"\"See the Place with Different Eyes\": Fostering Empathy by Communicating Spatial Experience"

Everything we do happens in the space around us. This is why understanding the human experience of space is a key research area in human-computer interaction. We explore how spaces can mediate an empathic response from their users. In our field study, participants used a mobile application to describe their experiences in different spaces. Subsequently, the experiences were shown to other participants to explore their empathic reactions in the same locations. We also conducted domain expert interviews to relate our findings to the practices of urban designers. Our results suggest that awareness of other people’s spatial experiences can foster empathy and that this is useful to designers but with certain reservations. We propose design guidelines for future applications that build on spatial empathy and propose a set of future research directions.