, I don’t care anywhere anymore, because it will help. It will help. When I was a child, I was in a stage of fitting in right in this moment, I’m an adult, and I could see myself, and I say, Hey, I don’t have a hand. I talk about it. I tell people, I open conversations. Yes, this has been challenging. I ask for help. But it took me all my 42 years,
Lillian Nave 33:52
yeah, to get to this point.
Jimena Vergara Sanz 33:54
To get to the point to say, hey, people, humans, I need help, you know, so that has been very, very interesting and inspiring to, I mean, all my friends that have kids with disabilities. I tell them, like, how important it is to open communication. And I try to tell as much as I can to my students, to people like, I mean, I know that my parents and my teachers didn’t open communication, not because they were back, not they were doing what they what they knew. But as more we grow on this level and we understand that part of including a population is making spaces to talk about the difference and normalize the difference. Maybe lives of those who are different can be a little bit easier with their own taboo and with their challenges. But I mean, it took me, as I said, like long, like four decades, to. Realize that it will be helpful to talk about it, and this has also helped me improve a lot of things about self esteem, self acceptance, that are things that I didn’t know I had, like some weak points, but it was thanks to this pain in my arm and the physical reality that, and also, like my open mind, because I really felt like, Okay, I want to investigate. What is this representing to me, this is how I actually got to understand the importance of talking and finding help, and including, including, yeah, wow,
Lillian Nave 35:43
that is quite the journey. And I know you’re sharing that with your students too, for Yeah, future designers to understand that there’s a really complicated understanding of what to do that difference between adaptive design and universal design, and that people with disabilities can choose what works for them at that particular time, right?
Jimena Vergara Sanz 36:11
Yes, and also finding these challenges on the health system to get the hand that I want has also shaped my research interest. So right now I’m researching on, I mean, my wish would be to design my own hand and build it. You’d be good at that. Yeah, that would be great. And I would love to start exploring, like, different aesthetical values and colors, and how can, how can you just use form and shape factors to re signify having your body in certain ways. It’s a little bit challenging because this requires a lot of skills and knowledge on the technical aspect of orthesis and prosthesis, which is like very medical so I’m looking for some alliances on that. I have already some, but yes, definitely, this has also shaped even my research interest right now. And like, I would love to make, like, accessible prosthesis for people like me who suddenly realize, hey, I need a hand, but I don’t have all this money, and the insurance won’t cover it, because when you are born like this, basically the what the insurance claim is, that is comfort item. Oh, really, yes, that’s a comfort item. So it’s like, ah, more challenge, yeah. So I really would love to be able to design something that wherever you are in the world, you send me a 3d scan, and we have the knowledge and the capacity to grab that file and make a hand that is functional that will help you, but You don’t need to go through all this complicated part,
Lillian Nave 38:03
right? Yeah, well, that kind of already started answering my last question, which is, where do you see possibilities for empathetic design in the future? But also, yeah, just Why are you? Do you see that empathetic design is so important for your students, and where are you hoping that it takes them? Yes,
Jimena Vergara Sanz 38:31
so besides teaching industrial design, I am also very devoted to the practice of Buddhism, so I have been studying and analyzing philosophy of Buddhism a long time, and they also tackle a lot about empathy and how the more empathetic we become, the closer we can get to Our best potential as humans, basically, and we can really connect more to others, understand what the world needs. So first, going beyond industrial design, like going to the panorama of the world, right this crisis that we live in, societal, political, environmental, so many crisis, I really think that the more tools we have as humans to empathize with others regarding of disability or not disability. I mean, empathy is something that I think is a very important value to build a better future, because this very, very clear crisis, like, wicked problems everywhere, yes. So absolutely, for this is, like, very connected, like, to my inner values, right? And in design, I think it’s very important there are two paths, one path, like designing for disabilities. Specifically, and the other part would be designing like for the overall population and making it more universal. So I think that nowadays there’s a lot of products solutions that might be disconnected a little bit and might be making some people’s lives a little bit difficult, especially the elder population. Sometimes they talk like super difficult with technology, and there are a lot of objects that industry will continue producing. So if young designers learn about empathy, the products and the services will be able to connect better to their users and have, like, a more satisfying resolution of their needs, because it’s not only understanding the physicality but the emotional part. For example, when you’re using something in technology and you press a button, you expect this button to do something, right? So even in simple things, on technology, on electronics, I mean, there’s so many fields where, if you really connect with how your users feel, how your users perceive, how your users manipulate things, if you understand very deeply, and you focus a little part of your research before you design something, if you focus on really understanding, like, what are the expectations and how they feel, is going to be easier, like to to bridge this gap between unsatisfied clients, because basically, The things were not designed, or the services, for instance, health care services as well, exactly, were not designed to comprehend the needs of, like, authentic needs of people.
Lillian Nave 41:52
No, so
Jimena Vergara Sanz 41:54
correct. I think it’s, it’s like, very big on, on, yes, creating better experiences, creating better products, creating a easier life for the majority of people, basically,
Lillian Nave 42:10
basically a better world. I’m
Jimena Vergara Sanz 42:13
hoping a better world. Yes,
Lillian Nave 42:17
oh, wow. I, as you were saying this, I was thinking, absolutely empathy is what we need in order to empathize how our students feel, also how the people who were designing products for the people who we want to provide healthcare to. I know that when I’m dealing with family members in the healthcare world, it’s like you’re putting on a suit of armor to battle a dragon to get the services that you need Correct. Yeah. And if we could just make that process easier and all of these processes easier, we’d have a lot better world.
Jimena Vergara Sanz 43:01
Yeah, yeah, yes. I think it will be very beautiful if these empathy tools reach, like today, to the leaders, right to the leaders who make the decisions on how those systems work. But at least if we’re starting to teach this in our students, maybe these students, at some point, will become leaders, and they will be able to see things from a different perspective. So yes, empathy is the way I think,
Lillian Nave 43:31
yes it is, and how inspiring it is to think that we are teaching this generation that will become our leaders, and let’s teach empathy, and that will lead the way.
Speaker 1 43:43
Yes. Very lovely. Goosebumps, yes, yes.
Lillian Nave 43:46
Goosebumps, yes, yes. Very lovely. Well, thank you so much, Jimena, for spending so much time talking to me and doing the wonderful work you do for our students at our university. So I’m really glad to find out that this is happening on my home turf at Appalachian State.
Jimena Vergara Sanz 44:06
Yes, sure, yeah. Thank you so much for having me and yes, and for having this beautiful motivation in your life as well that we share. And may you keep having a lot of podcasts to open more minds,
Lillian Nave 44:22
I hope so. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, and you mentioned a couple articles when we were talking. I’ll make sure to have that in our resources. So if anyone wants to learn more, they can contact you or read the resources we’ll have on the podcast. Absolutely
Jimena Vergara Sanz 44:39
great. Okay, thank you.
Lillian Nave 44:46
You can follow the think UDL podcast on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to find out when new episodes will be released, and also see transcripts and additional materials at the think udl.org Website, thank you again to our sponsor, text help. Text help is focused on helping all people learn, understand and communicate through the use of digital education and accessibility tools. Text help and its people are working towards a world where difference disability and language are no longer barriers to learning and succeeding with over 50 million users worldwide, the text help suite of products includes read and write equatio and orbitnote, they work alongside existing platforms such as Microsoft Office and G Suite and enable them to be integrated quickly into any classroom or workspace with ease. Text help has changed the lives of millions worldwide and strives to impact the literacy and understanding of 1 billion people by 2030 visit text, dot, help forward, slash, learn more. That’s L, E, A, R, N, M, O, R, E, to unlock unlimited learner potential. The music on the podcast was performed by the Oddyssey quartet, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez and I am your host, Lillian Nave. Thank you for joining us on The think UDL podcast.